T-Bone said:
Just wondering does anyone else see that we are not talking about Youth Camp...we are talking supposedly about adults who are going to a supposed institute of higher learning where they are preparing to lead congregations. When do they get to be grown up?
In talking to the Dean of students at an IFB college not long ago, this topic came up in a more roundabout way.
In the era we live in, the maturity level of people is getting lower compared to their respective age. Most of the colleges we see today are/were either started when that maturity level was different, or are modelled after one that was.
In days gone by, 17,18,19 year old young men and young ladies came to an institution of higher learning to deepen their understanding of theology and "practicology" (practical ministry). They came because they wanted to, often at great personal sacrifice and expense. They were already mature young men and women.
However, our Christianity is a reflection of the culture we live in, and as our culture got less mature, so did our Christian young men and young ladies. Spurgeon pastored at 18. Most young men today at 18 are not mature enough to go to college let alone pastor.
I asked him (edit: the dean that is, not Spurgeon) if in order to combat this it might be a good idea to not accept students until they are 20. See, rather than change the model, they instituted rules. Bible Colleges became the equivalent of Christian Boarding Schools. Bible College dating is generally not an experience of mature young men and women with their own moral and practical convictions getting to know others that they might find life's mate, it is (generally) a carnal, hormone driven, worldy, high-school looking mess of peer pressure and emotional drama. Supervised carnality. One of the driving factors is immature young adults, or rather prolonged adolescence.
So, rules get oriented as the need applies.
Why permission at all? Well, because "College Student Joe" is immature, a serial dater, and the girls he dates are too immature to see it. If we don't impose rules on Joe, ain't gonna be long before we gotta have a shotgun wedding.
Why parental permission? Two reasons, after the mess of "free love" there was resurgence of "courtship" over "dating". Really, most of this was a bit of a semantic-al argument in an effort to get young men and young women to stop the carnal hormone driven mess and to use practical means to vet potential suitors. Asking parents, asking those in Biblical authourity (I know this gets abused) is just good sense. As I pastor, I know things about people that make me a good resource if you want to know the character of someone you intend to date or perhaps marry. Those things are not meant for me to lords it over anyone, but are meant fro me to help them practically. The other reason is that wise parents could put the brakes on their adolescent adults.
Aleshanee, you said "who an adult dates.. or marries...should be their own business....... ", true, but an adult who is in Bible College, with their parents paying for it, dating "everything in a skirt that walks by", is not an adult, they are an adolescent.
Those here who recognize the problem are guilty of the same error as we mark adulthood by a numeric age as opposed to a maturity level. If we instead measure maturity instead of numeric age, we would stand a chance of getting the problem out of the Bible College and keep it at home where it belongs.
... nobody knows at precisely what age any child becomes an adult.... except for God... not even the child or the parents know 100% of the time but if either one has a brain between them then they are the most likely to know before anyone else does.......
