Committed Critic

With this post, I want to raise the question of whether those of us in the Church of Christ tradition should start reckoning the age of accountability for baptism as closer to 20 than to 13.

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, some background will be necessary:

I come from a Christian tradition called the Church of Christ, whose most defining characteristic is its insistence on believers baptism: people are baptized (= immersed) only once they are old enough to choose. We may disagree on many things among our congregations, but I am confident that you could search the nation without finding a CofC that uses the Believer’s Prayer or infant sprinkling to initiate members.

Personally and theologically, I fully support this practice: it emphasizes Christianity as a voluntary response to God’s call, entailing commitment and obedience. The New Testament lacks the notion of a nominal Christian, and believers baptism proclaims that fact in a graphic way.

The practice also demonstrates the belief that conversion is rebirth into a new life, in which the believer lives in obedience to God, empowered by the Holy Spirit. It sees baptism as an antidote not merely for original sin as found in an infant, but for the gritty reality of an adult who knows exactly how he or she has betrayed God.

But who can be a “believer”?

Although Martin Luther argued that God can give the gift of faith to an infant as easily as to an adult, most people would admit that the kind of faith typically portrayed in the New Testament requires a person to be a bit older. As a result, those who practice infant baptism often focus on the parents’ faith as well as their role in raising the child with a faith they can grow into. This is a worthy goal, but I think baptism is intended to signify an individual’s rebirth, not a family’s intentions.

Believers baptism is not without its problems either. For example, it raises the question whether young children are saved if they die before they are baptized.

Because certain scriptures describe young children who do not know the difference between right and wrong, some have argued that such children cannot actually sin. At some point, it is argued, they do come to know right from wrong, at which point they become accountable for their sin, and thus in need of salvation.

This age of accountability is kind of a nebulous boundary, and it guarantees that some children will die having reached this age of accountability but not having realized it. If we wanted to assure that no child died after reaching accountability but before baptism, we could push baptism to an earlier age, but that would require us to encourage baptism before the age of accountability, which would undermine the meaning of believers baptism in the first place. As a result, believers baptism requires an assumption that God will show mercy for borderline cases.

Some of this probably sounds silly to those not acquainted with the tradition, but these things matter to people, and they need to be reasoned out. Churches face the genuine pastoral concern of communicating to children (and their parents) that people need God’s forgiveness, but that children should not be bullied with the fear of hell.

There is an age, however, where the church needs to speak clearly about sin and the need for salvation, and the trick is determining what that age is. 4? 8? 13? 18?

Churches of Christ have tended to asssociate that age with the age of accountability, which more or less means the age of moral responsibility. Kids around age 13 start to develop ways of thinking very similar to adults, so it’s a natural time to view young people as making the leap from childhood to adulthood, and thus to accountability. In practice, this age varies from kid to kid and from family to family, but my sense is that the bell curve, if you took a survey, would peak at age 13.

However, it’s clear that kids have at least some notion of right and wrong by the time they start kindergarten. And what’s more, kids’ thinking at 13 is really only an approximation of adult thought. It seems to me, then, that we’re pretty much picking an age according to our best guess and assuming God will honor it since we don’t have anything more specific in Scripture to go on.

Personally, I’m not persuaded that 13 is a good age for young people to make a decision for Christ and be baptized. If we have to pick an age more or less arbitrarily anyway, let’s pick one that reflects the struggle young people go though when deciding whether to live a Christian life.

The Scriptural witness: Warriors in the desert

As for age of accountability in Scripture, there is nothing close to a clear guideline associated with baptism. However, the Old Testament has at least one important instance where age appears to be used as a criteria for accountability.

When Moses takes a census at two points in Numbers, he counts only men aged 20 and older (e.g., Num 1:3; 26:2). When the people of Israel refuse to take the promised land, God responds by holding these men responsible: all those who were counted in the census would die in the desert before the later generation entered the land. Only Joshua and Caleb, because they were ready to obey Yahweh, would be allowed to enter (Num 14:29-30; 32:11-12).

It seems most reasonable that this specific group was punished because they were qualified for battle, and thus could have stepped forward to fight in obedience to Yahweh; Deut 2:14 supports this explanation. However, another passage in Deuteronomy suggests a different explanation:

And as for your little ones, who you thought would become plunder, your children, who today do not yet know right from wrong, they shall enter [the land]; to them I will give it, and they shall take possession of it. (Deut 1:39)

It seems that the children under 20 weren’t held accountable for their parents’ mistake because they did not yet know right from wrong. This suggests 20 as the closest thing we have to a biblical “age of accountability.”

Guidelines for the church?

