Fight or Flight

Ever since I wrote the post “Crisis of Faith” I have known there would be additional post and my plan was to focus this post on the misconceptions that those outside the church have about God. However, in my time since writing the last post I have been overwhelmed by this idea that being raised in a Christian environment could actually lead us to a false sense of security in our faith.

I did not write my last post to say that kids should not be baptized young or that you cannot have a personal convicting experience at a young age. I recently had the opportunity to baptize my own son who is six and I would not have done that if I did not believe that he had a personal conviction that Christ is Lord. I also, am not saying that everyone who gets saved at a young age will go through this time where they “fall away” from God. It will happen to some and it will not always happen at a certain time. Unfortunately we all will face a crisis of faith in our lives that makes us question what we believe.

Shifting our beliefs is a tough task, especially when they have been ingrained in us since our earliest days. While in the Army I worked with a Chaplain who is to this day a great friend to me and my family. Chaplain (LTC) Mike Allen (ret.) was my Brigade Chaplain (Religious Advisor to our Brigade’s Senior Leadership and responsible for providing Religious Support to the Soldiers) at Fort Hood, Texas and was my supervisor during my 2nd trip to Iraq. One of the unfortunate task that I had with Chaplain Allen was to conduct Traumatic Event Management for any of our units that had been through a traumatic event (loss of life, serious injury, etc.). During these group sessions we would break the unit down into small groups and help them walk through their feelings of the incident that happened. Chaplain Allen would always start these groups the same way. He would describe a house of cards and explain that the house of cards is your reality and everything you believe to be true. Then, a traumatic event happens and that alters your house of cards, it removes one of those truths so the entire house crumbles. You now, have to either just accept that reality is not what you thought and give up or rebuild your house of cards with a new set of reality.

A Crisis of Faith is the Traumatic Event for a Christian and just like a Soldier in the Army we normally have two options when this happens. The Army and psychological circles call this “Fight or Flight” you either run towards the battle and engage or you run away. As a Christian this Crisis can happen anytime something we believe to be true is challenged. I am not a theologian by any educated means or standard, but I believe that a person who has never had a personal conviction moment with Jesus Christ will almost always choose flight when the reality they were raised with is challenged. When you are faced with opposition to your beliefs that are not rooted or that have no foundation then they will be easily overrun. I also believe that the more training a Soldier has the more faith they will have in their abilities and the more likely they are to choose fight over flight. If you don’t trust that your weapon is going to fire you are not going to be super eager to run into battle with it. The same can be said about our faith. If we are not constantly training in our faith and have a personal faith in it then we are not going to be eager to defend it. Let me try to clear that up. If my leadership in the Army had just handed me a weapon and told me to run into battle with it without ever taking it to the range to test it for myself I would not be really comfortable. Now, if I am 18 years old and just left my parent’s house and am living on a college campus and my roommate is challenging Christianity and all I have is a faith that my parents gave me and told me about but I don’t have a personal conviction that it is true then I will not be able to defend it. To put it in Army terms we have to spend some time on the range with Jesus. We have to spend time in the Word and see how it relates to us. Just like I had to zero the sights on my M16 I have to zero my faith in Jesus. I have to know personally that Jesus is the one true God and I have to know how to use Him as a defense to the counter arguments that I will face.

This all may seem like it is a little off my overarching topic of connecting Christ to Millennials but this is where I draw the connection. In former generations (Baby Boomers, GEN-Y, GEN-X) the trend was that young adults would leave the church and come back around the same time they were settling down with their own families because they wanted their kids being raised in church like they were. Not that they had some spiritual awakening or change of heart but that they wanted their kids in church. The end of Gen-X and the Millennial Generations are getting married later and having kids later in life so those that are returning to the church are doing so at a later age but many of them are not returning at all. I feel that this is because as they have grown into adults they realize that their faith did not stand up to the world’s arguments and not because it cannot do so but because they had never really had that moment of personal conviction that would truly allow them to choose fight over flight. If we want to pull more of these folks back into church or keep them from leaving then maybe we can start with equipping our youth to have a personal conviction. Allow them to ask the tough questions they have, allow them to express doubt, allow them to examine Christianity for themselves so that when they do accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior they are doing so for the right reason and that is because they have had that moment of personal conviction with Jesus Christ.