A Christian businessman who has his office near my home met me this morning (April 7) as I was walking to the mailbox. Almost immediately he began to unburden his heart about his sixteen-year old daughter who has him and his wife deeply worried. She attends the Sunday worship services very unwillingly, complains that the sermons do not interest her, and says she much prefers the informal Sunday group gatherings in Grand Rapids where the youth come dressed as they please—slacks, jeans, barefoot, and so forth—with no regard for the wholesome conventions that have been observed in our church for years. The father, who is one of my former students at the Grand Rapids Central Christian High School, cannot understand what is happening to today’s youth. He recalled his own high school days when we had routine problems with some of the teen-agers but nothing approaching the open defiance of rules and regulations so common among some of our church youth today. In our conversation this morning he kept saying, “What can we do? .  . . My wife and I feel so helpless . . . . We are utterly unprepared for this unexpected and rapidly-developing gap between our daughter and us.” His parting word to me: “Pray for us parents who are still in our thirties. We are worried about our young people.” If this were a somewhat exceptional case, I would not be disposed to writing an article on the subject. but we all know it is far from exceptional. I am not exaggerating when I say that not a week has gone by the past year or two without one or more parents or an older brother or sister—writing me or phoning me with a message of distress much like that of the father mentioned above. Brother ministers share my concern over this rapidly-developing situation. Less than a week ago a middle age pastor of a large Christian Reformed Church in Michigan told me he is ready to give up with many of the teen-agers in his congregation. “I simply cannot communicate with them any more” were his exact words. That from a pastor still in his forties! A missionary home on furlough last fall told a friend of mine that after a few years absence from the States he was astonished at the change he observed in our church youth. What’s happened? When did it happen? Where did we begin “to turn the corner” as regards the relationship between young people and the established church? In trying to answer these questions let’s be sure we do not oversimplify or yield to a snap judgment. That is so easily done and it helps no one. We must recognize that what is happening to some of our young people is part of a nationwide, and even an international, development. The April 19 issue of U.S. News and World Report carries an article under the title “The Unhappy Americans.” The opening statement is enough to jolt any concerned American citizen: “America in the early 1970s is finding itself a country more divided than at any time in a century.” And if that is not enough of a shocker, read what follows in the same article: “Unrest and divisiveness suddenly are tearing the whole fabric of U.S. society. Militant minorities of all sorts are questioning traditional goals and values. It’s a marked turnabout from the national unity Americans felt early in this century.” America’s “now generation”—some 40 million between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four—is providing the enthusiasm and youth power for a “counter culture” which Yale law professor, Charles Reich, appears to endorse. In his best-selling book, The Greening of America, he says: “This is the revolution of the new generation. Their protest and rebellion, their culture, clothes, music, drugs, ways of thought, and liberated life-style are not a passing fad or a form of dissent or refusal, nor are they in any sense irrational The whole emerging pattern, from ideals to campus demonstrations to beads and bell bottoms to the Woodstock Festival, makes sense and is part of a consistent philosophy. It is both necessary and inevitable, and in time it will include not only youth, but all people in America” (p. 91). Roman Catholic Robert J. Heule, president of Georgetown University, is not so happy with the situation. He writes: “There has never been a period in our history except that prior to the Civil War, in which we have been so divided, so lacking in unity of national vision, purpose and national moral consensus as we are now.” One is not speaking unrestrainedly when he says that America today is in a kind of civilizational crisis. It is every bit of that! And it would be naive to think that our church youth are untouched by it. Yet we cannot arrest our present inquiry with the observation that our denominational situation is only part of a larger problem and that we must leave it with that. We still want to know the What, the When, the Where, and the How of the chain of events and the sequence of conditioning factors which brought the sixteen-year old daughter mentioned above—and scores of young people like her—to this point of rebellion. We cannot afford to dismiss the whole matter as a recurring cycle which will eventually resolve itself. We are facing something more than a fad. The facts are against the off-the-cuff opinion that what we are witnessing is one of those little inner spirals within the larger spirals of history which will soon complete its tiny revolution and be forgotten. It is not too much to say that the future of our Christian Reformed Church may well be bound up with the thoroughness with which we conduct this present inquiry. Loyalty to our Church compels us to study the spiritual currents that have brought us to the present stage in our history. Just what has happened to us? Where did we “turn the corner”? What led to the predicament of the minister mentioned above who said: “I simply cannot communicate with them anymore”?         No, I am not going to answer those questions now. Perhaps I shall never get around to a substantial answer sufficiently comprehensive to merit attention. I have some ideas as to what the conditioning factors have been, but before I put them down in print I should like to continue testing them and reassessing them through discussion exposure. Perhaps some of this discussion can be carried on through correspondence published in this magazine. Meanwhile, a possible point of entry into this discussion, through which some of us concerned people already have moved a few steps, is the point of innovations in contemporary worship. The “mod” fashions which we have seen introduced in clothing, books, films, television and morality, have not bypassed religion, theology, and worship. Reports continue to circulate about worship services on the Lord’s Day in which inelegant language is freely employed and offensive procedures are introduced into the order of worship. For example, at the 11:00 a. m. Knollcrest Worship Service on April 18, the following “Meditation” was read after the Prelude: As young people we are trying to find meaning in life, and our central question is: What is life and how do I fit in? We look to the church for our answer and we see isolationism, fashion parades, misused wealth, and spiritual deadness. We look to America and see war, racism, greed, nuclear armaments, and emptiness. We look to technology and we see pollution, disillusionment, and talent spent on the production of weapons instead of saving lives. We look to the intellectuals and we find nihilism, elitism, and more questions than answers. We look to the youth and we see Joplin and Hendrix dead, escapism to communes, and defeatism. We look to the revolutionaries and see molotov cocktails, diverse factions, close mindedness and hate. We search for love, peace, and happiness in a world that has only chaos to offer. Where can we go and what is truth? Vanity, Vanity, all is Vanity. The closing “Prayer of Faith in unison” had this final petition, “Give me the guts to put up instead of shutting up.” Again I hear that father saying: “Pray for us parents who are still in our thirties. We are worried about our young people.” So am I! Leonard Greenway is pastor of the Riverside Christian Reformed Church of Grand Rapids, Michigan.