My point here is not to be a legalist in search of a proof text, but rather to wonder whether this seemingly arbitrary number from the OT is nearer to the reality of when the typical person indeed knows better.

In one sense, we never know better. At every stage of my life so far, I’ve been able to recognize how badly I misunderstood the world in the previous stage, and I suspect that will continue for a long time. I’ve been studying scripture, theology, and ministry for 10 academic years now, and what I have learned has challenged, at times harmed, and at times strengthened my faith in many way. However, the primary doubts I have––the ones that make me ask why I follow Jesus in the first place––are the ones that started when I was 17.

The fact is, at age 13, kids don’t understand what the primary questions concerning their faith are going to be. By 25, they usually have a good idea. I could name off a veritable parade of my peers who have seriously questioned their faith either in college or in early adulthood. Most of them were baptized in early adolescence, and most of them had no idea how much their perception would change between ages 18 and 24.

The goal is not complete understanding or complete certainty, because many/most faithful believers continue to have doubts throughout their lives. But when we encourage 13-year-olds to be baptized, we almost may as well use infant baptism instead. While kids that age clearly understand the content of their faith, the questions that so often arise in later adolescents suggest that 13-year-olds lack an adequate understanding of what faith really entails.

We don’t encourage young people to jump into marriage before they have a good idea of who their future spouse is and what some of the struggles of an adult relationship will be; I don’t think we should encourage kids to commit to Christ before they understand what adult faith entails.

In light of all this, it seems to me that advocates of believers baptism should shift our expectation of when a young person is truly “qualified” to commit to Christ for life. To me, the biblical age of 20 seems like a good target.

How it might work:

Here’s what I would envision: through high school, kids are encouraged to learn the Christian faith, but they are neither expected nor allowed to be baptized. Parents and churches teach Christian values just the same, and teens are still taught about the reality of sin. In fact, teens can even think of themselves more or less as Christians (just like young kids in the church do now), but everyone acknowledges that they’re basically just living out their parents’ faith (which, let’s face it, is the reality for most baptized teens now).

As kids approach age 20, the church clearly communicates to them that they are becoming adults, and that it is time to count the cost of following Christ.

For 20-year-olds who have not yet encountered the issues of adult faith, this is an opportunity for them to do so, knowing that they are old enough that no one can force them to be baptized. It’s an opportunity for a young person to ask adults in the church difficult questions about the faith, and maybe even do some reading. Then, if she makes an adult decision to follow Christ, she can be baptized.

Concerns

One risk that parents will point out is that some kids will act out during high school, planning on being forgiven later. St. Augustine famously held a similar attitude as an unbaptized adolescent in the 4th century, when he prayed, “Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.”

My sense, though, is that most teenagers are going to do what they want, baptized or not. Christianity may be a useful tool to prevent some teens from acting out, but on the whole I think it’s only marginally successful, plus I’m not sure God wants us to “use” it in that way in the first place.

The other risk is that some young people who would have been baptized at 13 will choose not to be baptized at 20. I agree that this would happen. But my question is: Isn’t the whole point of believers baptism that people cannot be Christians by default? If a person is going to be a true adult disciple, won’t she choose baptism at 20 just as sure as she would have at 13? Shouldn’t we recognize that the person who has lost their faith by 20 was really just making an immature (though sincere) decision at 13?

In the end, I think this concern reflects the same kind of desire that leads most Christians to practice infant baptism. We might claim that our concern is for the children, but I think the real concern is for the adults in the church, who want reassurance that their children are saved. To put it bluntly: if we baptize our kids before they know better, then we can think of them as Christians even if they end up losing interest in the faith as adults.

Delaying baptism until age 20 would help us all see things for what they are. For those who profess to follow a Lord who despised hypocrisy and heartless religion, I think this is a better path.

For the final segment of my series (see parts 1, 2, 3, 4), I focus on the area of congregational ministry I have the most experience with: the relationship between teens and the rest of the church. It’s my conviction that churches often approach youth ministry in ways that are counter-productive.

Youth and Adults Within the Congregation

Divisions among Christians indeed run deep, but generational alienation provides a realistic opportunity to practice reconciliation. While Warren and Kimball sidestep the issue by planting homogeneous churches for Boomers or Xers, a commitment to the church as the Body of Christ suggests another solution: learning to love those in our own churches who belong to other generations, and whom we see and ignore each week. In pursuing this goal, easing the generational divisions between teenagers and the rest of the congregation is a good way to start.

In recent decades, American parents have withdrawn from their teenagers’ lives, believing (incorrectly) that teens don’t want to spend time with them. Consequently, young people lose their connection to family, fail to develop a strong moral compass, and are forced to find their own way through life.

