I was born in 1946 – one year after Torrey Johnson Billy Graham and Chuck Templeton met and formed Youth For Christ. For years I heard the stories of how Chuck was in fact the better preacher and everyone expected him to “turn the world around.”

Known as the “gold-dust twins” Billy and Chuck travelled and preached together to large crowds of teenagers until 1948. It was then that Chuck decided he wanted more theological training and tried unsuccessfully to recruit Billy to go with him to Princeton Theological Seminary. While Billy Graham wrestled through his own spiritual crisis at Forest Home Retreat Center in California and concluded that even though he could not answer some of the questions Chuck was raising, he decided to “accept this book by faith as the Word of God.”

On the other side of the country, Chuck Templeton decided he could not believe and publicly declared himself an agnostic. He drifted from that point on for the balance of his life and died at 86 in 2001. Billy Graham said of him, “Chuck was the most brilliant able man I’ve known. He was a true intellectual. He could do anything…He was a genius, I think.”

Growing up in the 50s we were often told by our elders about Chuck’s decision and his leaving the faith after doubting his beliefs. While there was some merit in those warnings, I think the effect was more likely a discouragement of growth than confirming genuine belief. Any hint of moving away from traditional theological assumptions was met with a reminder of what happened to Chuck Templeton when he went to Princeton.

Why am I telling this story?

Partly as a caution that we can sometimes suppress healthy growth by overreacting to our kids having different values in their giving. For at least the last 100 years the emphasis in evangelical giving has been “finish the task” and the completion of the “Great Commission.” If your adult kids are listening to and reading Tim Keller, Abraham Kuyper ,Gary Haugen, Andy Crouch, Roberta Ahmanson, Ken Wytsma, Wendell Berry, Mako Fujimura, or being influenced by phrases like “common grace” or “common good ” then they are going to be seeing legitimate evangelical giving as being far broader than church planting: scripture translation and personal evangelism.

It would be easy to say to yourself and them, “Remember what happened to Chuck Templeton” or some variation of that. There is a sea change going on in evangelical giving and it does not mean the next generation has “gone liberal” or stopped believing. It means we have an opportunity to have a conversation about our own assumptions that is unprecedented, I think.  In fact, these are just the kinds of conversations we encourage at the annual conference.

My father grew up in an extremely fundamentalist home as the son of a Baptist pastor. To his credit, instead of holding the example of Chuck Templeton over my head when we had differences, he told me how he managed to remain orthodox but not inflexible.

“I think of orthodoxy as a very large tree in the forest around which I have tied a string he said. “Holding on to the end of that string allows me to go down different paths and even sometimes find myself a pretty good distance from the tree. However I know as long as I hold on to the end of that string I can find my way back to orthodoxy. Unfortunately, too many people head off without a string and get lost or never leave the safety of the tree.”

Yes, Chuck Templeton lost his hold on the string and it will happen to others. However just because the next generation’s priorities and interests are different from ours does not mean they have dropped the string and are lost.