The sermon, titled 'DIVIDIDA', addresses the alarming trend of young people leaving the church, as evidenced by statistics from researchers like George Barna and articles from the New York Times. It critiques the modern church's reliance on entertainment-based youth programs, arguing that these do not foster true Christian maturity. The speaker, Philip Leclerc, reflects on his own upbringing in the church and his father's concerns about youth ministry effectiveness. The sermon delves into historical influences on church education, such as Robert Rakes' Sunday School movement and John Dewey's educational reforms, which have led to age-segregated ministry programs. These approaches are challenged for their lack of biblical basis and effectiveness. The sermon advocates for a return to family-centered spiritual education, emphasizing the role of parents in teaching and disciplining their children in faith. It calls for churches to abandon modern traditions in favor of scripturally grounded practices that integrate families into the church community.

We saw the statistics made by researcher George Barna, indicating back in 2002 that about two thirds of young people would leave the church. Well, that's a shocking statistic. A recent New York Times article asked, why so many people in the 20-year-old's house take so long to grow? The young people are leaving the church in mass. The United States is on the same path as the European Union.

Whether you choose the alarming peak of 88% or the tendentious minimum of 40%, it's a crisis and everyone knows. Why are young people leaving the church? Are teenagers becoming false Christians? For a long time we had a wrong thought about working with young people. For years, we thought that fun, games and shine brought transformation.

And we are realizing that they don't. Are we losing teenagers before they even graduate? The issue of young adults leaving the church has been a hot topic for several years, raising questions about the long-term effectiveness of the Young Ministry. I wondered if 80% of these children are moving away from faith, and have done so in the 80s and 90s. How many of my children am I willing to see move away and go to hell?

Which of my five children do I want to lose? We lost about 40% of them until the end of elementary school, and 45% until the end of high school. In other words, we are losing them way before college. 88% of children raised in evangelical homes leave the church at 18 and never return. Brazilian version, Eden Studios.

The Church does not respect the Church as a whole. They do not respect the word of God and do not want to grow. I have serious questions. What inspires children to turn their backs to the Church? What gives them so much contempt for Christian maturity and responsibility?

Is it a problem with the Church? With the children? With the parents? Scriptures say to instruct the child on the path he should walk, and when he is old, he will not deviate from it. Which part of this verse is missing?

As a filmmaker, I decided to look for answers, and what I discovered shocked me and saddened me. But I also found some hope in what may seem the most obvious place for all. My name is Philip Leclerc. This is my journey. I grew up in a church with programs, and I went to Sunday school like almost everyone.

Every Sunday was the same rush for the family to get to church on time. I had some excellent teachers at the Dominican School and learned a lot. But mostly, it was just another moment to have fun and be with my friends. Then we went through the regular church worship, and the worship was over and we went home. That was basically the church for me.

So I turned 13, which was the age to join the group of young people in our church. It was then that my father really began to pay attention to the teenagers who left the youth ministry. They had good programs for teenagers with games and fun, usually even accompanied by a biblical teaching. But something really worried my father about the teenagers he saw leaving the programs. What left him wondering?

Is this program designed to teach teenagers in the church helping them or harming them? For One of the first stops of my journey was one of the biggest Christian youth meetings in the state. Just over an hour from my hometown, Sheboygan, Wisconsin, I'm here to talk to young people about their experience in the youth group. Is anyone of you interested in showing up on camera? We're making a film about the youth ministry.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how effective would you say your youth group was in terms of sharing the gospel and reaching the teenagers? To reach the teenagers, I would say that on a scale of 1 to 10, that church would be a 4. Eventually, my parents took me out of the youth program. Of course I was disappointed. Many of my friends were there and at the time I thought my parents were being irrational.

But I obeyed. Mainly because I didn't have much choice. What was there in your last young leader that attracted you? He was a very cool guy. He could relate to people because he was younger.

He was very energetic. And he was a great teacher, He guided you. I remember a few times when he took me out of school just to go play video games with him. A group of young people every weekend. Just to go out and talk, like, with someone you identify with.

And, yes, like, trips for young people, missions and things like that. To be honest, I think there's a moment to be serious, but there's also a moment for fun. I've noticed that many of these young people, in my group of young people, they just go to church and get excited, clap in the songs of worship, listen to the message, you know? It's like a club for them. Only one of us goes to the Dominican school.

