The RenewaNation Review 2016 Volume 8 Issue 1 | Page 8

WORLDVIEWS HAVE CONSEQUENCES By Jeff Keaton - Renewanation Founder & CEO I SAT NEXT to a young man on a four-hour flight from L.A. to D.C. this past October. The first remark out of his mouth was something about hoping a naked lady would sit in between us. I knew right then that our worldviews were probably very different. I kindly told him that I was happily married and didn’t share his hopes. He sheepishly said that marriage was a good thing as well.   Over the course of the next four-plus hours, we shared a very robust worldview conversation. It was cordial but intense. This man of about 30 years informed me that he was agnostic. He told me that he was into scientific facts and not faith as I was. Since he was into facts and I was into faith, I decided to ask him how everything came into existence. He quickly told me that math and physics had proven how everything came into existence and that he had even heard a mathematician explain it all. Unfortunately, he couldn’t remember the name of the man who had explained it all or what he had said, but he was confident that it had been explained. I simply looked at him and said, “You call me a 8 man of faith and yourself a man of facts and science. And yet, you have all your faith placed in a man whose name you can’t even remember.” I kindly told him that it took more faith to believe in his worldview than it did mine. I told him that I believe in a God who created everything and then gave us a written record of his work that we can compare against reality.   Perhaps the saddest part of our discussion came when he told me that his two grandmothers were Southern Baptist and Mennonite. He even said he had been named after two men in the Bible. My heart broke as I thought about his two grandmothers. No doubt they had high hopes their grandson, Matthew Adam, would grow up to be a man of Christian faith. Surely they believed he would carry on the Christian heritage they were passing down to him. Sadly, they were wrong.   This story has been told over and over again in the last two American generations. 80% of the 15-35 year-olds in America today declare they are not born again. 94% do not believe in one or more of the cardinal doctrines of Christi- anity. 76% do not attend church. 1 A strong majority have no problem with same-sex marriage. 2 We are fully confident that 16,000 hours of non-Christian K-12 education has played a major role in the loss of Christian faith in this generation.