‘Hey, Dad, the sermon today was 1 hour 7 minutes and 20 seconds long. All in Portuguese.’
My gap-year daughter was on her regular Sunday collect-call home from her short-term mission placement in Brazil. ‘So I spent the time memorising the books of the Bible. Do you want to know what they are? Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus….’ My first thought was: ‘I’m paying for this call while you rattle off all the books of the Bible’. My second was: ‘Isn’t it great that my teenage daughter wants to knows her way around the Bible?’
I am a ‘Baby Boomer’ — born shortly after World War II, childhood in the 50s, teens in the 60s, young adulthood in the 70s. Suzy, by definition a generation down, is defying (I hope) a trend that is identified in the survey, Living the Christian Life: Becoming Like Jesus.* This survey, commissioned by the Langham Partnership and conducted by the Brierley Consultancy, examined the habits of Christian discipleship in the British evangelical church in 2012 — including our use (or not) of the Bible and the influence it has (or not) on our lives in many areas.
