As we chatted during coffee time, Freddie (six) was enthusing about Skylanders. This is not something within my grey-haired and wrinkled ken. Freddie tried to explain. Separately the words made sense but together they left me bewildered and not a little awed. Imagine! A character called Gorilla Drilla (or it may be Goriller Driller) who is half-gorilla and half – well, yes, it seems so obvious – drill. How inventive! I surmise the game is basically a set of characters that have different ingenious ways of smashing each other to bits. All very good preparation for adult life, no doubt, even if it raises questions about how such a being might go to the toilet without damaging the porcelain. My real interest in this conversation was the great gulf between my world and that of Freddie. Even my 19 year-old daughter had not come across Gorilla Drilla and his chums. This game means so much to him and takes up so much of his leisure time, and yet it had not even come across her path. Even these two are of utterly different generations, just 13 years apart. Things are changing faster than ever before, and the way we articulate and frame our faith needs to reflect this
I’ve been wallowing in Isaac Watts’ Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children. These verses are splendidly of their time. Perhaps my favourite is number five:
Tis to thy sovereign grace I owe, That I was born on British ground, Where streams of heavenly mercy flow, And words of sweet salvation found. (Out with the union flags and huzzah for his majesty!)
Or perhaps number 23 on ‘Obedience to Parents’:
Have we not heard what dreadful plagues Are threatened by the Lord To him that breaks his father’s law Or mocks his mother’s word? What heavy guilt upon him lies! How cursed is his name! The ravens shall pick out his eyes And eagles eat the fame.
Splendid, I can see this in next year’s Mothering Sunday cards. The interesting thing is that these attitudes and the Christianity described in 1715 actually sound very Victorian and wouldn’t have seemed out of place to many British Christians all the way up to the 1940s. In other words, the attitudes and expression of the religion of Isaac Watts went on for at least another 200 years, whereas today, as Gorilla Drilla proves, a scant 13 years separates one generation from the next together with a wide gulf of technology, language, possessions, behaviours and attitudes.
In his book You lost me (Why young Christians are leaving church and rethinking faith), David Kinnaman reflects on the way that our culture is ‘discontinuously different’ from what went before. He writes: ‘I doubt many previous generations have lived through as compounded and complicated a set of cultural changes as have today’s Christians in the West. The transmission of faith from one generation to the next relies on the messy and sometimes flawed process of young people finding meaning for themselves in the traditions of their parents… But what happens when the process of relationships and the sources of wisdom changes? What happens when the world we know slips out from under our collective feet? We have to find new processes – a new mind - that makes sense of faith in our new reality.’ Things are changing faster than ever before and the way we articulate and frame our faith needs to reflect this.
As children’s leaders this century, we need, as never before, to take seriously the advice of Paul in Romans 12:2 : be transformed by the renewing of your mind. We need to accept the fast-changing world God has placed us in and be generous, gracious and hopeful to see God’s message expressed in new, different and perhaps challenging ways.