Many churches have taken a similar path: unsure of how to relate to teens, adults assume they will be happiest spending time with their peers, so they create a youth group where teens can be themselves.

But the goal of Christian discipleship is to develop Christlike selves, and that requires consistent personal contact with mature believers –– preferably from various generations and beginning with the teens’ parents –– whose faith they can emulate. To accomplish this goal within a youth group takes deliberate effort and hard work, because it’s always easier for a youth minister to keep parents happy by keeping their kids occupied than to connect those teens with their parents and other adults. A successful youth program can create the illusion of a single body without connecting young people to the church as a whole in any significant way.

The unintended lessons taught in isolated youth groups are subtle but destructive. Teens who grow up in a youth group that lacks strong connections with the church learn that their faith has no real connection to that of older adults, and that relationships with other generations (and anyone who is genuinely different from them) are too difficult and not worth pursuing. They learn that it’s okay to spend all their time with people who are mostly just like them (even the “different” people in the youth group are still teenagers). They aren’t expected to form relationships with adults in the church other than their parents, and as a result they don’t learn how to relate to other Christians as adults.

These teens are disappointed to find when they leave home that most churches are nothing like their youth group, so they lose interest –– unless they find a vibrant college or singles group, or a newly-planted church (following Kimball’s model) which does remind them of their youth group. If so, the cycle continues, with young people bouncing from congregation to congregation in search of a program that appeals to them at their particular time of life.

Can this really be what God intended for his Church?

What to do?

Wide-eyed idealism is no antidote for genuine differences, so this is no call for churches to scrap their youth programs and throw everyone in a room together. Young people have developmental needs which parents sometimes lack the skills to meet, and education ministries and youth ministries can help the church give young people appropriate spiritual nourishment. Such programs also remind the church to reach out to its youth rather than expect them to become adults on their own.

Still, to be an effective body, churches must resist the temptation to divide too strictly into age groups. It is of course appropriate for children and teens to have Sunday school lessons taught at their own level. However, classes and activities which can involve multiple generations should do so, and those that cannot should be balanced with focused efforts at other times to build relationships between young and old. Teachers can enlist teenagers as assistants for children’s classes; senior citizens can join young families for an evening of board games.

Many resources are available to help churches develop programs that cross generational lines. Two in particular are Mark DeVries’ Family-Based Youth Ministry and Diana Garland’s Family Ministry: A Comprehensive Guide.

But placing the burden for change on ministers and programs skirts the issue of loving one another. We should expect that God’s intention for the church depends not on the programs we devise but on the Holy Spirit manifesting itself among us in love.

Perhaps the best solution to intergenerational division is for each of us to deliberately walk up to someone in the Body to whom we don’t naturally relate, say hello, and learn who they are and how we can serve them. If we cannot bring ourselves to take that small risk, we will scarcely be prepared to face the greater challenges of racial and socio-economic division which remain before us.

This is my fourth post (of five) in a series on division within the church––not between denominations, but between different generations and different preferences for how to do church. (Also see parts one, two, and three.)

Ultimately, I believe that our division of the Body into segregated generational groups constitutes a refusal to learn to love another and a refusal to be the Body of Christ in its full sense. The body imagery in Paul’s letters (Rom 12, 1Cor 12, Eph 4, Col 3:15) indicates that God has called us into churches where different kinds of people find fellowship with one another. A simple reason that we don’t act on the love we claim to have –– by welcoming those who are different into our lives –– is that it’s really difficult and we don’t know how to make it work.

Love is not positive regard but intentional action. As 1 John 3:18 urges, “let us not love with word or tongue but in deed and truth.” Building inter-generational relationships requires hard work. This can be discouraging, but our recognition of the difficulty of God’s call does not mean we can pretend he hasn’t called us. Our recognition that we do not know how to love as Christ loved us doesn’t mean we can cast aside his command and move on to more realistic tasks. A divide-and-conquer approach to evangelism (see part one) may seem to more effectively accomplish God’s mission for the church, taking the Gospel to the world. But in the process, I fear, we fail to be the church he has called to that mission.

By calling the Church the Body of Christ, God has given us an identity that is grounded in who God is. The church is not an organization of saved people who meet together; it is the Body of Christ on earth. That body is formed not only by each member’s relationship with Christ but also by our relationships with one another, which is why the greatest of all the spiritual gifts (1 Cor 13:13) is not prophecy or speaking in tongues or knowledge, but love.

