Religious education is in the same shape as Detroit automakers.

Gone are the days when it was a cultural norm that every child would go to confirmation and every adult would dutifully attend Sunday School before church. According to the Barna Group, a pollster of American religious trends, Church attendance has remained fairly steady in the last decade, but Sunday School participation is slowly going the way of the buffalo. Churches have tried all sorts of gimmicks to reverse this trend—bagels, coffee, dancing bears—without much success. Meanwhile, the Barna Group also says only nineteen percent of self-identifying Christians profess belief in historical Christian doctrines, which is at an all-time low.

Forget about atheists. We’re quite capable of sabotaging our own faith, thank you.

A good number of contemporary churches have thrown their hands up in despair at Sunday school programs and instead focused on educating their congregation’s children through youth groups and their adults exclusively through “small groups”, tightly knit groups that come together to study the Bible or a Christian book at some agreed upon time during the week. While this has been more successful in terms of being responsive to people’s schedules, it hasn’t been a silver bullet in education, as the Barna study acutely points out. The missing component, I believe, has not been finding the right time for people to meet. In a rush to respond to our consumer-driven culture, we’ve forgotten what the first century Christians did instinctively.

We’ve forgotten the art of cultivating worldviews.

A worldview determines how we make sense of everything that we see and experience, from spirituality to sex, ethics to economics, purpose to politics. A healthy worldview ties it all together in a way that is consistent and self-reinforcing. It may hold tensions, but doesn’t contradict itself. Worldviews are inherently exclusivist to at least a degree, that is to say a worldview means declaring some beliefs, values, and lifestyles are true while others are false. While that kind of statement can make our politically correct sensibilities squirm, it is nothing more than the rational acknowledgement that if we attempt to pluralistically approve all beliefs, values, and lifestyles—we will have ceased to have any views at all—and essentially will have given our brains a furlough.

I think God intends us to use our brains.

Yet, a healthy worldview does not necessitate, or even encourage, intolerance. In fact, a worldview is first required for the concept of tolerance to have any meaning. After all, you can’t tolerate what you agree with—that’s called approval. One is only capable of practicing tolerance when there is something or someone to disagree with. In contrast to intellectually passive relativism, rich worldviews allow ample opportunities for tolerance and dialogue.

But what do worldviews have to do with religious education today?

Until the 1960s, American churches could generally rely on the prevailing cultural worldview to reinforce it’s own. Whether or not this actually reflected an authentic “biblical” worldview is debatable, but its cohesiveness was not. The awkward marriage of church and state was only beginning to unravel, and religious institutions were enjoying their last days of social power where the educational mechanisms of the government worked in partnership rather than competition.

We’re not in Kansas, or the 1950s, anymore.

Now churches are tasked with educating their flock against a rising tide of culturally sanctioned materialism, relativism, and general narcissism. Felt boards and warm, fuzzy sermons are no match for the thousands of competing worldviews attempting to convert us (both believer and non-believer alike) daily by way of media, advertising, and culture. Cultivating a Gospel-centered worldview then, one robust enough to counter the systems that are out of sync with the way of life presented by Jesus, is now absolutely critical in a church’s educational framework. This is serious educational business we’re talking about here.

A Gospel-centered worldview is meant to put on the gloves and go all nine rounds.

However, it is important to note that this kind of biblically oriented worldview cannot be produced through religious indoctrination, a system of top-down learning designed to instill doctrine without a personal understanding and experience of its truth. Indoctrination is the fundamentalist’s primary tool for creating a worldview, but it is one akin to blowing up a balloon—a system of thought easily popped with sharp run-ins of reality. Indoctrinated worldviews are dependent on staying within the shelter of a protective group and rarely survive the scrutiny that occurs should an individual stray from the nest.

A Gospel-centered worldview must be able to stretch its wings in the “real world.”

In my personal context of ministry, I serve an intergenerational downtown church full of skeptical young adults, highly educated professionals, and diverse families—where we couldn’t go down the indoctrination path even if we wanted to. It’s a long-term transition with no short cuts and plenty of hurdles, but the leadership believes that the healthiest worldview comes to fruition by creating a community (a.k.a. church) that unconditionally embraces, provokes, and engages spiritual questions. Whether you’re a student who is just beginning to assume responsibility of his or her own faith or someone facing the challenges that come in the twilight of life, there is no question off limits, no doubt taboo. But isn’t that kind of questioning dangerous? If it is, I’m not sure for whom. Institutions? Maybe. Dogmatists? Perhaps. But not for Jesus.

Jesus is not threatened by your doubts. He’ll still be there in the morning.

In fact, if someone comes to our church believing to have “all the answers”, then it is the role of our church education to invite him or her to explore new questions. We aren’t interested in producing Christian zombies. This is why we have experiential learning for our children, Socratic curriculum for youth, our largest Sunday School class taught by a defense lawyer, beer and philosophy nights at local restaurants, and theological dinner parties in homes. We challenge each other, from kindergarten onward, because we believe an authentic wrestling with questions and even doubts ultimately distills a Gospel-centered worldview, one that is well reasoned, empathetic, and discerning. It is a worldview that equips our members for compassionately disarming the myriad of other worldviews that exist in our society and allows them to live the abundant life that God offers us.

And Jesus remains at the center of it all.