Counterculture Kids

Turns out the Lauren Winner piece I linked to below was not the first in the "Counterculture for the Common Good" series (itself one part of a 3-year undertaking called the Christian Vision Project), which means that Frederica Mathewes-Green's piece was the third, not the second. Sorry. The first essay was actually this one by Michael Scott Horton. The introduction to the series is here.

Now that we've gotten that straightened out, here's a little bit of Horton's essay:

To be truly countercultural, the church must first receive and then witness to Peter's claim in Acts 2:39: "The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call." The promise is not only for us, but also for our children. According to recent studies by sociologists like Christian Smith, evangelical teens are only slightly less likely than their unchurched friends to adopt a working creed of "moralistic, therapeutic deism." As the diet in our churches is increasingly determined by the spirit of the age, and as youth are treated as borderline cases to be cajoled into thinking God is cool, the church risks abandoning that promise. The "pumped-up" teens in our youth groups today are often tomorrow's skeptics and burnouts. They don't need more hip Christian slogans, T-shirts, and other subcultural distractions, but the means of grace for maturing into co-heirs with Christ.

But mightn't that mean that what these children - and all of us - need is a sacramental life together, something like The Church as Culture?