Aesop's Fable Approach to the Bible

I don't do much with regard to student ministry, but I am interested in how younger people approach the church and Christianity.  Alvin Reid at Between the Times writes in some detail about Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, a term popularized by Christian Smith and Melinda Denton. 

Reid writes, "Unfortunately, many churches have taught the Bible to children and youth not as a book with one central, redemptive message, but as a collection of stories and morals with the gospel as the key story. Moralistic therapeutic deism is 'moralistic,' because its focus is behavior modification. Acting right subtly becomes more important than believing right. It is 'therapeutic,' for it focuses on surface change, turning the Bible into a counseling manual more than the revelation of God. It is 'deistic,' because it does not require a God who is intimately involved in all of Creation and in all aspects of our lives, but who generally exists to bring us happiness and most specifically in our spiritual lives.

"I call it the Aesop’s Fable approach to the Bible. It is ironically a 'moral failure,' for by focusing on morality too much we actually hinder students from seeing the lifelong, holistic implications of their faith. Motivation for serving God stems more from changing our behavior than from living a life of radical faith. Such extrinsic motivation will actually work on the short term: show students how sex before marriage will lead to guilt and disease, for instance, or show them how lying will cost them friendships, and they will abstain from these sins, at least for a season. But if moral change becomes the primary focus of our faith, the long-term obedience we seek may actually be the one thing we will not see." 

Later, he follows with, "The practical result of turning the Bible into a series of moral truths is to assume the gospel and to minimize its role in our lives. We move the good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection to the category of 'lost person only,' so that the gospel is for unbelievers, not believers. So we have our mega-youth events and we share the gospel (or often tack it on at the end) at these, but we do not teach the impact of the gospel for the believer and the redemptive story of God in all of the Bible and thus its impact on all of life. Thus, students grow up in church, learn a lot of stories, and are destroyed in one semester of Intro to Philosophy when they go off to college. They never got the border of the puzzle of life by understanding the mission of God; they simply got practical stories on how to deal with certain felt needs, and they got their eternal destiny taken care of, or so they think. Many become the dechurched—those who grow up in the church but walk away when away from the familiar (family, home church, etc). Others limp their way through life spiritually, never getting the great plan of God for creation and for their lives."

We cannot afford to give our children a weak or inaccurate Gospel.  Read the rest here.