It is sad to hear parents lament the condition of their children who have recently reached adulthood. So this month, something autobiographical is coming to our meeting. In the process, a bit of what might come close to bragging will occur. Please forgive me in advance as we examine . . .

Tim tells us that, "Talking to your grown children about faith is a sobering experience." I don’t mean to pick on Tim here - but he offers a temptingly perfect microcosm of a problem shared by many American Christian families today.

I thoroughly sympathize with Tim. When he probed the beliefs and attitudes of his twenty-something children, he was shocked to find conditions such as these:

"They do not see absolutes. They view our ethical notions as antiquated, rigid, and simplistic. Their ranking of ‘sin’ is radically different: matters like abortion and homosexuality bother them little; world hunger and poverty are the real ‘evils.’ . . . They don’t trust systems, companies, governments, committees, and the people who have influence within them. They don’t believe the evening news, they have no confidence in the latest policy, they listen with suspicion to the politician, the expert, the teacher, and preacher."

That is quite a list of laments. But let us pause to note that not all the attitudes of the Woodroof offspring are bad. There are some companies, governments, committees, politicians, teachers and preachers we should not trust, because they have shown themselves to be untrustworthy. If the Woodroofs don’t trust the evening news, they are simply intelligent people. And not being a denominationalist - what’s wrong with that?

But I understand Mr. Woodroof’s consternation with the moral and conceptual relativism he has belatedly discovered infesting his brood. Tim wants to see something positive in all this.

"I do believe our children give us a wonderful window onto our culture. You don’t have to wander around . . . searching for some rare example of "postmodernity." All the examples we need can be found right at home. That strangeness we encounter in the thinking of our children? That’s the impact of culture on them. That otherness we experience in their values and ethics and viewpoints? That’s the evidence that our children are as much the children of our times as they are our own."

At this point I want to move, as often said, from preaching to meddling. The plight of the Woodroofs illustrates a key mistake made by many Christian parents. Parents are often aware, as Tim says, that:

"Our children have grown up in a world that has profoundly influenced the way they see life. Their values have been shaped by that world. Like creatures with semi-permeable skins, they have absorbed lessons about life, categories for thinking, prejudices and preconceptions from all around them and incorporated those viewpoints into the way they perceive reality."

But though aware of this, many parents do not act upon that awareness. Most children "grow up" not just in the world in general, but at a school. While you might like to think otherwise, it is a simple matter of addition. Add up the hours children spend at school and school-related activities, and you will find it is most of their waking lives from ages 5-18. If you throw in day-care, it begins even earlier.

Most of the people who staff the schools (including many of the private ones) your children attend for lo those many years are people who were themselves "trained" in a college of education somewhere. Having attended one myself and being in constant contact with students who are attending one, I know that colleges of education are dedicated to moral and conceptual relativism. So it should not surprise us that teachers from such colleges are steeped in moral and conceptual relativism, and that if our children are under their tutelage for years on end, our children will pick up at least the remnants of that relativism.

I’m not sure how Tim’s children were schooled, and that is not the point here. Our two sons were educated by Cindy and Harold Orndorff. We made a point of "subverting the subversion." When they were ready, when they were already young men, we turned them loose on the education system. They seemed to function acceptably there: the older was an honors scholar in college who received a post-graduate fellowship to pursue his Ph. D. The younger is an honors scholar in college who was given a full-tuition scholarship by the university he is attending.

Tim Woodroof chides his readers for thinking their children are anything but "gone."

"Perhaps you have assumed that, apart from a few adolescent quibbles, they’ve adopted your faith and your viewpoints pretty much as a whole. . . Whatever you do, do not probe or challenge or dig. If you insist, you might find that things are not as you thought. . . Allow me to make a few assertions about our children. (Perhaps yours are the exceptions to these general trends. If so, forgive me for disturbing your happy delusions.)"

Again, this is not about Tim and his children. But Tim and everyone else who is concerned about these matters should know that the pessimistic results he anticipates here are far from inevitable. To prove this, I will now begin to brag.

My children are not exact clones intellectually of my wife and me. But they are neither moral nor conceptual relativists - far from it. Try telling them that there are no unchanging truths or that moral concepts are merely relative to individuals or groups. Go ahead, try telling them that and see what happens. (Do you feel lucky, punk?) My older son wrote his bachelor’s thesis as a debate over whether or not morality is even possible apart from theism. After my son’s presentation, the department head announced that he had now changed his mind on this matter, and agreed that theism was a necessary foundation for ethics. Away from home at grad school, he walks to church every Sunday, and does all he can to help both the church and the campus ministry in his college town. My younger son participates both at our church and at our campus ministry.

It is now time to stop bragging about my "boys." They are less-than-perfect young men who do at least understand the Christian faith and have not absorbed the distortions promoted by our culture, especially by the schools of our culture. Christians owe God and our fellow human beings at least a good attempt to keep the intellectual and moral garbage from going into our children’s minds while they are young and developing. (And I respectfully suspect that the Woodroof brood picked up their relativism, not from Tim, or their church, but at some school staffed with teachers who studied at some college of education. If that is the case I am truly sorry.)

Our family’s strategy was to do much of the teaching ourselves. That is not the only viable strategy. But whatever approach you take, consider the advice of my younger son who, having known many students at a college of education, likes to tell me, "Dad, if I were hiring teachers for a school, I wouldn’t hire anyone who had ever been near a college of education." If you are a parent of young children, for God’s sake, listen to my son’s advice. It is up to parents to subvert the subversion. Otherwise, you may someday discover that your twenty-something offspring have gone the way of relativism.