Clarity 07 Challenges America's Biblically Malnourished Youth
MCLEAN, Va. – Hundreds of teen students challenged their largely biblically illiterate generation over the weekend as they spent hours digging into Scripture.
Clarity 2007, the annual nationwide tour run by Student Life for middle and high school students, hit McLean Bible Church to make God's Word more clear to a generation that many say has a loose grasp on the basics of Christian faith.
Clarity director Josh Malogne says biblical illiteracy is a "huge issue." "People don't know what they believe and why they believe."
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Some 1,000 students from 70 churches registered for the two-day Clarity event at McLean – the 12th stop for Student Life's 2007 tour.
"We're going to spend this whole weekend talking about the word of God," speaker Darren Whitehead, teaching pastor and Next Generation director of Willow Creek Community Church's Student Impact, told attendants on Friday.
Past Student Life tours had featured lots of drama presentations and entertainment. This year, however, the ministry is going back to focusing on God's Word, according to Malogne.
"Don't become spiritually dull, don't become spiritually bored in your faith," Whitehead exhorted, citing the book of Hebrews. "I think there are young people in churches all over America who are bored with the basic, under-challenged, watered-down experience of Christianity."
Ongoing research has revealed that the majority of students who graduate from high school fall out of their Christian faith in their college years. Many youth workers attribute the fallout to the lack of transition implemented in the lives of the students and a loose grounding in Christianity.
Whitehead raised the notion that America's churches have raised young people who are not able to feed themselves. The only time they "eat" is when someone else feeds them, mainly on Sundays.
"It is no wonder that you have not progressed, you have not moved on in your spiritual life," he said. "It is time for you to feed yourselves. It's time for you to learn to feed on the Word of God."
The Australia-born youth leader went on to say that the church is the only place where people do not notice if there is no change or progression, even if a person who has been walking with Christ for 26 years still only knows the basics of Christianity.
Such lack of progression would not be tolerated in the school system, Whitehead noted. Yet many in the church remain content as long as the persons continue attending church.
"I think that we are jamming ourselves full of milk and what happens is ... when you drink nothing but milk, it actually quenches your appetite and forbids you hungering after more sustenance, more nutritious food. You actually get pretty comfortable, pretty satisfied with just drinking milk," said Whitehead, comparing milk to what America's youth ministries all over the country are feeding students. And that leaves students "biblically malnourished."
He called the young attendants to move beyond the "milk" and feed on the "meat" of Scripture. Once that happens, students emit the "aroma of Christ" and become an inspiration for peers who begin to hunger for God.
But first, they have to begin reading the Word of God and develop their own hunger, Dr. David Platt, senior pastor of The Church at Brook Hills in Birmingham, Ala., encouraged students on Saturday.
To develop a passion for God's Word we must read the Word, Platt said, according to Student Life. Specifically we must learn to read the Word prayerfully, regularly, and slowly. "The more you read the Word, the more you will hunger for it."
Clarity 2007 is scheduled for Spartanburg, S.C., and Jackson, Miss., on the last two weekends of March.
