The following article is reprinted by permission of the Association of Christian Schools International, an international group of thousands of Christian schools of which DPCA is proud to be a member. The article is from ACSI's
Christian School Comment 44.6., written by ACSI's acting president Dan Egeler.
Christian School Comment is published periodically by the Association as a resource to help parents and Christian schools stay focused on teaching and practicing biblical perspectives.
Spiritual Formation in an Age of Entitlement
During a discussion with Josh McDowell a few years ago
about unbiblical values, he proposed a provocative idea for an elective
course for Christian schools. What if we taught students to identify the
top 10 cultural lies being taught by American culture and then equipped
students with the skills to debunk those lies? [Mr. R's note: we do something very much along these lines in Philosophy and Culture class.] One lie I would identify in American cultural is the primacy of comfort and wealth. In The Overload Syndrome
(1998, 43), Dr. Richard Swenson says the new American dream is "more
possessions-more quickly"; and because most of us are already saturated
with abundance, this is a problem.
I believe that this value system has also infected our
Christian schools; it is an insidious threat to the healthy spiritual
formation of our young people. Too often, those held in high esteem are
people who have succeeded in terms of comfort and wealth. It's not that
comfort and wealth are inherently bad, but a person's wealth should be
of far less importance than his or her character. The book of James has a
lot to say about judging a person on the basis of outward appearance.
Why do our Christian kids want to grow up to be like our cynical and
ungodly celebrity musicians, athletes, or even businesspeople rather
than like the godly janitor, educator, or neighborhood pastor? The
reason is that we live in a celebrity culture that values comfort,
wealth, and image.
One of the negative by-products of a focus on comfort and wealth is the disease of "affluenza." The authors of the book Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic define affluenza as
"a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload,
debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of 'more' "
(De Graaf, Wann, and Naylor 2005, 2). By any economic indicator, our
American Christian families are the wealthiest in recent history, and
our kids have become infected with this disease. Affluenza's costs and
consequences are immense, although often concealed. Untreated, the
disease can cause permanent discontent. This discontent leads to a sense
of entitlement-and the accompanying rejection of self-discipline, a
deep repugnance for delayed gratification, and the embracing of
self-indulgence.
The fallout is that indulged children are often less able
to cope with stress in an increasingly complex world because their
parents have created an atmosphere in which the children's every whim is
indulged, and the children then believe that they are entitled to a
life of comfort and wealth. This indulgence promotes a lack of
frustration tolerance and produces an inability in children to persevere
in the face of difficulties.
How do we, as parents, combat affluenza? One way is to
teach children to persevere and not to accept the option of quitting.
Athletics is one arena in which children can learn those
characteristics. My second son wrestled during high school, and he
competed in a number of topflight wrestling tournaments. For the first
two-thirds of the season, he did not win a match, and he was being
pinned consistently in the first period. He was competing against
nationally ranked wrestlers; I helped him set some realistic goals. The
first goal was just to make it through a match without getting pinned.
This goal wasn't very glamorous-he ended up spending six grueling
minutes fighting while on his back. I celebrated the first match in
which he did not score a point and was beaten badly but did not get pinned.
He learned to persevere, and that lesson was far more important than
what he could have learned from winning. The sport of wrestling was one
of the few avenues I had to teach my son the importance of learning to
persevere.
A second way to teach our children to combat affluenza and pursue Christian character is through gratitude. In his book Cultivating Christian Character,
Dr. Michael Zigarelli writes, "Growing one's gratitude has a radical
and transformational effect on character, because gratitude is one of
God's primary vehicles for inducing other Christian qualities" (2005, 27).
Both Christian schools and parents have a considerable
task before them if they're going to be serious about fostering
spiritual growth. We need to help our kids
- resist the consumptive lifestyle
- identify and counter the cultural lie that wealth is the measure of a person
- cultivate a heart of gratitude
- learn to persevere-never to accept the option of quitting
- become self-disciplined-embrace and celebrate delayed gratification
- overcome the temptation of self-indulgence
As Christian parents, we should not just throw up our
hands and accept the way our culture is, deciding we can't do anything
about it. We can raise young people of great character who have the
skills they need to debunk cultural lies.
Daniel J. Egeler
Acting President
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References
De Graaf, John, David Wann, and Thomas H. Naylor. 2005. Affluenza:
The allconsuming epidemic. 2nd ed. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler
Publishers.
Swenson, Richard. 1998.
The Overload Syndrome: Learning to live within your limits. Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress.
Zigarelli, Michael A. 2005.
Cultivating Christian character: How to become the person God wants you to be and how to help others do the same. Colorado Springs, CO: Purposeful Design Publications.
