Father Christmas and Father God

I agree totally with you. It's about time the churches admitted that the picture of a God who rewards the good with heaven and punishes the bad with hell is just a story, put about by the religious people in order to keep them under control.

In fact, the great discovery of the Reformation was that this image of God is so far removed from reality that we would be far better off without it. Unfortunately, this myth is still perpetuated in some Christian circles, and there are even churches who still prescribe penance for sinful acts, and who teach that we somehow earn our place in heaven by doing religious duties.

Shocking teaching of course, which has no basis in the bible, and should not be part of the Christian message for the 21st. century.

In the bin with it, along with Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, Purgatory, Mariology, membership tickets, idol worship and suchlike!

Spartacus

of course you should teach your children about father christmas - if you indent to teach them about god. It prepares them perfectly to believe in a fictitous figure that does not exsits - if you behave well you will be rewarded - badly you will be punished. But please do tell them the truth, won't you, and that both are just stories - stories use to control peoples behavour.

You ask a very good question. Unless churches can offer age appropriate teaching to pre-school children, junior school children and high school age teens, it will be unable to retain their attention through late teens and twenties. And as you say, if they do so, then you have young families remaining as part of the church body and the whole process begins again with their children. Living now in Texas as I have done for the last 5 years I see many examples of churches that do this successfully, some growing by exponential proportions. Why can't the Methodist Church do the same? Well if it is prepared to put aside dogma and use many of the modern resources that are out there, it can.

When Jesus said to Peter, "Feed my sheep" and "Feed my lambs", I think he may have taken for granted that Peter would know that you don't give young lambs and full-grown sheep the same food.

It's true that if you keeping hitting people with the same full gospel message, you will convert a proportion of them. International research shows, however, that most will be so put off by this "sledgehammer" approach that they won't want to come near a church again. The secret is to start where people are - to discover their needs and to tailor the message to meet those needs.

Yes, there are some churches that take this full gospel, hard hitting approach which are full of teenagers and people in their early twenties. Doesn't that prove it is successful? Well, if these churches have been doing this for 20+ years, why are they still full of young people? Where are the young families and those in the forties? What's happened to those young people who were there 10 or 20 years ago, if this diet is right for everybody?

God's calls to Abraham, Samuel, Andrew and Zacchaeus were all quite different and targeted at their individual needs. We talk about personal faith because it is individual. Today, some will flourish in a black-led Pentecostal church, others in an Orthodox or Catholic church and still others in the silence of a Quaker meeting.

We have to get people to take the next step towards God from where they are. To say to them, "You have to get to where I am in order to find God," is to place yourself as a barrier between God and them.

There is only one message we should be focusing on - the Gospel. That message offers everything that people today need, even when they do not realise it. They know what their issues are. Surely, it is the church's responsibility to convey the Gospel in a way that it provides the answer?

When Roger Hutchings and his team reported on The Methodist Church 20s30s Initiative and the outcomes of their structured conversations with this age group, they found two very distinct target groups - namely, post-graduates / young professionals who could be drawn to open, liberal-minded churches, and less mobile, small-town 20s30s who might well be open to uncompromisingly evangelical preaching, often with contemporary styles of popular worship.

Of course, it is more complex than this. There are questioning minds within small town communities and young people in our university cities that need the security of strong, uncomplicated belief systems. The key point is that the church should cater for people with very different personalities and very different life and educational experiences in different ways. Far too seldom at local level do church leaders even recognize the need to do this, let alone do anything about it.

According to this research, it is not so much a question of the right message, but of the right range of messages. God wouldn't have made us all so different if he wanted us all squeezed into the same mould. Part of our generation gap problem is that ministers and church elders (and how age-appropriate that term so often is these days) want young people to have exactly the same religious experiences that they had when they were young and think in the same way about God. Spiritual life has moved on since then.

We've got to stop thinking about how to get the younger generation into our kind of 1950s church (and swapping the organ for a guitar and projecting the words onto a screen doesn't alter the basic format of a preacher dominated service), and start from the spiritual needs of the young people.

In the first place, where our children have walked away from church, you need to ask why that happened - and indeed what happened.