If the Body is to mean anything, we must love one another with a love that extends to all its parts. Claiming that one body composed only of hands will reach one portion of the population, while another body composed only of ears will reach another, denies our identity. Claiming that all these congregations really are unified in Christ, even though many of them meet separately precisely so that they don’t have to take each other’s viewpoints and preferences into account, is simply dishonest.

At the end of the day, most of us struggle to know how to love one another; to truly love someone based on no common ground but Christ takes a level of maturity in faith that perhaps most of us lack. Furthermore, we cannot be simply willing to love others. Many Christians –– perhaps most –– would claim willingness to form relationships with people of other generations or backgrounds, and yet our churches remain divided. To turn those words into action takes great effort, and that is a key part of our calling.

The Real Call: Love One Another

Clearly, Christ has called us to love one another, but we must discern how to go about the task. It has been said that when Christ told his disciples to love one another, he was not calling them to a benign positive regard. The command, specifically, was for the disciples to show the kind of love for one another that Christ had shown and would show for them, the love of the cross (John 15:12).

When a Christian chooses her church so that she relates easily to the worship service and the preacher and the kind of people who attend there, positive regard is easy, but a part of Christian love falls by the wayside. The problem is not that we can’t love people at a church where the people are just like us; it’s just that typically we don’t have to. When I attend church every week with people who look like me, act like me, think like me, and worship like me, I can get away with effortlessly having positive regard for almost all of them and thinking I know how to love my neighbor.

Jesus said, memorably, “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even ‘sinners’ love those who love them…But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked” (Lk 6:32-35). In other words, love that is easy to give does not mean much on its own.

What reason could there be for us to form churches full of people just like us except that people just like us are easy to love? And what reason could there be for us to seek out people who are easy to love except that we are too frightened or too lazy to learn a deeper love which overcomes differences?

The Obstacle: Self

A recent New York Times best-seller called Quarterlife Crisis describes the struggles of upper-middle-class twenty-somethings trying to figure out what to do with their lives. The authors conducted dozens of interviews and found a generation faced with endless choices and possibilities, looking for direction. One of the people interviewed said, “I just try to do whatever will make me happier, and think of myself first (kind of self-centered, huh?) But if more people did it, they would be happier.”

Many Christians, young and old, shun such an attitude for their daily lives while using that very standard –– their own happiness –– to select a church. Part of the difficulty in loving other people involves letting go of one’s self in order to love an other. In a sense, if I love someone just like me I have done no more than love myself, and in any event I deserve little praise; after all, people like me are those who love me, who pay back what I lend them. Loving a person when he acts just the way I want doesn’t, as it were, count. While all people have something in common –– the image of God, if nothing else –– I really can only love another person to the extent that I can recognize how he is different from me. Real love must overcome differences, and in the context of, say, a worship service, the preferences of teens, young adults, Baby Boomers, and senior citizens certainly differ.

This need to respect the differences of others rather than expecting them to be like oneself is why Paul confronts division in the Philippian church with a call to humility, urging them to consider others better than themselves, to look to the interests of others rather than themselves. Humility, emptying oneself, is the one way to overcome the selfishness that prevents us from loving one another. We are called to be humble the way Christ was so that we can also learn to love the way he did, with the self-sacrificial love of the cross.

This post is building on my previous post, where I suggest that churches that try to attract one particular demographic or generation, to the relative neglect of others, fail to fulfill the biblical call for the church to be the Body of Christ.

Within the enormous Christian subculture in America, we gather into different churches based on common worship preferences, common levels of education, common race, common social classes, and common generations. The Gospel, however, calls believers to a particular kind of commonality: fellowship of the Spirit in Jesus Christ. The flaw with the plant-all-churches-for-all-people approach to ministry (that espoused by Warren and Kimball) is that it waters down God’s call for Christians to be the Body of Christ –– a body which includes all sorts of parts, often from different classes, races, and generations.

This is not to say that Christians should seek diversity at all costs; Spanish-speaking congregations will have limited fellowship with those who speak only English, and patronizing bids for the inclusion of token minorities in white churches or poor families in affluent churches only trivialize what the gospel calls us to do. Furthermore, black and white churches in the United States, for example, have an ongoing legacy of hurtful relations that must be worked through slowly and sensitively. It may yet take decades or longer for such divisions to be overcome. However, intergenerational divisions lack such a daunting legacy, and a failure to overcome them suggests not an insurmountable breach but an unwillingness of churches to accept the implications of the gospel.