We talk and spend time together. We just go out, you know? Like, not going out to church. But we go out and then go to church to do church stuff. But we still have fun and attract young people doing fun stuff in the community and stuff like that.

I think not participating in the normal activities of the youth took a while to get used to. For me and my friends, the group of young people was the church. And not being part of it was seen by some in the church as critical or as if my family was abandoning the church. I don't think it was an easy decision for my father. As I grew up, I saw something that made me sad.

I watched many of my friends leave God. That didn't happen overnight. When they left home for college, many of them had already left faith. I like to expose young people to the same things and culture. Like, how is our world today?

A local Christian show started to open my eyes. The Children are being informed that the fun music of the world can bring them closer to God. It's nice to be introduced to other things, in what concerns the Christian culture. The show was amazing. I never felt like this before.

What I know about myself is that I'm a failure, and I'm going to change that tonight. Is it probably one of the best I've ever been to? That was like, out of the curve. My back hurts, my mohican is flat and my voice is almost gone. We have to scratch her head again tomorrow.

That means something right there. I think we all know that my generation needs to leave the world and seek Christ. And yet here, I see no distinction between Mundanism and Christianity. It occurred to me that if the Church allows Mundanism here and calls it Christian, how can I trust that it doesn't allow corruption in other places? And even calls it Christian.

I see an emphasis on music and entertainment, but no real emphasis on biblical teaching. And if the Bible is taught in fact, it is usually for a very short time. What surprised me a little was that, when interviewing local teenagers, I discovered that almost all the young people I spoke to rejected the belief in a young land, as it is written in Genesis. Do you believe in a young land or do you believe in an old land? Young or old land, right?

Good question. Obviously there are millions of years, billions of years. I think we have a... I think we have a... Could it be a half-century land?

I'd say... I'd say probably millions, millions of years. But it was definitely created in six days. Millions of years. The Bible is a figurative language.

It's not literal. I don't think the Bible cares about answering this question. That's one of today's questions. But do you know what we usually do in our Sunday school with our children? Don't worry about it, but trust in Jesus.

Being stubborn, I won't answer directly. My answer is, if it was literally created in six days or over millions of years, Jesus still died on the cross for me. But we need to worry about that, because if we can't answer, that shows the next generation that we only have a blind faith and that we don't really believe in this book. And it's not a real story. Christians, mature Christians in faith, disagree on this subject.

And all are Christians who believe in the Bible. You can disagree on this topic. Some believe it was made in six days, and others believe in evolution, kind of directed by God over millions of years. If you can't trust this part of the Bible, here at the beginning, they tell you, you can use human ideas to reinterpret. We don't need to accept it at the foot of the letter.

But what about the rest of the Bible? Why should I accept it as authority? In the process of co-authoring Already Gone, Ken Ham recently joined the statistic and market researcher Britt Beamer for a significant research project to discover why young people have left the church. I went to Orlando to meet Mr. Beamer personally about his research.

Welcome to the Beamer's. Hello, Mr. Beamer, how are you? Come in, come in. What do I see as a company?

When nine mega-consumers interviewed each other, we did almost two thousand different studies. I probably studied all the significant markets. We lost these young people when they went to college, because the premise has always been that when these young people are at home and under the control of their parents, they are solid Christian citizens. But when they get to college and leave a controlled environment to a totally uncontrolled environment, then suddenly they say, man, I can do whatever I want. I was surprised by the fact that so many children had already moved away before they even got to college.

But the surprise was the number of people in elementary school. And in fifth and sixth grade. And elementary school was almost equal to middle school. That was what shocked me. About 43% of them lost in elementary school.

In primary school. And 45% of them lost in high school, and 10% when they got to college. 90% of people basically had so many doubts before they even got to college that you could walk through them. What is happening to leave such great doubts in the hearts of young people? Clearly, what we are losing happens while they are still at home with their parents.

And as the title of the book indicates, much Before they even left the church, most of my generation had already left. I heard about two pastors from Tacoma, Washington, that I knew I needed to interview. Carl D'Armond and Jamie Davis have been on a very different journey. So, what is your experience in the youth ministry? Where were you and what did you do?

I was that classic boy from the Youth Group. I went to the Youth Group while I was growing up. I had a great relationship with my pastor of youth. In many ways, he was a hero and influenced me to move forward. With the Youth Ministry, I met my wife in the Youth Ministry.

