Let's Repent

When I was growing up, I remember being taught about repentance. In fact, as I recall, repentance seemed to find its way into just about every youth group lesson my youth pastor gave. Repentance was what Christianity was all about in my conservative evangelical context. And it wasn’t just that we should repent because it’d be good for us to do so. It was that if we didn’t repent, God was gonna punish us in hell for all eternity. I even remember, for one of our youth group lessons, one of the young people in the group simply stood and read Charles Spurgeon’s famous sermon, “Turn or Burn.” That was the whole lesson.

And that’s what repentance was. It was a “turning.” Turning away from sin. Reversing direction on the default path toward hell and damnation.

When I was older, I rejected this view. [Read More]

This article was originally published on the Progressive Youth Ministry Blog on October 13, 2016.