Review: "Ready to Return"

Ken Ham’s book, Ready to Return:  Bringing Back the Church’s Lost Generation is the newest volume in the series preceded by Already Compromised and Already Gone (which I have not read).

Ham et. al. asked 20-somethings questions about Genesis, Biblical authority, etc., and tallied their views and compared them to past generations.  What Ham sees is a less literate, less believing generation of people who were brought up in the church.

In questioning what to do, Ham asks why we can just tell everybody, “Jesus loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life”?  (57).  Why do we have to teach and believe that the Bible is a historical document to be believed?

As a Calvinist, I disagree with the assumption that “Jesus loves everyone and has a wonderful plan for [their] life.”  However, I agree with Ham that Christianity is a historical religion, and if it is not historically substantiated, then there is no reason to believe it – in fat, our faith in Jesus and our hope of salvation through Him – if it is not historically true, it is all a vanity.

Ham explains that the current generation holds subjective experience in high esteem, rather than objective truth – in fact, they often deny objective truth (72).

In the latter half of the book, Ham asks what can be done to bring this generation back and to keep other generations from falling away.  He concludes that we must in our families and in our churches strongly educate and equip our youth to know what they believe, why they believe it, and how to show that it is true.

Similarly, for those currently outside the church, we have to learn how to show them that the truths of the Scripture matter and hinge together – for example, if there is no historical Adam, there is no salvation in Christ, because Christ says that He is the fulfillment of the historical Adam, which, if there is not historical Adam, makes Christ – at least inaccurate – and definitely ineligible to be a holy Savior.

Too often, we have thrown up our hands and said, “you just have to believe on faith” – as though there was neither apologetic or historical proof for the claims of Christianity.  But there are, and our chief need is to learn them and learn how to present them to help our children grow up to be strong believers and – by God’s Grace – to bring back the church’s lost generation.

#ReadyToReturn

[I received this book free from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.  This review appears on my blog, Amazon.com, and Masterbooks.com.]