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Family Driven Faith: Doing What It Takes to Raise Sons and Daughters Who Walk with God by Voddie T. Baucham Jr.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I appreciate that Baucham says plainly things that need to be said. It is surprising how myopic we can be. We assume readily that the way things are now is the way things have always been. We cannot imagine it differently. Even a little familiarity with church history will show us that the typical church in America for the last five or six decades looks very different from church in the last two thousand years, and particularly in regards to the modern concept of youth ministry.
This book deals with the family at home and in the local church. Modern youth ministry has two main problems: 1) It is unbiblical, 2) It is doesn’t work. Baucham addresses both of these with biblical exegesis for the first and statistical data for the second. Most people recognize a problem and there are two main responses.
1) The typical First Baptist Church in Anytown, USA will try to resolve this problem by hiring more youth staff workers and bringing in more programs. So, something is not working and there is sufficient data to establish it is not working. Evidently, we need much more of it.
2) The second response is to identify the problem exists between the family and the local church, so the response is to abandon the local church to save the family. This response plays out in a variety of ways, but most end up with their own definition of church that is completely unbiblical.
I appreciate that Baucham does not take either of these approaches. I recommend this to parents, pastors, youth workers, church members, Christians, etc.