Nigeria is preparing a generation for careers without always preparing it for conviction. Christian parents can spend 15 years paying school fees, preparing children for examinations and planning university admission, while leaving biblical formation to occasional sunday school/church attendance. The result is increasingly visible: young adults carrying Christian names and identities without the biblical literacy to understand, defend or consistently practise the faith they inherited.
This is not an argument against university education nor vocational training. It is an argument against spiritual negligence. A young Christian who enters higher education without knowing Scripture, Christian doctrine and the foundations of the faith is entering a marketplace of ideas with an empty wallet. The first confident argument against Christianity can become persuasive simply because nobody prepared the student to interrogate it.
Christian parents must therefore treat Bible education as formation, not decoration. From childhood, families should establish regular Scripture study, welcome difficult questions and teach children to distinguish sound biblical Christianity
from superstition, personality-driven religion and internet theology. Before university, young people should ideally receive structured Christian education through a living church, Bible school or credible discipleship programme—not merely another collection of memorised verses.
That education must also be intellectually serious. Young Christians should learn to read Scripture in context, understand the central doctrines of Christianity, examine the historical claims of the faith, reason about morality and engage atheism, other religions and contemporary ideas without panic. The objective is not to produce children incapable of questioning. It is to form adults capable of questioning without being intellectually uprooted by every new idea they encounter.
The home must carry much of this responsibility. Parents should ask their children what they believe and why; discuss difficult subjects rather than silence them; scrutinise the quality of religious instruction they receive; and connect faith to everyday decisions. Churches must do their part too: fewer programmes built primarily around religious excitement, and more sustained discipleship, biblical teaching, mentoring and apologetics. A crowded church is not necessarily a well-taught church.
There is a useful lesson in how some faith communities take religious formation seriously: beliefs deliberately taught from childhood are more likely to remain intelligible and resilient in adulthood. Christians can learn from that principle without turning religious education into a competition between religions. The question is straightforward: if parents expect their children to remain Christians, why should they not deliberately teach them Christianity?
The consequences of neglect are already visible. Some professing Christians ridicule their own faith online without having seriously studied it; others, under pressure, move from prayer to spiritualists, traditional practitioners or occult alternatives. This is more than hypocrisy. It is the vacuum created when religious identity is inherited but never intellectually or spiritually developed. Where understanding is absent, almost any confident voice can become an authority.
The target audience is therefore clear: Christian parents, pastors, church leaders and educators. Parents should stop measuring preparation solely by grades, certificates and admission letters. They should ask another question: Can my child explain what he or she believes? Can that faith survive an intelligent question? Can this young person recognise superstition when it is dressed in religious language?
Nigeria does not need a generation protected from difficult questions; it needs a generation prepared for them. Give children education, but give them foundations. Give them degrees, but give them discernment. Prepare them for the university, but do not send them there spiritually illiterate. A Christian name can be inherited. A Christian conviction must be formed.
– Inah Boniface Ocholi writes from Divine Drops Ministry International– Kogi State, Nigeria.
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