My story was basically when I started attending the biblical school after leaving the military service. I started asking some questions and I started seeing some of the results of the ministry and the activities with the young people. I was wondering why these young people are no longer following Christ. Why are they not glorifying God in their behavior? This is what scares me so much for having held so many of these types of events where we attract the crowds, and the reason why I simply don't know.

And the final results? Again, we invested a lot of money to do these events and... With very little fruit to show. I mean, we had fun, but when I went to bed that night asking myself, what was that for? The author Brent McCracken, who describes himself as a 27-year-old hipster, recently published his first book about the highs and lows of being a hipster in the church.

You just wrote this book, Hipster Christianity, and is receiving a lot of attention from the media. What have you observed, you know? Writing this book, what led you to this conclusion? I believe that the role of hipster in the youth ministry has been, unfortunately, too great in recent decades. And perhaps going back to the 70s and 60s, when the Ministry of Youth really started to develop, and young culture in general, and culture became a huge force.

I think the Ministry of Youth doesn't necessarily have much of a biblical support, like the kind of specific passages that talk, for example, about creating a group of young people. There are many things in the Bible that are not clearly explained. Ideally, the transmission of scriptures and biblical knowledge from parents to children is something that should happen naturally. I think it would be preferable to have a young pastor or another person filling out this role, but I think many parents may not feel prepared, they do not have biblical training. They have never been to the seminary and maybe the young pastors have and they feel that, You know, these people are the experts, and I want them to really teach my children.

Is the goal of the young shepherds to cover for parents who do not feel prepared? And are young shepherds more qualified to train children than parents? I must say, this is a lot of confidence to deposit in young pastors. It seemed a logical step to go straight to the gurus of the Modern Youth Ministry. So I traveled to Chicago for the Youth Ministry of the Year event, and Group Magazine.

Why are you here today? What's going on? We're here for the Youth Ministry Conference. The standard approach hasn't changed much. Same fun, same games.

Hey, interested in saying something on camera? Well, you're a young pastor. Which would you say was the best way to attract young people? Honesty, honesty. I don't know if that puts them inside the church.

Sometimes it takes a big show to attract this MTV generation, but whatever attracts them, draws their attention, you know? And leaves them close to you. Just being honest. Look, this generation is claiming for something authentic. We will have to think.

How can we present the Gospel in a context that is relevant to their lifestyle? They don't want to know what the third finger of Daniel's foot was about. They don't give the minimum. They want to know how to deal with what they face tomorrow. So we'll have to present forms of the Gospel that are highly relevant, highly relational.

If they see us as real and authentic, that will attract them, even more because it's what they're not getting anywhere in the world. I know what the modern church means by being authentic. It's just being yourself. But just being yourself doesn't fill the desire for something real. For the truth.

My business mentor, Trey Jacobson, often defined authenticity to me in relation to the brand. We're all looking forward to authenticity. And when I talk about authenticity, Authenticity is what is real. The Church has destroyed its credibility with the young. We know from consumer branding that the fastest way to break trust is to promise something real and then deliver something false.

Building trust is a fact. The process of making promises and fulfilling promises. And the value of this trust is directly proportional to the singularity of the promise and the meaning of this promise and our capacity to keep it. The reason why we emphasize so much on building trust is because people value what they trust and do not value what they do not trust. Is it possible that the Church has promised truth, but delivers tolicies instead?

Is a desire for something real being sincerely satisfied with truth and real relationships? At the conference, I listened to the young minister's guru, Doug Fields. I interviewed the speaker, Walt Mueller, the veteran leader of young people, Diane Mayo, and Rick Lawrence, editor of the group magazine. All champions of the practice of the youth ministry. And I was surprised to discover a concern that arose as a constant frustration with everyone I talked to.

You can't overcome the impact of a father. Even the best pastor of young people in the world cannot overcome the impact of a father. So, this is a problem for young pastors, because they have to work in partnership with their parents. It's not a matter of, we should, you need to. Because if you don't do it, if you close this path, then basically you're saying, I'm going to have very little impact on the lives of young people.

Family is the place where spiritual care happens. I think we need to admit that there was I think that the pastors themselves would say that one of their biggest challenges is the parents who don't see their role as a disciplinary in the lives of their children as a primary school. They see the importance, but they don't know what to do. So, many times, they pass on their children to be the providers of service to their faith development. So, this is a frustration for many young pastors today.