The fellowship –– koinonia, “commonality” –– to which God has called us is a sharing of the body and blood of Christ (1 Cor. 10:16). The loaf of which we partake, the baptism we have received, and the Spirit we have been given to drink (1 Cor 12:13) all unite us into the Body of Christ. Therefore the fellowship to which God has called us and which we must pursue is fellowship in the Body of Christ. Paul writes,

God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honor to the parts that lacked it, so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it. (1 Cor 12:24b-26)

Paul insists that the Corinthians who possess prestigious spiritual gifts cannot look down upon or ignore those whose gifts seem less honorable or less important. All parts of the Body are necessary.

Corinth’s divisions focused on prestige; those I’m trying to address here are generational. So in terms relevant to the question at hand, we might say that if young people seem to lack the gifts of maturity and self-control, older members cannot for that reason claim they are not part of the Body. If older people lack the gifts of energetic passion and accepting new ideas, younger members cannot for that reason claim they are not part of the Body. And even if GenXers lack the gift of humbling themselves before the wishes of older generations and accepting as brothers and sisters those who have failed to make the leap to the postmodern mind set, I cannot for that reason claim they are part of the Body.

Obviously, few Christians would officially exclude other age groups, but how effectively do we obey Paul’s command and show “equal concern” for other generations or suffer with them when they suffer? Many young ministers prefer to plant new churches rather than deal with the hang-ups of older generations of Christians. And even in existing congregations, generations often merely tolerate one another, without forming real relationships.

Our efforts maintain a superficial peace, but they fall short of God’s call.

One of my deepest faith commitments is that God wants the church to be a unified Body made up of many different parts. This week’s post is the first section an essay I’ve written on the topic.

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Young nor old didn’t make the list in Galatians 3:28, but perhaps it should have, for the sake of today’s American Church.

Our culture has a merked tendency to segregate itself generationally –– toddlers to day care, kids to classrooms, college students to dorms, “real” adults to work, older adults to home alone, everyone watching television or surfing the web to avoid interaction with whoever is around. Cell phones and email have reconnected people in important ways, but they bring their own problems. Churches, opting not to fight the cultural tide, provide Sunday school classes and social activities for every demographic. Generational alienation, not suprisingly, characterizes many churches.

Churches for the Ages

One response to this generational divide is to try to circumvent it. In The Emerging Church, a sort of guidebook for reaching Generation X with the Gospel, Dan Kimball describes a new breed of churches that draw generational lines almost intentionally. While mega-churches find greatest success with Baby Boomers, Kimball suggests strategies for developing new churches to involve and convert Generation-Xers, a group that often struggles to find a place in Boomer churches. Kimball quotes Rick Warren: “No single church can possibly reach everyone. It takes all kinds of churches to reach all kinds of people.”

In one sense, Warren’s approach is based on sound enough reasoning: churches want to grow and reach the lost, and congregations often find greater success programming for a particular demographic than integrating many different kinds of people into a single group. Commonalities, after all, bring people together. I myself for two years during seminary participated in a small group of young adults who shared weekly Bible study and Sunday lunch. The fellowship we experienced was powerful and valuable.

I question, however, whether it is the primary fellowship to which God has called the Church.

To be sure, the Warren/Kimball model has proved wildly successful in bringing about church growth and leading countless people to become Christians. Warren argues persuasively in the Purpose-Driven™ Church that churches must determine their purposes and focus their efforts only on meeting those purposes.

For Warren, finding a church’s evangelistic target –– the kind of person a particular church can best reach –– is a key to achieving the purpose of reaching the lost. And of course, evangelism does need to be tailored to its intended audience. However, I will argue that gathering all different kinds of people into one community under the fellowship of the Gospel is also one of our indispensible purposes. If so, churches must not build their programs with such a narrow target in mind.

I suggest that a biblical understanding of the Church as the Body of Christ prohibits us from planning our congregations around reaching particular “target” people. Rather, it requires us to allow the Gospel to bridge differences which normally separate people. Unfortunately, churches in the U.S. are already divided up in every way imaginable –– denominational, generational, social, racial. Most of us attend churches primarily made up of and led by one demographic of people or another. The broad task of overcoming divisions is likely to be painful and protracted, and I am hardly qualified to point the way.

I want to offer a more modest proposal, that we take preliminary steps towards bridging such gaps by crossing generational lines within each congregation to form meaningful cross-generational relationships. This means first that believers will commit themselves to building relationships within existing multi-generational churches rather than following Kimball’s model of starting new congregations tailored to a particular group.

Second, I will suggest a place where such bridging of generations is perhaps most needed. It is, ironically, an area in which well-meaning parents and ministers often intentionally accentuate the division: the relationship of teenagers to the rest of the congregation.

There is more to follow next week, but I would be very interested in whatever thoughts or questions this raises for people.