I agree. I was one of many who, despite being brought up in the church and having no actual argument with it, I simply stopped attending when I got into my late teens. But I question whether I was truly saved at that point in my life and only took that step of faith some ten years or so ago. So my answer to you last question would be, is the Church teaching the right message? I know I was never really taught the way to salvation, despite years of Bible study and listening to countless sermons. But to retain the interest of young people the Church needs to be perceived as relevant in today's culture and lose its image of an 18th century institution.

"I am convinced that the children of God's people have special protection and that the Holy Spirit will do the job of bringing them back into the fold."

Well, you may be right, but I'm not entirely convinced. In the first place, where our children have walked away from church, you need to ask why that happened - and indeed what happened. I constantly meet people who have given up on church, but not given up on God. What troubles me most is the number of children of the manse who have walked away. In some cases it has been because the church has robbed them of their dad, never there because of the demands of the job, and in others it was because of the horrendous way their dad was treated by the church.

But to address your specific hope - if the Holy Spirit is still drawing these folk into something (and of course I believe he is: God doesn't give up) that will not be about bringing the rebels back to what they abandoned. If that style of church no longer met the needs, people will only return when they are led to something which does. Is the church which has lost so many of its people listening to what that can teach them?

The truth is that we ourselves cannot "fix" these situations - only God can. And our best contribution is to pray constantly and to try as best we can to reflect God's glory. I am conviced that the children of God's people have special protection and that the Holy Spirit will do the job of bringing them back into the fold.

I am not sure that it 'proves' anything. I think it points to the possibility that our kids are conditioned by the seclular society in which we all live. Where story is not allowed to express greater truths and empirical evidence is the only thing that is real. Our kids live in an impoverished world where they can not see the true reality of life in front of them because they live on the surface.
It never took away the magic for our 4 children to find out what they suspected, that we put the pressents out. Not one of them told thier younger sibblings although we would not have denied it if they had. We read and told the stories in the bible always looking for what it might have to say to them where they were at the time.
Only one of my children has in anyway 'renounced' faith and even he has doubts about his agnostism. However, only one has any real contact with a worshipping community. They have lost faith with the church...but that's a different thing!

My daughter says she has tried to make a connection with God but has failed. She feels that "going through the motions" of prayer is futile because she does not feel God's presence. "God doesn't talk to me", she says.
My son just dismisses the idea of God completely. Logically he can see no reason to believe in His existence. My son sees a world governed by reason, science and logic.

What kind of God is it that your children have rejected, Ella? Too many reject the kind of superhuman king above the clouds (not unlike a Father Christmas figure) that they encountered in some Sunday Schools and in far too many hymns.

We can sometimes be surprised by the quality of our children's thinking on issues we take for granted, even when we think they have no religious interest.

My son turned his back on church after a bad experience years ago. Yet the other year, when I wrote a couple of religious books and submitted them to friends for comment before publishing them, his were by far the most helpful, constructive and perceptive comments of all and he had clearly thought a great deal about what I was trying to say, how that related to his own experience, and how readers might interpret what I'd said.

That led me to think that, just because our children have rejected what they have been offered in church (very understandably in too many cases), there may be a depth of spiritual understanding there.

I suppose that some children might be psychologically damaged by telling them that their Christmas presents are brought by Father Christmas. In the case of our own two children they admitted in later life that they had known for several years before the pretence was dropped that Dad in a dressing gown brought their presents on Christmas Eve. However, they did not want to disappoint their mother and me so they continued with the charade. It was, of course, also in their own interest!

When my daughter (now 22) discovered that there was no Santa Claus, she was horrified. Not because he did not exist, but horrified because her parents and grandparents had LIED to her. She could not believe that we had lied - something that we had told her people should never do. "I will never trust you again!", she declared. I was mortified and, when my son was old enough to appreciate Christmas, I made sure he knew the truth about Santa and that it was just a story to add to the magic of Christmas.
Despite bringing up both children in a Christian environment, they have both now come to the conclusion that there is no God and that those of us who do believe are deluded. Not sure what that proves?