The issue of new generations’ education of faith and to faith is now one of the biggest challenges that Christian communities have in front of them; after all, their future will depend on the way to show children and young people of today the great prospect that opens before the one who includes God in his horizon of life and who decides to give credit to Jesus Christ and his Gospel.

It is a matter of extraordinary complexity: upon this profound changes are affecting  in society and reflected on the youngsters with an influence of whom it is now difficult to grasp the scope and the world of education, even of the Church, does not yet seem fully warned.

Here I will only consider faith from the perspective of the educational dynamics, without taking into account the undeniable fact that it is above all a gift of God wrapped in the mystery. It has come to associate education in the faith in a process of transmission, from the knowledge that as adults - believers, families and Christian communities - we have received a precious heritage that we have the responsibility and the joy of handing in the new generation.

No longer effective paths

Two routes seem to be the most usual of such transmission: the family and parish.
The Christian family passes on the faith as well as it is living, as a legacy of value delivering to those who come after, with care and trepidation of those who rely on those who love what is most precious. For this reason parents ask for their children the sacraments in a very early age and educate them to the faith. Forward in faith, they follow the same procedure below for the education of every other aspect of life: proposals and discussions conducted in a manner often informal, indication of behaviors, meaningful experiences designed to engage, an example of their lives.
The parish teaches through structured courses and tends to help people understand what faith is important. The Church feels a responsibility not to squander the wealth of truth which he has received, which is the guardian and who has the mandate to reach out to the ends of the earth. This is what the parish have done and do especially with their catechesis, in which, through the testimony of the community and the catechists and through structured and more cared courses, they have started younger people to discover the importance and irreplaceable value of faith. These forms of transmission of the faith today seem to be not more effective, for several reasons.

Unfavorable trends

The context in which children and young people grow up is now full of "hidden educators" who spread an idea of the life other than religiously inspired. It is characterized by unfavorable trends to capture the value of a Christian perspective: the strongly outward and superficial character of the popular culture, which leads the weakening of the sense of interiority and the capacity for introspection, the weakening of the sense of authorities at all levels, starting with the family. This is a trend that is linked to the weakness of the sense of social and of the  institutions and into the crisis of belonging to a community.

To the influence of the context must be added the problematic condition of the adult generation’s education, which seems to have given up the responsibility of educating the younger generation, which also transmits his indifference to the faith. The adults of today are the "a generation that is against God or against the Church, but a generation that is learning to live without God and the Church".[i]

The path to the faith today is made more complex by a strong need for customization which young people, namely the need to have their own reasons for making choices. This is a potentially positive aspect, since it allows to the faith to take root in the conscience and to sustain itself on reasons personally maturated. However, it is a difficult path, exposed to the risk of multiple elements that tend to divert young people from a perspective of demanding life.

Generations without God?

Is the times of the faith finished? Young people, who no longer have antennas for God,[ii]  are intended to be a generation without God? The first of a series of generations without God? Or in this unprecedented time in so many ways, the youth meeting with God cover different paths from those we are used, to the point that we can not imagine?

It is impossible not to recognize that today the path to faith is difficult; it is especially for young people, who lack suitable guides. I am not speaking about available and generous guides, which today are still present, but guides are able to understand that the question of God and openness to the Gospel unprecedented speed roads, perhaps incomprehensible to the adults of today, culturally, anthropologically more distant from younger than one or two generations, that separate them, would suggest.

Education in the faith of young people is difficult because the education is of little thickness, that is, the path through which a young man picks up his life and decides not only what it wants in terms of materials - work, love, career, ... the place where to live - but especially those who want to be and who want to become. The educational vacuum of now is hard to imagine, even within the shared statements on the crisis of education, or on education’s emergency. And then, this unpublished time how can have teachers?

Perhaps it can only travel companions, prepared to accompany the research and willing to listen to young people, to understand what are the questions in their life and openings to the Spirit, and also to read in their lives the direction that the company is taking. It is difficult to proclaim the Gospel and a proposal for a Christian life for young people who have not been trained to self-reflection and to work on his own humanity. Oriented generations to live on the surface of themselves, accustomed to the taste of the ephemeral and encouraged to compete only with external objectives are almost strangers to themselves and their own inner life, do not know the questions that attend to the depths of consciousness reveal a need for meaning, as well as career; of fullness, as well as self-realization.

Hand on the Faith generating in our heart

Not that there are no questions, pressed getting to the bottom of themselves; but until they don’t find the road to be expressed and, expressing,  generate pain and discomfort, rather than research and way of life. To speak to young people of faith, they  need to help them to give words to questions, to recognize in consciousness, to dig in humanity and issues of meaning that it contains. After all, is what did the Lord Jesus with the people he met: he took their lives, welcomed and taken to the full their demand for life, happiness, love. In addition, to speak to young people of faith in a post-Christian society we must "erase the blackboard/ wipe the slate". The "blackboard" that young people carry within them already wrote Christian words: those of faith, tradition, or some devotion ... These are words real or uneven, appropriate or approximate, actual or presumed, but words and thoughts that give the impression of some familiarity with a Christian perspective of life.

It is hard to surprise with the announcement of the beauty of the Gospel to people who think they know already and have often known as a message that demeans the life which imposes prohibitions, asking sacrifices and renunciation …. It’s hard to cross the road of the announcement of a "good news", a discourse that is fascinating, a proposal for a life that opens horizons beyond their own desires.

Finally, the Christian community must reflect on what his daily way of life, its    language, style of his life and his relationships can act as a screen that separates her from young people, instead of encouraging meetings with them, for transparency through which hints at the mystery and to seek the desire.

This is the time when we must ask questions about generative paths of faith, if you do not want the words and the most important experiences of Christian life remain without echo in the minds of young people and, in the case of young people who receive them with availability, remain divorced from their existence, a separated chapter of their lives.

Perhaps instead this is the time when faith is passed on not handing it as a consolidated capital, but generating in the souls of people, because they protect, cure, let them grow in their own way.  Even saint Paul uses this term: "My little children, whom I am again in travail ..." he writes to the Galatians (Gal 4.19), and to the Corinthians: "You may in fact have countless guides in Christ, do not have many fathers, because I am that I have in Christ Jesus through the gospel "(1 Cor 4.15).