Orthropraxy is Rooted in Orthodoxy: The Postmodern Return to Rome

Youth ministry is tricking business. I served as youth pastor for half a decade and as a pastor I continue to served young people. The challenge of youth ministry is a fairly new phenomenon that has arisen within the past 100 years. There is a growing temptation within youth ministry to entertain young people making Christianity cool and exciting. The youth pastor keeps going and going, staying up late everyday, eating pizza everyday, and "hanging out" with his youth.

The job description of the youth pastor remains a bit fuzzy. There are no youth pastors in the Bible. In an age of adolescence, many have bought into the myth that young people are unable to understand the hard truths of Scripture and the difficult doctrines of Christianity. As a result, many teach parables and lessons that are more resembling of Mr. Rogers than the Apostle Paul. Many believe that to teach hard truths will empty a youth group, make the youth pastor irrelevant and boring, and a bad strategy for youth ministry. Read the books, go to the seminars, observe your local youth pastor, and you will see what I am talking about.

Recently, I came across a Twitter quote from Emergent leader Tony Jones who wrote:

A theologian in #youthministry doesn’t repeat doctrines but articulates God’s presence in the life of young people.

Jones clearly is articulating the common misnomer that doctrines no longer work. Instead, what we need to do is present "God's presence in the" lives of our youth. Certainly nothing that Jones says here is anything new. Jones himself has years of youth ministry experience and many young people follow him, read his books, listen to his sermons, and follow his blogs. But this statement is full of fallacies.

How does one articulate God's presence in any one's life without a proper doctrine of God (theology proper)? To wright off orthodox doctrine as secondary to living the Christian life will not work unless we first understand the orthodox doctrines as primary. Right doctrine leads to righteousness. Righteousness does not create right doctrine. No one is driven towards righteousness and orthopraxy without first being made right and reconciled with God and understand orthodoxy.

This point should not be missed by any Christian. Christians today are lazy when it comes to doctrine and theology, but are always wanting to know how to live like a Christian. No wonder the current state of the Church does not look well. Many are running around trying to live right but have no foundation by which to base their morals, ethics, or Christian living. What we have built is a house on sand, not on a rock. Without building our lives on the firm foundation of the gospel, no matter how hard we try, we will fall and be destroyed.

Though Emergents claim to be leading Christians to the future in our postmodern age, they are really leading us back to Rome and the pre-Reformation. The need for reformation was not debated among Protestants and Catholics, but rather how the Church needed to be reformed. Catholics believed that what needed to be reformed was morals. Protestants believed that what needed to be reformed was doctrine. Luther and the other leaders of the Reformation correctly understood that Christians would not change their immoral behavior without first returning to orthodox and correct doctrine.

By undermining theology and considering doctrine a secondary issue, the Emergent movement and many in postmodern Christianity are not leading us forward, but backward. The only way to reach culture is to present a transcendent gospel rooted in right doctrine that originates with a holy, righteous, Sovereign, and immutable God.

As youth ministers, pastors, servants of God, and Christians in general, let us move beyond the lie that doctrines are too difficult for young people. They aren't. The problem is that we are too lazy to present them in ways understandable. Furthermore, if we truly believed that one must be a certain age in order to understand the faith, we would be presenting the faith to the adults. And yet, we are not. The illiteracy of Christians today is sickness that is killing the Church. Will we not leave behind these false ideas of right living without right doctrine, and affirm the gospel itself: justification first, sanctification second. And glory to God, glorification in the end.