God
Dear Church,
Please recover our lost youth.
They are intelligent. They are vibrant. They are revolutionary in their gifts, and you have let them go into the hands of the world.
When God would have reawakened His presently sleeping church to the reality of the supernatural with their curiosities into it from transhumanism to Egyptian Titans, you progressively shunned them into the hands of Harry Potter, Vampire Diaries, Splice and Dr. Strange. So now they are indeed strange. Strange but powerful. Now they can conjure up success in the secular industry having tapped into the "secret" Oprah Winfrey's Christless new age-ism promoted. All while your superficial Christianity does 10 prayer conferences throughout the year with negligible numbers of church members even rising above their current salaries.
You want youth in your church so you work on great church lighting, feed them pizza for a day, treat the 18 year olds like 10 year olds with cheesy music, and encourage them to read the King James bibles they don't understand without exegesis as long as they don't ask the tough questions about Genesis 6 because there's no time for that... While the world and their friends in Wicca encourage them to fast, give blood sacrifices, sit in circles and conjure up demons that will tell them their futures through ouija boards in dark fire-lit rooms where their cell phones and selfie's don't even matter because they've encountered real power. Malevolent, but real.
You don't lack youth because the youth are disinterested in God and the supernatural.
You lack youth because even they have become disgusted with the constant milk you feed them through anointing oil bottles and grape juice cups supposedly signifying the blood of Christ but with you denying its power and openly discussing the fraud you will play on your taxes as you back-bite the deacons.
You lack youth because they may be juvenile and immature but their spiritually illiterate sincerity would rather follow the evil truth than the seemingly Godly lies you tell.
You lack youth because even their inexperience trumps your years of jaded and ineffectual prayers and religiosity when they compare it to the ever-awaiting cults, psychics and psychotropic drugs which give them tangible, albeit, sinister experiences.
You lack youth because you are not real.
You haven't been real about your sins.
You haven't been real about your doubts.
You haven't been real about your failures.
You haven't been real about your struggles.
You haven't been real about God's holiness and glory because you constantly fall short of it and didn't properly educate yourself on the extent of salvation by Christ's finished work to realize you shouldn't be kept from evangelizing.
You haven't found the Jesus of the Bible who when those who find Him find Him, can't leave Him ever again.
The youth found out your inadequacies on their own and you lost your credibility with them.
They discovered your secrets on their own and now you are a lie to be unraveled and exposed, rather than an example to be learned from. Good or bad.
The youth are aware that in life, we don't have all the answers; that sometimes you have to sacrifice desires for what is truth, and that sometimes, true power lies behind dying to self.
This is why they will do the craziest things in the name of experimentation and deprive themselves OF themselves just to become a small member of the collective large group of "crazies" just to fit in to something real.
Something real you are supposed to have had in Jesus but neither valued nor taught.
You have shielded them from the truth of God's word. Especially the parts you yourself don't understand and can't explain when they inquire... You should be searching and seeking God's face to give the right answers; ...or the more humbling alternative: admit for once that you don't know it all!
While you don't talk about the rapture (Harpazo) as taught in the word, new age and the world makes movies teaching them someday aliens will show up and many will be raptured away but it's a good thing for them to be left behind.
While you don't talk to them about demon possession, they continue having imaginary friends, voices speaking to them and want to know more about witchcraft.
While you don't mention fallen angels and the nefarious agenda of nephilim chronicled in the Bible , the world teaches them to long for day when the ubermensch (superman) shows up with superhuman abilities or they themselves can use Crispr Cas9 genome engineering to modify their genetic codes to become something inhuman.
Wake up Church!!
Your daughters have run to girls to become their men for strength because the men called their fathers have only touched them in slaps and reprimands and not hugs and fatherly affection except when his ego is stroked by their occasional successes.
Your sons have run to other boys to justify and even cater to their unhinged sexual desires because they have not been taught that behind the pastor's tie is a man also dealing with sexual temptations but who takes it to God in daily prayerful submission.
All they see is the the leadership's scandalous reveals via the media and the church's quiet coverups subliminally educating them not to change but simply to become better at covering up their own indiscretions. As long as they don't get caught, it's fine.
So beneath their crazy hairstyles, perpetual earbuds, tweets and snapchats are inquisitive spirits seeking the real God who understands their failures and is relevant to all of life from history and anthropology to politics and science.
You lack youth because you want to be "hip" as you "hop" on the stage feeling "fresh" with what can only be defined as "theatrics"; lacking the meat of God's word those young ones need to keep them busy chewing on... so as not to go out into the world feeding on satanism and ungodly indoctrination.
Wake up Church!
Wake up Church!!
You are losing the next generation.
Your empty pews and increasing age gaps in the doctrinally-sound christian population should trigger your alarms!
Soon you will be obsolete.
In the increasingly post-christian world you have allowed by negligently stroking evolution's propaganda when it showed up in their school homework will soon "naturally select" you out of the process of their lives because to them you have become weak and useless.
Why be vexed when they lack respect for you, have no manners and sleep around like rabbits when you never sat them down and taught them their lives had purpose from God; purposes superseding your own desires to just create doctors and lawyers in your family line?
Why wonder at their addiction to social media and trending celebrities who keep them engaged with constant posts and streams when you don't consistently engage their open minds in critical conversations about controversial topics from biblical perspectives and think they will stay in the presence of God just because you invited a semi-popular selling artist, blasted their pictures on flyers and made those people even bigger than Christ's cross?
You have a generation of young people whose spiritual growth is observably stunted and they suffer from biblical kwashiorkor.
What will we do Church?
How do we fix this mess we've created?
I have good news and bad news:
The bad news is that for some of those children whose spiritual limbs have become malformed into maturity, they will stay that way and become the unattractive anomalies in your religious resumé. And if they will change, God will lovingly have to break those fused plates of their twisted limbs and painfully restructure over time what you failed to nurture into proper growth in their infancy.
It will hurt them to change later in life.
And It will hurt you to see them go through that. They will have to struggle to be released from the chains with which Satan has their minds bound.
The good news however, is that God won't lose. In spite of your own malpractice, the King of glory will make Himself known. If he has to bypass your pews, He will. He will find them in their dreams. He will speak to them through a remnant of radicals who don't care about ties and suits. Those who will rap their way past the lies and poetically prophesy powerful pieces of God's word into their open minds. God won't lose.
He will transform the tattooed tyrants of trashed streets into unhinged disciples unable to be hindered by fear of incarceration since they've already lived there.
God won't lose.
The intensity of those youth will contrast your lackadaisical attitude towards God. Their quest for depths of God will overwhelm your superficiality.
Wake up Church.
God wants to do this with you.
He always has a remnant in generations.