We all know that this young culture is the least guided by parents, which we have already seen in America, you know? They are educated by the media, by technology, but usually not by their parents. I was impressed when I found out that at the Young Ministry Conference, the biggest frustration seemed to be that the parents were not involved. When we look at the family, it is there that the discipline and care should happen. But unfortunately, we live in a time when half of the families have already gone through a divorce.

Therefore, the church needs to be this family. Darwin Gray is a pastor of a church that involves teenagers from the fifth year in the church's cults. Each ministerial context is different. At Transformation Church, where I act as the main pastor, our biblical philosophy with the students is that they are part of the church. Students don't need to be segregated from the church as a whole, but they must be integrated into the church.

I think it's a great thing. It's not something new, It's something biblical. I don't want to be a... A poster saying that this form of church is the only form of church. I was in relationships where it's just the integrated church and all the other churches are wrong.

And I'm like, man, you just can't do that. Chuck Bowmer was involved in a new church, where they fundamentally restructured the church programs around small local groups. The main point was that when we look at the scriptures and then at the church, like, If you only read the scriptures, you wouldn't get to what we had. The ministry of youth is in the community context. There is no ministry that separates ages.

You see young people through the scriptures. But it's the work of the parents to discipline. So if we have a role in the children's disciplinary, ideally, it would be to work with the parents to help them, right? That's the ideal. And it's not what every church needs to do, you know?

You can trust me on that. But it's exclusively what we're called to do in our context, so... Initially, it makes sense to group children by age, because they all seem to be in the same place on their learning journey. They need to learn specific things at specific moments. There was something that Chuck Bomar said, and others also said, that I simply couldn't leave out.

He basically said that if you use scriptures as a foundation for your church, it would never end what we call the ministry of youth. But if it's right, then this philosophy of education and discipline that is so prevalent in the church today came from somewhere beyond the Bible. Of course, the group of young people is very modern, but we have already had a Dominican school for some time. I started researching this. I visited university libraries and even went to the Congress Library, where I consulted some of the documents from primary sources.

And what I discovered at the beginning was quite straightforward. Robert Rakes is seen by many as the father of the Dominican School movement. After inheriting his father's magazine, the Gloucester Journal, at the age of 21, he began his career as editor of the Social Reform magazine, defending the prison reform, trying to improve prisoners through education. After his efforts in the prison reform failed, he then returned his attention to the children who flooded the streets of the factories on Sundays. Once again, he tried to improve these children through education.

The idea was to teach children who couldn't have a formal education. Education sometimes included reading, writing, math and religious instruction. But it also discovered something surprising and fascinating. As the Dominican schools became a movement and gained popularity, there were pastors and Christian leaders who saw errors in what was happening and strongly protested against it. Reverend Thomas Byron said, Be it as it may be.

I repeat again, my great objection to Dominican schools is that I fear that in the end they destroy all family religion and anything that has the tendency to do that, I consider it my duty to protect it against. Is what we are seeing today a direct fulfillment of Burns' prediction? Scott Brown is an author and pastor who influenced my father's thinking many years ago. I sat down with him to discuss his most recent book called A Weed in the Church, which is a detailed biblical assessment of the modern young ministry and also a detailed history of its origins. In fact, I discovered that there is a level of controversy around Reichs and his movement.

And his contemporaries predicted that the Dominican school would end up destroying the family. Right, they feared that the parents would abandon their responsibility to teach their children and transfer them to the Dominican school. But you have to understand that what Rakes was doing was outside the Church. But over time, as the movement was so great, the Church ended up adopting the basic principle. There are many stages that led us to the place where we segregate young people in their own cultures.

There are many forces that contributed to this, but what Reikis did was really different from the modern movement of the Dominican school. He is a distant relative. He goes back to the Greeks and goes back to Plato. Plato believed that children should be separated from their parents. Plato believed that the children should not even know their parents in the perfect republic.

You have Jean-Jacques Rousseau and one of the most famous educational revolutionary figures in history, the G. Stanley Hall. He came up with and really established a new and important initial mark. When you get to the 20th century, you have John Dewey, who is called the father of modern education. He was an atheist, he was a critic of the Bible, he was a pragmatist philosopher, he was one of the signatories of the Humanist Manifesto.

