God is opening up the floodgates
of blessing upon us, our families, our churches. I'm seeing it everywhere.
They're having children. You walk into a church, a family-integrated
church, you've got 300 people and 227 children. They've got the vision. They've
got a generational kingdom vision, a desire to disciple their children
for God. We're going to have sons standing
on the shoulders of fathers, which means we're going to see
an increase in the quality of strength for the kingdom work.
We're going to see generational leverage for the sake of the
kingdom of God as the years go by. This is exciting stuff. In other words, the other side
isn't having children. They're losing 80% of them. They're
failing. But if we can capture God's vision
for generational continuity, I think we're going to see tremendous,
tremendous leadership for families and churches in the future. We're
just going to see our young men growing up, getting involved
with vision and direction in life, versus the world where
70% of young men aren't grown up by 30 years of age, up from
30% in 1970 according to Newsweek magazine. The world is failing
if the Christian Church is going to compromise with the way the
world does things If they're going to continue to see their
families break down and dysfunctionality rule in the family, which is
happening in society If you want to drag that into the church,
well go ahead Ruin your church and ruin your society and your
civilization at the same time. I'm sorry. We're not playing
that game We're building society We're going to build the kingdom
of God. We're going to bring the word of God to bear in all
areas of life, specifically in family, in discipleship, in marriage,
in heading households, in family law. We're going to bring these
things in and we're going to apply these things. And as it
turns out, if you walk in God's ways, He will bless you. Oh,
we have detractors right now. Sure, we have detractors. People
are poo-pooing what we're doing. I get that all the time. Constantly. But I say, hey, just wait 20,
30 years. We'll see what your fruit is. We'll see what our
fruit is. We'll see what happens in 30 years. We'll eat the vegetables.
And we'll do something different. We won't play the way the world
plays in terms of the education of these young men, the discipleship
of these young men. You can have your wonderful,
sumptuous meals. You can have your youth groups.
You can have your Sunday schools and your programs and things. We're going
to go eat vegetables for 20, 30 years. We'll see what happens. You only get one shot at this.
I tell pastors all the time, you only get one shot at how
you're going to run your ministry and how you're going to try to
disciple the nations. If you do it poorly, you'll have a bunch
of wood, hay and stubble in the end when the fire burns. But
if you do it rightly, if you do it according to the word of
God, you're going to have gold, silver and precious stones. And
we'll give God the glory for it.
There is a crisis. Christian youth are rapidly leaving evangelical churches for the world. This well-recognized disaster has been the topic of significant discussion in recent years for both church leaders and modern news media. DIVIDED follows young Christian filmmaker Philip LeClerc on a revealing journey as he seeks answers to what has led his generation away from the church.
Traveling across the country conducting research and interviewing church kids, youth ministry experts, evangelists, statisticians, social commentators, and pastors, Philip discovers the shockingly sinister roots of modern, age-segregated church programs, and equally shocking evidence that the pattern in the Bible for training future generations is at odds with modern church practices.
He also discovers a growing number of churches that are abandoning age-segregated Sunday school and youth ministry to embrace the discipleship model that God prescribes in His Word.