Farming Out the Kids
by R.C. Sproul Jr.

I've spent quite a few hours lately outside raking leaves. We have many trees, and therefore many leaves. It's not my favorite job, but it needs doing. While I'm out there amidst the beauty of God's creation I remember the curse upon Adam. After the Fall he was told that his labor would be more difficult, that thorns and thistles would frustrate his efforts to coax food from the ground. That curse, however, is not merely for farmers. Whatever work we do, there will be frustrations. There is no escaping it.

With Tabletalk the joy of harvest comes when I receive a new issue. The thorns include finding the weeds of typos that slipped through. When I told family and friends that I wanted to plant a church, several warned me of the thorns that waited for me. "You'll have to have a youth group" I was told.

I considered the warning for a second, scrolled through my limited memory of Scripture and replied, "Why? Where is it written?" Nothing in the Bible hints that youth groups are even allowed, let alone required. And youth groups are one weed that will never grow here.

Scripture does have something to say about age groups. Paul instructs in Titus 2 that the older women are to teach the younger women. Parents are enjoined to teach their children, husbands to teach their wives. It seems that whenever age groups are mentioned in the Bible, they're mentioned together, not apart.

How did we get here? How did the church receive as divine tradition that youth, and in some churches every other conceivable demographic group, are some- how to be kept separate from the body? How have we come to treat our young, those whom Paul calls "Holy" as some kind of pestilence to be, avoided, to be corralled until they can learn to be adults?

We got this not from the Bible, but from the world. First, the world figures that it would be far more efficient if we could get all the folks of one age together in one place, and teach them all the same stuff at once. Why not apply the wisdom of the assembly line, the creators of government schools reasoned, to educating people? And the church responded prophetically, with a thundering, "Gee, what a great idea. Why didn't we think of that? Mind if we borrow yours?" What the church should have said is, "It will never work you idgets, because kids aren't widgets."

What an inefficient mess to have all these parents turning their attentions away from their economic garden to weed out the sin and folly in their children. Wouldn't it be wiser to pool resources to hire a collective gardener to do all that nasty weeding work? Don't want to have that awkward birds and bees conversation with junior? Let the youth guy do it, that's what we pay him for. And while we're at it have him talk about it while the bundle of hormones in the locked pen that is the youth group meeting, sits beside Sweet Sally.

And where would our children be without that great means of grace, socialization? How will our children learn to get along with other people, we seem to reason, unless we keep them caged up with people just like them? Of course nowhere is socialization held up in Scripture as a goal for our children. Maturity is, and it's the last thing to grow in the garden of age segregation.

The church, in drinking up the wisdom of the world, again drinks only folly. Age segregation in the church is nothing but pooled ignorance, and a way to enable parents to fall down on the job. Our children are our garden, that is my children are my garden, and your children are yours. We don't raise our children collectively. I can't farm out my responsibility to anyone else. Neither should I want to. The economic garden I till, that doesn't much matter. It just puts food on my table. It is just where I grow plant food for the eternal plants God has put in my care. The children I raise, they last forever. And I will answer for them forever, not Miss So-and-So, the dear old lady in the nursery, nor Mr. Hip Guy the youth director.

Take your children back, and take back the responsibility you never lost. And prepare yourself and your children, to meet the Lord of the Garden.