He embraced all of this, this messianic vision of the state, that the state will rescue children through education. He spent his life building this segregated school system by age. The Church adopted this segregated system. That's why today, when you walk through the corridors of public schools, you see classrooms on each side. And when you walk through the corridors of the churches, you see the same pattern of education.

We adopted this model, this factory model, and we brought it to our educational visions, so that we have this notion that schooling is when we take the product, the child, and submit it to a series of processes, and they come out the product. This is where the model of the school for work emerged hundreds of years ago. This is not a new idea of educational bureaucrats, But it has always driven the government's school system and the Church, being the critic and not being deliberate, I think it embraced this idea and created again similar Dominican school curricula, which are built on different ethereal tracks. We have used segregated approach with programs and young ministries in the Church throughout my life. It always seemed like a very normal and necessary part of the Church.

But understanding the roots of this methodology and paganism changes everything for me. It dates back to approximately 380 BC, when the Greek philosopher Plato wrote in Greek literature the idea that children should be separated from their parents. Jean-Jacques Rousseau expanded the Platonic thesis, saying that the education of children is more important to the state than to their parents. Robert Rakes promoted a social reform program called the Dominican School for Street Children. G.

Stanley Hall applied Darwinian evolution to the theory of child development, codifying the modern concept of adolescence. John Dewey was the father of modern education, institutionalizing the segregated purity classroom environment. Would these pagan seeds of division planted over the last thousands of years now bear fruit in our churches? What the modern church doesn't understand is that the promoters of segregated education, by age, were all men who were at war with God. If the Church adopts Athens, the Church will become like Athens.

And that's what happened to the Church today. I traveled to Houston, Texas to talk to Dr. Vody Balkan about what scriptures really say about disciplining young people. Dr. Balkan, good to see you.

Good to see you, man. Thanks for coming. We simply don't have ministries divided by the age group. And we do this on purpose. We have a focus on family discipline and on enabling families to do what God called them to do.

The question is, we start with, we have to make man respond to God. That is our goal. Therefore, everything that makes man respond is appropriate. This is the wrong starting point. When it comes to being innovative, and trying to reach culture and do things that are not in Scripture, trying to worship God in ways that God did not tell us to adore Him.

Then our innovation becomes dangerous. A great example of this in the Bible is Uzah. You know, the Philistines captured the ark and elevated it. They send the ark back. Now the ark is coming back and being loaded and falling.

Uzah watches the ark falling. And he tries to do something good there. He loves the bow. He loves Israel. He wants to rescue the ark from falling on the dirty ground.

So he stretches out his hand and grabs the ark in a way that God has expressly guided Israel not to touch the ark. And God kills him. Is it possible that the crisis we are seeing in the Church today is a way of judging God about the Church? By extending our hand and, in a certain way, doing something completely against God's command to solve a problem with youth? Are you saying that scriptures are mandatory and do not leave us an excuse?

You know, Philip, we do not believe that the Church has the freedom to invent itself. It needs to go to God. You know, the apostles were inspired. What they did was inspired and we must imitate that. Paul said, we have no other pattern.

Follow my pattern. So what were the patterns in the New Testament? They were always all the integrated ages and never segregated. We must follow this pattern. Scriptures have a lot to say about whether the ministry must be segregated by age or not.

There is an authoritative and binding testimony to the Church. It is the Word of God and only the word of God. So what is this example in the scriptures? How is it? How does it look?

The meetings of the Old and New Testament are all integrated. In the church of Ephesus and Colossus, the children were present in the meetings of the church. The apostle Paul, in his letter, specifically addresses the children, along with the parents, the whole body. This illustrates, you know, mature men taking younger men into their lives. Older women disciplining younger women in the Church.

It's organic, and definitely not programmatic, and absolutely not segregated by age. Some say that they did not deal with the same problems we face today as culture. The Ministry of Youth is a way of talking to the world that cries, a world lacking in direction and spiritual leaders. God's patterns are transcultural, they work in all cultures, because they are God's. All people have the same sinful nature.

But the word of God is true in all cultures, and God designed His Church to become His people in a corrupt and pagan world. You love together as families on Sunday. And why do you do that? I do this because I see in the Scriptures of the Old Testament, in the New Testament. In the Old Testament you find the assembly of the believers, the Jews.

