I have unwittingly created monsters: vintage monsters, that is. When my three boys were young, I toted them along to thrift stores. They hemmed and hawed about it, but now things have come full circle. As teenagers, they have caught the thrifting bug. They love all things thrifted and vintage. The older, the better. Now I am their taxi driver, taking carloads of teenagers to vintage markets around San Diego.

I’ve found that this trend toward the vintage and the old-made-new goes deeper than a surface level. The teenagers and children who frequent our home and church are hungry for ancient truths. They have begun to see through the shiny consumerism that culture has been peddling them; they are more aware of the God-shaped holes in their hearts than are most of their parents. Some of them come to church all alone or beg their parents to take them.

The Ancient Ways

When God’s people were chasing every new god of their neighbors and running after the things of the world, he begged them to remember the ancient ways, which they were loath to do.

“Thus says the Lord, ‘Stand by the roads, and look: and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls.’ But they said, ‘We will not walk in it’.” (Jeremiah 6: 16).

As we all know from experience, familiarity can breed contempt. But the more I can hang out with children and teenagers on the West Coast, the more I see them hungering for ancient truths to anchor them. When God is working in someone’s heart and wooing him or her to himself, they hunger for the ancient ways. They delight in what others might consider dusty doctrine, discovering for it for the first time like a treasure found in an attic.

Dusting off our Doctrine

It is easy in the church to slip into a culture of assumption. We assume that people know the basics that we have been steeped in. Our experience planting a church reaching the lost in our corner of San Diego has taught us we cannot assume anything. Interacting with nonbelievers and the unchurched has forced us to dust off our doctrine and display it to the watching world. We cannot assume that the little boys in our neighborhood “Little Man Tribe” (a group we started for our son and his ten-twelve year old friends) have a working understanding of sin or creation. We have to start with the basic building blocks. And as we do, my own heart is reminded of the glories of the gospel.

Few joys compare with watching a teenager grasp the diagnosis of their sin for the first time so they they might run to the cure in Christ or teaching a new believer how to study the Word of God for herself. The old thing passed on to a new believer refreshes and reframes it in the heart of the one passing it along. Dusting off doctrines we had grown accustomed to leads us to doxology: the old song becomes new again.

People around you, especially the younger generations who have grown up in a vacuum of spiritual truth, are hungering for the truths we hold. As they shop for vintage knick-knacks and old tee shirts, they are also searching for ancient truths to moor them in an unmoored culture.