After we finished excerpts of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, our high school English teacher asked us to write brief essays on our definition of heaven and hell. He gave copies of the finished essays to all students.

Nearly all my classmates would have called themselves Christians. While I was quite aware that many didn’t live like Christians, I expected a modicum of understanding of basic Christian doctrines.

I was in for a surprise. Of my classmates who believed hell existed, most thought it was only part of the here and now. And for many, heaven was nothing like what the Bible depicts. There were a few who demonstrated a clear understanding of the places where people will spend eternity.

We were the end of the Baby Boom generation. We’ve taught our children, and they are teaching our grandchildren. And, according to a new Barna survey, the relatively clueless Baby Boomers have passed on their ignorance to Gen Xers, thus seeing it grow in the Millennials, who are multiplying their ignorance in the much more atheistic Generation Z. There are nearly twice as many atheists among current teens (13%) as in the previous millennial generation (7%).

The gender chaos of our age has taken its toll on the youth, with one of out every eight teens not identifying as heterosexual. Three out of 10 know someone who has changed gender identities.

Those are sad but unsurprising consequences of a departure from biblical Christianity. Three quarters of Baby Boomers considered themselves to be Christians, but only 59 percent of teens do. Of those, a mere 10% of Boomers held a truly biblical worldview and a paltry 4% of teens do.

“[Y]oung Christians are struggling as much as we have seen…in the 35-plus years of our company to understand how to live out their faith in an increasingly skeptical culture,” Barna president David Kinnaman said. “They are having to represent what the Bible says, what it means to be Christian, in a culture that doesn’t understand it or who believes that the Bible is simply a book that is religious dogma that has been used to oppress people, that being Christian is extremist or irrelevant.”

Kinnaman called on Christian ministries to consider how to “help kids …have a more robust experience of what it means to be Christian. We need to be thinking theologically. We need to challenge them. They are ready to be challenged more than the church is willing to challenge them.”

Indeed. Christians can’t continue the same sorts of education and training and expect better results. While Reformed Presbyterians haven’t always chosen the education methods of other Christian groups, to what extent are we accepting the plan for educating and training that has failed every previous generation going back to the late 1800s? Are we carefully preparing our children for the world they will face?

If you have a child, start fresh. It seems like Gillespie Academy (p. 8) is thinking about God-centered education in a clear way, and so should we.