Transcript
What’s “deconstructed”? They have looked at the system of doctrine, the system of belief, and they've torn it down or it has been torn down for them. What are you thinking as a parent? You're thinking that there is a story behind them leaving their faith or tearing down their faith. What is the story? Theological changes, when we renounce a certain theological direction, there are usually personal reasons for that. It's not simply, I've studied the text, I've studied the theology, and I don't agree with it anymore. There are usually personal reasons for our theological changes. So you see what I'm doing? I'm saying this is a very, very difficult thing for a parent to go through, but what are you doing? You first want to try to understand what is the story, especially what is the personal story. For example, perhaps the change has been incited by the lifestyle of friends, people that they love who have moved into different variations of sexual activity that are outside the boundaries of Scripture, and they understand that Scripture condemns them and there is no way that they're going to condemn these people that they love, especially when they see them engaging in these out-of-bounds behaviors, and then in a certain way that seems caring.
Sometimes it'll be the lifestyle friends that's part of their story. Sometimes it will be their own personal desires. I suspect a number of the stories that I have observed and been a small part of, the issue was not so much a theological concern; it was they wanted to live with somebody else. They wanted to have a sexual relationship with somebody else, and they knew that was out of the bounds of Scripture, and they were going to go outside those bounds anyway, and that became their occasion for leaving their faith.
Sometimes it might be personal, but it's a personal pain. It's a pain, their own pain, a pain of friends, perhaps to which Christians have contributed. And what they're doing is they're lumping the church in Christ and the people who have contributed that pain together and they're walking away as a way to care for themselves.
So what do you do? You walk carefully and humbly with the person and you try to understand them in the midst of their story, things like this: “I so appreciate that you've been willing to talk to me about these things. Thank you so much.” Something like this: “I suspect there'll be times where I will not engage with you in a way that is very helpful for our relationship, but you are so important to me and I love you so much. Please, would you help me? If there are things that I say that are in some way offensive, would you please be willing to speak those things to me? I will try to invite them, but would you please be willing to speak them to me?” That's a real question: “Would you be willing to do such a thing?” Or the question, “Help me to understand the story. What happened?” And there are different ways we can ask that question. One is a “What happened to you? What's wrong with you?” The other way is, difficult turning points, they usually don't just emerge for no reason. There's a story, and perhaps it's a very long story behind this. “Could you help me to understand your story?”
We invite. This is the posture that we find of our God to us and we want to offer it to our children who have moved farther and farther away from the things of Christ.
What else do we do? We try to know them. We try to understand the story. We do everything we can also to maintain and grow a relationship. When in doubt, we look to surprise people. And the nice thing is if they see you as entrenched in a certain belief system and they see themselves as moving to someplace a bit more enlightened, they will expect you to do silly things and to be a normal lover of another person can surprise them. And so you look for ways to take them by surprise. They expect to rebuke, for example; they expect your disapproval, but instead you see good in them. You appreciate their openness and their honesty, and in that perhaps they may even be able to see something of Christ in you.
You study them, you know them. You creatively look for ways to enhance and to grow the relationship. In the midst of that, you are going to encounter a relationship that may well be an unbalanced relationship, that you are the one who is doing the pursuing and they are doing the avoiding or they simply are not doing the pursuing. If that's the case, what do you do? You see this is this wonderful opportunity because our life is this unbalanced life where we have been pursued and we've been loved in a way that we will never be able to respond in kind. This is the nature of life in Christ. And if you now are moving into an unbalanced relationship with a child where you're the one who's making the call, you're the one who's sending the text, and they don't tend to be responding, what a perfect opportunity to treat others as you have been treated.
And then of course, how do we proceed? We seek the wisdom of other people. And when you seek the wisdom of other people, of how you engage with a child who has deconstructed their faith, you will get so many divergent views and so much divergent advice and you will never be able to cluster it all together in some coherent way to love the other person. But here's what we know. When we seek the opinions and the wisdom of other people, the process is part of humility and wisdom. And even though we're not going to choose some of the advice that we've been given, the process is a fine one in what we anticipate is our God will give us what we need. If our question is “How can we love this child wisely now?” he will give us that light for our path, and then we wait and we wait patiently. We wait creatively, always looking for ways to surprise them with the true nature of our God, to offer him in a way that is attractive and beautiful and is Someone we could never imagine on our own. But he does things better than and greater than and more attractively than we can imagine.
