Satisfying Our Young

I left work early today with Dot & Chitra to join a 3.5 km walk organised in conjunction with the official opening of the Civil Service Club in Bukit Batok. It was a nice gesture by the PMO to release those who wanted to walk - part of the overall thrust towards getting the civil servants to be healthy & maintain a healthy work-life balance I suppose.

Anyway, we got to talking during the walk about the most recent incident of a lawyer who seemed to have become so enamoured with alternative religious interpretations that he was prepared to throw away his career to join freedom fighters. What was interesting (and worrying) about it is that he does not fit the usual profile (or what we have come to think is the usual profile) of disenchanted, marginalised or poor young people who get enticed by the call of movements that promise liberation or a better life. Instead, this is a young man who has enjoyed the best that modern socity could offer - educated in premier schools, a skilled debator & orator, a lawyer in one of the top law firms here. Every thing we know about him screams that he must be an extremely intelligent young man well-versed in reasoning. Not some impressionable, passionate adolescent shaking his fist at an unjust world. What could have caused him to choose the path he did?

That got me thinking, of what religion had to offer the young minds of today? More specifically, what does Christianity have to offer the young people today? The young today are more widely read, have access to information, fads, lifestyles that were unimaginable during their parents' times. And the more intelligent they become, the more they question. The more they demand. And this is not necessarily bad. In fact as an educator, I am proud that many of our young minds today think far more deeply and engage in far more rigorous debates than I did when I was their age. And that is as it should be. We have encouraged precisely these habits of mind, this desire to inquire and we should not seek to quench it now.

What we do need to watch for is when young Christians seek and do not find answers in our churches. The Bible is clear on this - "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' (Mark 12:28-30) God created us as reasoning beings and He challenges us to use it to understand Him and love Him. And this was the first attraction of Christianity for me - that there was intellectual satisfaction in engaging with the Bible. I first read the Book as a literary work and tutored a class in NUS on Comparative Literature, dealing with the themes and imagery of books in the Bible. I just loved the way the analysis hung together. And even now I get a lot of satisfaction in studying the Word, asking questions, attending workshops, listening to sermons - there is just such a wealth of wisdom in the Book and it has taken many men a lifetime of work just to analyse it.

So the young people who question and thirst to know more must be encouraged, challenged to go deeper, encouraged to question & answered - within our churches. That is vital. Because if the young cannot find answers to their intellectual curiousity within the Church, there are many other alternative ideas waiting within their reach to fill this intellectual void. That, to me, is a big challenge today. We need to have thinkers, philosophers, scientists, social historians who have tasted and tested the Lord and know He is good and faithful and immeasureably able to stand any scrutiny, stand on any witness stand - the unshakeable Rock.

Attending a talk by LT Jeyachandran of the Ravi Zacharias Ministry last week, I felt awed to be in the presence of such a brilliant mind. I felt challenged to re-examine what I believe, why I believe and who I believe. I think that is a crucial journey any Christian must make - especially the young. I was touched by LT's humility and I know such humility can only be seen in such an intelligent man when he has walked with God and seen His hand in his life.And after my discussion today, I feel really thankful that God has raised such thinkers for kingdom work. And I pray that we will be ready to respond with compassion, humility and a razor sharp mind to the young inquirers in our churches. Lest we lose them.