Russell Moore is an American Bible teacher who grew up in Mississippi, where some of the folks were Catholic, and some Baptist."Around me," he writes, "I saw Catholic casino night fundraisers and Baptist business meetings, and neither looked much like the Book of Acts. When it came to the divide between Catholics and evangelicals, we knew there were some big differences which resulted in the Protestant Reformation and all, but day to day those differences seemed to my friends and me to amount to little more than who had a black spot on their foreheads once a year and whose parents drank beer right out in the open."
Much of the differences between Catholics and Baptists, he says, were summed up on what the British call Pancake Tuesday and Americans know as Mardi Gras. Or Fat Tuesday, if you prefer.
"Some of the older Baptists in my community," he says, "downright hated the whole idea of Fat Tuesday. They knew that Mardi Gras was the day before Ash Wednesday. After Mardi Gras was the beginning of Lent, the forty days of fasting rooted in Jesus' time without food in the wilderness temptations. And they saw this party as blasphemy.
"'Those Catholics, they just go out and get as drunk as they want to, eat till they vomit,' I remember one neo-Puritan naysayer lamenting. 'They're just getting it all out of their system before they have to get all somber and holy for Lent.'
"As the years have gone by, I've concluded that we Baptists had Mardi Gras too. This phenomenon was seen in Baptist churches dotted all over the South. Mardi Gras Protestantism didn't celebrate a day on the yearly calendar, but on the calendar of the lifespan.
"The cycle went like this. You were born, then reared up in Sunday school until you were old enough to raise your hand when the teacher asked who believes in Jesus and wants to go to heaven. At this point you were baptized, usually long before the first pimple of puberty, and shortly thereafter you had your first spaghetti dinner fund-raise to go to summer youth camp. And then sometime between fifteen and twenty you'd go completely wild. . .
"After a few years of carnality, you'd settle down, get married, start having kids, and you'd be back in church, just in time to get those kids into Sunday school and start the cycle all over again. If you didn't get divorced or indicted, you'd be chairman of deacons or head of the Woman's Missionary Union by the time your own kids were going completely wild.
"It was just kind of expected. You were going to get things out of your system before you settled down. You know, I never could find that in the Book of Acts either."
British evangelicals are a bit like that. (I hope I don't get too pointed here.) They buy a Bible for each of their children and take them to church for an hour each Sunday. Then when the children get to 13 or 14, they decide they are not going to church any more, and parents are left with some years of heartache trying to win them back again.
Some youngsters will do their best to kick over the traces no matter what. If you are parents with rebellious teens, don't feel condemned. I understand. I feel for you.
But it does take more than the gift of a Bible and an hour's exposure to Christian doctrine each week to keep them on the straight and narrow. It takes love, it takes discipline, it takes personal example, it takes personal instruction, and it takes patience. Christian friends can help too.
Whatever young teens may think, God made us. He made us to worship Him. Because He made us the way He did, the only thing that will satisfy is a life of personal relationship with the living Lord. Without that, there will still be an emptiness inside.
Do continue bringing up those youngsters to a life of relationship with Him. They are infinitely precious. They deserve to have lives that are effective; lives that satisfy.
