Get Your Teens Rewired

Walk into any department store across America this month, and you’ll know for sure that it’s “Back to School” season. Parents will hit the malls, with teens in tow, to get them ready for school—purchasing everything from Gap jeans to graphing calculators. But while American parents will spend a whopping $40.5 billion getting their kids re-geared for school, how much time will we spend preparing our kids’ minds for the onslaught of often anti-Christian messages they’ll face in the classrooms? From the subtle lies that image is everything to the more blatant ones like life is nothing more than a random collision of atoms, teens will have to face challenges that their parents and grandparents never imagined. When they see three pink triangles in the room of a teacher who sponsors their Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network club, or when they make new friends whose Internet MySpace pages look more like soft-porn than the yearbook pages of yesteryear, will parents, youth group leaders, and other caring adults know how to guide them? The truth is our back-to-schoolers need more than help to get re-geared with notebooks and sneakers. They need our help to get “rewired.” That’s why Ron Luce and I, along with the staffs of TeenMania and BreakPoint, have teamed up to create an engaging, often humorous, and always relevant DVD curriculum, called Rewired. Our vision is to see kids shaped by a biblical worldview, so that rather than being shaped by the culture, they can transform the culture in the years to come. A recent Barna research survey found that “less than one out of every ten churched teenagers has a Biblical worldview.” While Barna found that most kids surveyed could recall some facts about the Bible, made some friends in church, and had a good time, he says, “we also find that most of them have neither accepted Christ as their Savior nor altered the basis on which they make their moral and ethical decisions in life.” I find this heart-breaking, especially when you consider that 64 percent of born-again adults were reached by the Gospel before they were age 18. Let me share with you just one of the very compelling video clips on the Rewired DVD curriculum. It is a fictional history of how the whole world finally heard the Gospel. And it hinges on one teenager, just like the ones perhaps watching the curriculum. The revolution, they say, started in a way that seemed so ordinary; a teenager gave his whole life to follow Christ. He brought along another teen, and then another, and then a movement for the Gospel began to spread like a holy contagion. Or to put it more in terms teens would understand today, the epidemic spread like a computer virus. It ended with the whole wide world hearing the Gospel, but it started with one teenager who got rewired. What a great way to raise the vision of our teenagers, young men and women who, after all, are the future of the Church! Be sure to visit our special website, www.breakpoint.org/rewired, and get more information. You can even watch a preview of this marvelous worldview curriculum for teens.

For Further Reading and Information

Today’s BreakPoint offer: Rewired: A teen worldview curriculum from the Wilberforce Forum and Teenmania. Tell your youth pastor about it! BreakPoint Commentary No. 060127, “Overwhelmed or Inspired?: Heeding the Battle Cry.” BreakPoint Commentary No. 060301, “Talkin’ ’Bout MySpace Generation: Teens and Online ‘Communities’.” BreakPoint Commentary No. 051013, “Our Teenagers, Ourselves: Soul Searching.” BreakPoint Commentary No. 031128, “Image Is Everything: Losing Identity at the Shopping Mall.” BreakPoint Commentary No. 040628, “Same-Sex ‘Marriage’ Goes to School: Out of the Closet and into the Classroom.”

08/28/06