They were men, women, children, sometimes baby-bears. In the New Testament, Jesus, for example, is found in the Gospels, having his disciples when the children wanted to come and hear him teach and be near him, saying, Come out of here. And he said, Let the children come to me, and do not stop them, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. And I see this and think of modern churches, as many times you come through the door of the graves to enter the sanctuary, and a receptionist will tell you, I'm sorry, but your children can't come in here. I was inspired by the love of Pastor Huston, by the children in his congregation, and by his desire to reach them the way he saw them in the scriptures.

Not with programs, but with whole families gathering with the rest of the Church's body every Sunday. Well, the Bible has a very clear pattern in the Old and New Testament of young people being first in worshiping the community of faith with their parents. Where do we go to Deuteronomy 6? Where do we go to Psalm 78? Where do we go to the book of Proverbs, where we go to Ephesians chapter 6, where we explicitly see the Scriptures teaching the parents to communicate the truth to their children.

And this in a continuous way, when you get up, when you lie down, when you sit at home, when you walk the path. A generation teaching another generation. We see this again, again and again. Obey your parents in the Lord because this is correct. Honor your father and your mother, which is the first commandment with a promise, so that you may live well and live a long life on Earth.

Fathers, do not provoke your children to go, but raise us in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. It is absolutely clear that the Fathers have this responsibility. So, to know more about this, I went to Colorado to meet with Kevin Swanson, a radio program presenter and church leader who focuses specifically on the effective Christian disciple at home. And I was desperate. I was so desperate that I went to the word of God.

While I was looking for children in the concordance of the word of God, I found Ephesians 6. It happens that Paul has nothing much to say about groups of young people. There are these verses, key verses. Ephesians 6, 1 to 4. It's very simple.

What we do is get up and say, Father, raise your children in the instruction of the Lord. Father, are you responsible? The ball is with you, man. We are here to equip them, encourage them to do what is necessary, but the responsibility is yours. And then we say to the children, Honor them, listen to them, Follow them.

The reason why faith is crumbling is that we don't have men who love God with all their heart, soul, mind and strength enough to teach the word of God to their children while they are at home, while they are walking on the road, while they get up, while they lie down. If they loved God with all their heart, soul, mind and strength, they would discipline their children to whom they love, to the God they love. There must be more love for God here. Everything is summed up by a man standing on the cross of Jesus Christ, and seeing the blood dripping from the hands of the Savior who died for this man. And if he understands this love, he will go home and love God.

He will love his children. He will discipline his children to the God he loves. We have direct commandments in the Scriptures. In all places where men must teach and train their own children. But we end up following a Plan B, do you understand?

And you can invest money in it, hours of work, you can give your life for it, but it's Plan B. It's not the plan God recommended or ordered. So even if there is some success in a group of young people, it doesn't make it biblical. And if it's not biblical, it's not right. What I'm seeing is that the problem is not just what's happening in the church.

The problem is what's not happening in the Christian homes. It seems that Christian parents have been negligent in fulfilling their obligations to discipline their own children. Very well. Parents teach at home, do their work in the scriptures, but what's the problem in maintaining the ministry? Well, in fact, there is a great movement in the Church towards this, to maintain the ministry segregated by age and try to activate the parents.

But it's like mixing oil with water. It's like mixing the paths of the world with the paths of God. And that always produces bad results. Although we are grateful for really having a resurgence in equipping the parents to perform their roles, at the same time, if you continue to do something that is strange to the scriptures, you will only continue to corrupt the Church. This is one of the greatest dangers of the Ministry of Youth.

It has literally deviated the attention of men from their real duties. And it gave them an alternative, an easy alternative to disobedience. And when it becomes so popular as it has become, it is very easy for men to support it and say, because the authority of the Church says that this is acceptable and spiritual. And the way things have always been done, well, I'm just being a good Christian when I agree with that. I presumed that the radical ministries of young people were the ones that were failing, those that didn't pass pure fun and games.

But as I reevaluated everything, I met a young pastor who asked to remain anonymous to protect the reputation of the families of His Church. My team of young sponsors and I really work hard to develop a curriculum that focuses on Christ and a very sober approach to the scriptures and the elevation of the word of God. I am not one of those crazy young pastors who exceed the limits of what parents in society would call activities for young people, but I am very conservative and very focused on strengthening the home. After seven years in the Ministry of Youth, with the group of graduates of this year, probably 20% do a true faith profession, and the other 80% are undecided or turned their backs to God. And my heart is breaking.

