the Christian mind

about a year ago my friend Cathy & I went to hear Donald Miller speak (author of Blue Like Jazz...). he was speaking to a group of college students. i was blown away by his ability to share the story of the gospel like a poet would--and his audience was captivated. i turned to Cathy & remarked on this, and we wondered together how the college students were themselves going to be able to learn that skill.

there is a generation of us that grew up with much modern teaching--orthodox beliefs, apologetics. we were a literate generation--less literate than our parents, perhaps, but we still grew up in the era of network television and without mtv. we grew up without the internet, without many electronics. our imaginations were stimulated by mere words, and our past time was often reading or imaginative games that we created ourselves--because those were the only options we had.

but the generation that comes after us--the mtv, IM, podcast generations, these are the generations of the illiterate. yes, they can read, but most do not read to learn, to explore, to expand their minds. they read only when they have to, and are very disengaged at that. if you doubt it, ask any educator who's been working over the last 10 years. even at my law school, the professors have seen a dramatic drop in reading and comprehension abilities. and we haven't even touched on the lack of an attention span!

so Cathy and I asked ourselves who is going to come up with a way to teach this generation what they need to know to really share the gospel--really interact with their peers, based on the foundation of orthodox faith and doctrine, yet able to communicate on the post-modern level, able to tell the story of God.

today i went to a session about apologetics for the post-modern person by James Emery White. amazing scholar. his solution to post-modern apologetics is what he calls a "Christian mind." a mind that is literate in culture and ideas, a mind submitted to God and educated in the origins of western thought. he claims, along with others before him, that the battle for culture and souls is fought in the marketplace of ideas.

and i just sat there thinking that surely all is lost then. if literacy is all we have as an option, then we have already lost this generation to a spirituality that does not have anything to do with God. because this generation will not read. sure, there may be some who choose to educate themselves and enter the upper eschelons of educated society, and influence culture on a meta-scale. but by and large, this generation will go to their graves without knowledge of the living God because their peers will not do the work of developing a "Christian mind."

so what should the church do, then? is all lost because this Christian mind was not developed in our Christian families, in our churches, even in our Christian educational institutions?

i don't know. i don't have another solution to this problem yet. i want to believe that the story of Christ and his blood can be told, a person can answer the "so what?!" question to the Christian story, and this generation can come to Christ. but how?

what other options do we have?