As someone who has been in the church my whole life, I never understood why “church raised kids” tend to be the group that gets highly criticized. Just because you are in church every Sunday, or 2-3 times a week does not mean that you are suddenly Holy and that everything will just be rainbows and butterflies. You will grow up being criticized by most if not every person in your church, because of something you’ve said, something you did or even something you wore. You’ll get the dirty looks, the correctional stares, the “how dare you call yourself a Christian” petty face.
The thing is… people do not realize that this type of attitude towards children in church will not only make them despise church, it can eventually take them away from God. These are the people I call “inheritance thieves”. People who can only sit around and criticize everyone else’s life but their own, stealing the blessing that someone may gain through their own trials. Sometimes people have to go through their own experiences to learn something, our job is not to sit around and point fingers.
The reason why I call these people inheritance thieves is because as one of the first generations to come out of my church, I believe I carry a spiritual inheritance. People have given up that inheritance many times. People have left to follow others, people have left because they did not feel “loved” and people even leave because they honestly found the outside world gave them more “freedom” than the church life. Why is making these types of excuses valid? Because the critical people in the church calling themselves Christian are pushing people in that direction.
I am not saying that people are the only reason for this lose of inheritance. We also have a choice in our lives whether we turn left or right. My point is that as a church, we are called to be one body, if we see a part of the body is not functioning to the best of its ability we are not supposed to cut it off, we are supposed to help it heal, restore and be transformed.
That being said, Are we doing that for this generation? Or are we pushing them further away from God because we do not think they are sanctified enough? I have seen so many issues go unresolved or “resolved” in some of the most disruptive ways that it horribly damages the person. My fear is that this generation sees a distorted version of who Jesus truly is, simply because we let our self-righteousness speak instead of God Himself.