Donna R. Ryan - Equipped to Tell the Next Generation

T he seeds for this book were sown in my early childhood. Even then, I was concerned about the spiritual state of Christianity in the United States. I can remember agonizing over why churches kept sending their best and brightest workers to foreign lands. My instincts were yelling, But what is going to happen here? I also remember the knot in my stomach when the day came that we could no longer pray the Lords Prayer together or hear Scripture read in school. One day it was okay; the next it was illegalwith just the stroke of a pen. I felt like something precious was being ripped away from us.

A little later, I recall some Christians trying to warn of the problems that the increasing divorce rates and rise of single-parent families would bring on the children, but the media countered that there was no statistical data to support their concerns. Many years later, we have all of the statistics we need, but they are rarely used to promote change in these behaviors.

Within the decade of removing Bible reading and prayer from our schools we had riots in our streets, tanks in our cities to keep the peace, and abortion on demand. Still, the removal of Christianity from our public life was never part of the discussion of cause and effect. As a young person I watched as one major pillar of Christianity after another was knocked down and waited for leaders to rise up to defend the faith authentically and convincingly, but only a few isolated individuals were willing to connect the dots (whether in the church or in government). Christians built their own ministries and were more like voices crying in the wilderness than a unified force to be considered and followed. We, the culture and the church, kept drifting further and further from God and Truth. It was incredible to me how desperately this nation wanted to be deceived. I was deeply troubled as I watched the church I love bow to the culture that had lost its way.

Later in life I discerned a call to become a pastor as a second career. One day about mid-way through my MDiv, I was praying for our nation when suddenly, I sensed that God had impressed upon my mind that even the best of us had missed it. There was no condemnation or anger; there was only sadness. I could not convince God that he was wrong, so I began asking him to show me how the best of us, his people, have missed it. By now I understood that to miss the mark was the literal meaning of the Greek word for sin. I kept wondering, How are Christians in the United States sinning? This book is an outgrowth of that question.

After graduation from seminary, a Christian friend asked me what I wanted to do with my degree. When I told her that I wanted to preach and teach the Bible, her immediate and honest response was, We had better send you overseas! No one does that in America! You will not find any church here that will want you. This is a sad commentary on the state of Christianity in twenty-first-century America. This book identifies things that are needed to recover our vitality.

A few weeks later, I was sitting in my home office watching an ice storm form a truly beautiful pattern all over the windows. As I admired the beautiful patterns, I found myself being drawn into the scene so that it seemed to become a world in itself. The thought then came to me that while it was beautiful, it was not real. In fact it obstructed the view of what was real. I could no longer see the trees, the road, or the field that I knew were on the other side of that glass. It came to me that this is exactly what American culture has done to our Western Christianity. We see only the things of this world held up to us as beautiful and glorious (like the ice on the window) and ends in themselves so that we cannot see beyond the immediate. We no longer have an eternal perspective on everything (the reality beyond the window). Therefore, we have less and less ability to distinguish what is truly beautiful and lasting. Our fixation on the present and temporary things of this world is obstructing our view of the ultimate goal of eternity and of taking the gospel to all people so they can enjoy eternity with God too.

I am convinced that until our eyes are opened to the ways that American culture has evangelized, disciplined, and transformed the church to its image, all the prayers, Bible studies, and programs to win the culture to Christ are destined to fail or, at best, will have only limited success. This book challenges American Christians to be revived as Christs new creation by looking first at what needs to be changed in us, so that we can be transformed to be about Gods work in Gods way carrying out the ministry of reconciliation in others. If we are not aware of what the problem is, it is difficult to deal with it. Often when a problem is discerned, we tend to ignore it and to hope it goes away. Then we wonder why things are not getting better. In the meantime we keep perpetuating the things that got us into difficulty in the first place.