At a college level, the Edge program (FOTF) isn’t bad — but I find that many of the students coming out of there come with just a far larger suite of preprogrammed answers. They really have not been taught to think though that may actually be in spite of the program’s best efforts. (Really, they are an awful lot safer with that programming anyway.)

Realistically, the problem may be at the local church level. It is the nature of fundamentalism to demand compliance — any purported attempts to cause someone to think usually are designed to make the person to think the church’s way rather then leading the student through an understanding of logic such that they arrive at an ability to think (Which would result in similar conclusions — if they could trust the process.)

This results in children actually being immunized against rational thought. It’s especially true when they have been subjected to programs that claim to allow them to question — but never do — and then tell children and teens that they have already questioned.

Doubt me? Just try throwing out a question like, “Can a believer sin?” or, “How can you be so sure you haven’t imagined Jesus and your entire existence,” before a church council and watch what happens… Those are just the mild questions.

There’s a fundamental shift that needs to take place at that Jr. high Sunday school level. You can’t get a grade 8 student to read Schaeffer — but you can begin to teach her/him concepts from it. You can teach them — but then you have to give up on just presenting a laundry list of WHAT to believe. You have to lead a student to truth through his/her own mind.

To draw teens to think about some of the fundamental questions of what is the nature of existence, to assess the validity of what science claims to know, to understand what truth is, to consider why God would have made people to begin with and how that demanded the incarnation, to understand what a world view is and to learn to apprehend and address inconsistencies in such. Anyone wanting to go there is going to have to write their own — to make a class of questions and then not throw out answers.

Why? You could never sell that curriculum because it demands you be OK with questioning all of the sacred cows of the church and finding some of them wanting — so no one is going to bother writing or publishing it. Any publishing house that tried would likely destroy their own core market.