Now Flatulating Cattle are Driving Teens from the Church?

When I wrote my last post on Christians and climate change a few days ago, I had no idea the New York Times would publish the following article validating my points:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/science/earth/what-to-make-of-a-climate-change-plateau.html?_r=1&

Again, I'm not discounting the possibility of global warming - I'm just challenging the confidence of what we really know.  I've had some people come after me very aggressively for my views on the subject.  I just find an incredible amount of hubris in the environmental science world about an incredibly difficult to solve (mathematically) problem.  Forgive me if my wee bit of experience (OK, a little more than a wee bit) mathematically predicting physical phenomenon makes me skeptical of the confidence of the environmental climatologists.

All that being said, I want to reiterate that it really doesn't matter if the science is correct or not - Christians should be the first in line to take care of the planet, albeit without unnecessarily taking a "hair-on-fire" kind of approach.

Related to this subject, today I saw an article in the Christian Post by Deborah Fikes entitled "Reversing the Trend of Teens Leaving the Church: Using Climate Change to Reengage Our Youth".  I really have trouble accepting the conclusions of Ms. Fikes' article.  The thesis of this article is that if we want to keep from losing teenagers from the church today, one place to start is by having the church address climate change.  Paraphrasing the conclusions as I see them, the author is saying that today's teens are so turned off by the cultural positions of the church and that we need to grab onto any politically correct opinion we can possibly affirm in order to engage them.

I get what she's saying.  I understand that the culture has been so successful at molding the minds of our teens that the church seems at odds (and "odd") with everything they hold true.  I don't disagree that we should build bridges where we can, but I think she is missing the bigger picture.  I don't believe the answer is to focus on finding ways to merge with the dominant (and transient) world view(s) just for the sake of winning our teens.  I think the answer is to seek truth - wherever we find it.

The issue is not that the church isn't closely enough in step with contemporary thinking.  The issue is that the church is not deep enough to clearly articulate and defend historic Christian truth.  The problem is that Christians aren't molding contemporary thinking rather than reacting to it.  When our churches feed our teens light theological drivel (and act inconsistently with even that) and then try to combine this hypocritical drivel with ideas which are accepted in popular culture, our teens will see straight through that.

So once again, I turn my attention to the methane producing bovines on Kentucky hillsides.  I don't think our primary concern in keeping our teens in the faith is dealing with flatulating cattle or coal fired power plants to reduce our carbon footprint.  I think our issue is the disconnect teens see between our personal actions as compared to what we say we believe.  They smell hypocrisy a mile away, and it does not smell sweet.