Because what did I do wrong with the other 80%? If even the most diligent efforts in ministry programs for young people who are serious and pious fail, This confirms my growing conviction that segregated programs of age go against the scriptures and do not work. When I became a father, it was to realize that these children wanted to spend time with me instead of their own parents, wanting to do activities with me and spending time with the nice guy instead of wanting to be with their father. And that really touched my heart. Because I want my son...

I want to be a hero in my son's life. I want to be the person he goes to and asks difficult questions. They told me, you really need to meet my son. Ok, what's going on? And they tell me.

And my question would be... Ok, I'll be happy to meet your son. But before that, tell me, What did you tell your son about this so that I can be sure that I am working in harmony with you and not against you? The chin fell. So, what did you tell your son?

I didn't actually talk to him. Oh, really? Okay. I believe that the vision that the group of young people is a necessary part of the Church would be the exact manifestation of the traditional mentality against which the Reformation fought. Boyd Dillinger was once a pastor of young people, but now he lives in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and is a pastor of an integrated family church, a church without formal programs of I look back and realize I believe I have caused more damage.

Families are what I never imagined, and I see this more when I look back, because I was usurping the authority of the parents, especially the men. Having the hearts of their children turned to me with their permission, I look back and would like to be able to come back and do everything again, but I can't. But today I can make more difference, more with the youth and the life of the youth, through the biblical peace standard, returning their hearts to their children. I don't question the hearts of the majority of young pastors. The leaders of young pastors are there because I believe that most of them love their children.

They love the young people. They want to see them achieved. The problem is how we are doing this. And what we have to go back to is what the Bible says. There is something fundamentally wrong with the impulse of the Church to say, we can do a better job by raising your children than you can.

And God appointed the parents to lead their children, not for another person to come and do it, just because they obtained a diploma or some training in the seminary. This does not qualify anyone to become the spiritual leader of their family. The parents are the only ones who have the appropriate tools. For example, children need care, but they also need correction. This type of biblical correction falls within the responsibility and duty of the parents.

The Church does not have the role of disciplining the life of a child, only the parents. And the Bible says that this is a primary tool in the correction and formation of children. I really never saw this before. Maybe there are some things in life that a father simply cannot delegate, such as loving his wife or loving his children. I think it is quite clear that God gives the responsibility to educate children to their parents, not to the Church.

And the parents who delegate, third this responsibility to the Church and end up, unintentionally, separating the children from their parents and the rest of the Church. But not everyone has a family, especially nowadays. But that's the problem. The parents aren't doing their job. They aren't.

The families and communities aren't doing their job. Isn't the church filling up the emptiness that the families failed to fill? Isn't this the work of a young pastor, in a way? The answer is that we trained the parents to do this work, because that's what God ordered them to do. So, let's create a new generation of parents who are willing to obey God in this area without transferring it to someone that the Bible doesn't even mention.

Let's give this to the person God gave it to. God gives the young people much, much more than a minister of young people. In fact, the Bible really knows nothing about young pastors. There is nothing in the scriptures that indicates that there has been a position in the Church for young pastors. One of the tragic effects of separating young people in their own subculture is that it creates, you know, cultures, different for each generation, within a church instead of a single body?

In fact, this destroys one of the most wonderful principles of the Gospel, which is that God gathers all people, He gathers all ages, He gathers all sexes, He gathers all races together. He gathers the rich and the poor, the wise and the fools. That is what God does. But God doesn't command the orphans and the widows to take care of themselves. Isn't that what they think they do?

They attend to a fault that comes in the culture. Well, what goes wrong with that is that it is not what Scripture portrays. But what Scripture portrays is that there is a family, there is a church, and in this church there is a wide range of gifts and relationships that are perfect for a child without a father. If you do not have a father, come to the Church of Jesus Christ and you will have Many fathers. Come to the Church of Jesus Christ, and you will have many brothers, many sisters, many uncles and aunts in faith, many grandmothers in faith.

When you see a lost generation without care, you have parents in these houses, in these neighborhoods, in these workplaces. They do not care about this lost generation, but they should and should invite them. Invite them to their homes like Jó. He said, Take my arm off if I don't have the orphan at my table eating a piece of my food. If a child is in an environment where there is no stability in a home, I recommend a piece of my food.

