The Children Are the Key

You may be surprised by who wrote this statement:

It is in the minds and hearts of our children that the battle will be fought.

It sounds like something a Christian would write. After all, God’s Word clearly instructs us to train up our children—to raise godly offspring (Proverbs 22:6; Malachi 2:15; Isaiah 48:19; Ephesians 6:4).

In Joshua 4, God had the Israelites build a memorial of twelve stones so that when children saw them and asked the meaning of these stones, their fathers would not forget to tell them what God had done (e.g., the miracle of the crossing of the Jordan River).

It was not a Christian, however, who made the above comment. It was a secular humanist who toured our Creation Museum in August with hundreds of atheists. After going through the museum and observing the resources in our Dragon Hall bookstore (including many materials for children), this secularist wrote on a blog:

For me, the most frightening part was the children’s section. It was at this moment that I learned the deepest lesson of my visit to the Museum: It is in the minds and hearts of our children that the battle will be fought.

Christians must understand the nature of the change that has occurred in our culture. No longer do the secularists just mock Christians from afar. They are now actively campaigning to indoctrinate children in an anti-God philosophy—to teach them to be secularists and atheists. These secularists are no longer passive. They accuse Christians who are training their children in biblical truths of being “child abusers.” (They’ve even likened Christianity to a deadly virus.)

Of the 900,000 people who have visited the museum in the last 2 ½ years, many have been secularists/atheists. They frequently express their dismay that the many children they see here are being influenced by biblical teaching.

One secular humanist professor said he was worried about the Creation Museum because “children may come away confused. And that means we’ll have a harder job convincing them.”

You see, this professor wants to take your children and indoctrinate them against God—and he is furious that the Creation Museum has made his teaching job harder!

Recently, we released a book titled Already Gone. It summarizes a nationwide survey conducted to find out why 2/3 of young people are leaving the church. Something shocking came to light: that—of those who left the church—if they attended Sunday school regularly as kids, they were actually worse off! That is, they were more likely to become anti-church, more inclined to defend abortion and “gay” marriage, and more likely to believe in evolutionism and millions of years than those who didn’t go to Sunday school regularly!

One of the main reasons is that most Sunday school curricula only teaches disconnected Bible stories. They don’t teach how we know the Bible is true, how to defend the faith, and how to answer the skeptical questions of today.

About 90% of children from church homes go to public schools. Monday through Friday they are taught an atheistic belief system in regard to the history of the universe. But when they go to Sunday school, by and large they aren’t taught how to answer anti-biblical teaching, or how to defend the history in Genesis. In fact, many church leaders simply tell these children they can believe in evolution and/or millions of years. The children see the inconsistency: if they can’t trust the first part of the Bible, how can they believe the gospel message about Jesus that comes from the same Bible?

Well, Answers in Genesis is producing more and more curricula for all ages so that churches can deal with this crisis of young people leaving the church—and instead raise up generations who can defend the Christian faith.

We are also developing an entire Sunday school curriculum, based on apologetics, creation, biblical authority, and the gospel (for all age levels), to be released in 2011.

In January, AiG will install special exhibits throughout the Creation Museum especially designed for children—a series of kid-friendly exhibits called the “Knee-high Museum.”

The secularists are right: “It is in the minds and hearts of our children that the battle will be fought.” Protect your children by bringing them to the Creation Museum—and obtaining AiG apologetics curricula and resources, such as It All Begins in Genesis. AiG has been raised up in this generation to provide you with “weapons” needed in the culture wars to keep your children from being captured by the Evil One.