[From the diaries by susanhu.] I was reading the comments on Blog for America earlier this evening, and Kimmy posted this from James Dobson of Focus on the Family:
“Those who control the access to the minds of children will set the agenda for the future of the nation and the future of the western world.”
Reading those words helped me figure out why an encounter I had earlier today keeps gnawing at me.
I was heading out to take my daughter to one of the Columbus Metroparks this afternoon, and while she was still out in front of the house, I ran back inside to grab my water bottle. When I stepped back outside, this pleasant older woman was standing there, and my daughter said, “This lady wants to talk to you”. The woman started talking about some church program–actually, she didn’t even say church program right away, but said that “We pick up Billy and Joey down the street every week–you know Billy and Joey, right? Everybody knows Billy and Joey!”
Blank stare from Renee. “Oh, you don’t know Billy and Joey?” Then she goes on to rattle off the names of a couple other neighborhood kids who are picked up every week by their church bus. She went on to tell me that they feed the kids breakfast and then they feed them God. Okay, she didn’t say it that way. I don’t remember what it was that she actually said, because once I realized what she was talking about, I wasn’t really listening any more, as I was composing my pleasant, “no thanks” in my head.
Get them while they’re young. I started thinking about a local megachurch. Hypothetically Speaking, over at MyDD has told me about their youth program and how they market themselves to teens.
As I thought more about this, I found it more disturbing. She gave me this little handout about their program for kids. It says “Have the children ready by 8 a.m. Bus arrives between 8 and 9.”
Imagine how appealing this is to a lot of people who don’t go to church themselves, but always have this gnawing sense of guilt that, now that they have kids, they really should be getting them “churched”. But they don’t actually have a church themselves, and, frankly, they aren’t really keen on the idea of getting out of bed on Sunday morning to cart the whole family to church.
What? You’ll pick my kids up at the house? Feed them? Take care of that “Christian formation” thing that we haven’t been doing with them, but feel like we should be doing?
I can see how a lot of people would go for that sort of thing.