Is to be in something more unstable, like a group of colleagues. You cannot simply withdraw the Ministry of Youth. It is necessary to train the parents to lead their families and create an environment in the Church that favors this, something that is missing in most churches, if you end up with the Ministry of Youth and say, What will we do with these children? The answer is to let the parents lead. And for those who have no family or parents present, include them in your family.

And here is the danger of the Ministry of Youth. We create an environment that generates an opportunity for children's hearts to return to the pastor or other youth workers. Or even your colleagues, your girlfriends, your girlfriends. This creates this kind of environment. God wants the hearts of parents, focused on their children, and the children to their parents.

And the Ministry of Youth, By default and by its design, it does not encourage this. Many young leaders without a job. I don't think they'll be unemployed. I think their focus will change. You know, there are many parents out there who need to be exalted, who need to be trained, who need to have an environment.

I don't think they'll be unemployed. I think they have a lot of work to do with their parents, saying, Listen, God called you to lead your family. If we just get it out of our heads that the professional way is the way to do it, it's not what we see in the scriptures. I started this journey with a thousand questions. And although there are still many things I'm not sure of, some things seem pretty clear.

God did not order the ministry of young people. He did not create the Dominican school. He created the church and the family. And gave work for both of them to do. I resigned.

Officially, my last day here was two months ago. What was the specific thing that you saw that made you two decide to leave the Ministry of Youth? The scriptures and the total lack of evidence anywhere in the scriptures that the ministry of youth was present, recommended or even considered. There is no standard when opening the scriptures and discovering from Genesis to the Apocalypse that there is nothing, Nothing. When I started asking questions, no one seemed to give me answers.

So I started reading, and listening, and doing a lot of research. And I came to the conclusion that, all right, The question I asked was, is this biblical? We're doing it because a church is organized like this. I saw the results, but it was when I was exposed to certain authors, certain speakers who started to play with my mind. And when I started reading these things for the first time, I will be honest with you, I did not react well.

I entered this path kicking and screaming because I was very against the culture of everything I was doing, of everything I believed to be true. For each of their arguments against what we call the ministry of young people, I could not biblically present an argument against, both as a father and as a pastor, to say, how can I watch this? Seeing the results, I have already done this in four states. This is the fourth state and the results are very similar. How can I continue to lead a ministry like this, knowing what I know and knowing what the final results will be?

How can I allow my children to be part of it? My message to the parents is very simple. The message is that God gave you an incredible gift. The gift of investing in the life of your children. And the children of your children.

And somehow, someone convinced us that the best thing we can do with this gift is to give it to someone else. I have a vision. Dude, we won't see... Men leading their families, we won't see faith being saved, right? We won't rebuild the family, we won't rebuild the paternity unless we do something radically different.

My appeal to the pastors is, trust the word, it is sufficient. We will be before God, and when we are before God, we will not want to answer with, Are you seeing how much I helped you? When I took the things that fallen men put in culture. In my search for answers, my journey took me all over the country, crossing America. But I discovered that the solution was right in front of me, and it was much simpler than I had imagined.

Looking back, I can see the wisdom and courage of my own father in getting me out of these programs. And I also discovered parents throughout America who had the courage to do the same. And churches and pastors who, instead of modern programs, are using the pulpit and their own examples of life to train parents to discipline their own children. A man stood up in the congregation. He said, Mr.

Washer, if I do these things that I know are right, my church will kill me. And I looked at him And said, Then die. Philip, many years ago I was on a very similar journey, asking many of the same questions, except that I was a leader of a church. And it occurred to me that the ministry structure that I was promoting was contrary to the scriptures, and that it was harming the next generation and dividing the church. And I realized that those things we were trusting had failed us.

The crux of the matter is that, progressively, in the last 200 years, the Church has left aside the sufficient scriptures for the next generation's disciples. And what you have seen is the devastation that resulted from this, as the Church abandoned the principles for the training of the next generation. What will be necessary? Another lost generation? Isn't it time to look beyond modern tradition and study the Word of God again?

Dare to abandon the false inventions of man and, instead, obey His plan to reach our young people. It is time to structure our churches and families as God prescribes. Reunited. I'm gonna be fine I'm gonna be fine I'm gonna be fine You you