It’s graduation season, and another batch of young men and women is preparing to leave our youth ministry and move into the next season of life with the new responsibilities, opportunities, dangers, and joys it will hold.

Though it does not compare to the experience of our parents, I can’t help but feel nervous energy as we watch students, some of whom have been in our ministry for seven years, prepare to move on. They are entering a world that will pull at their faith from all sides and unrelentingly. They will face intellectual objections, moral dilemmas, social pressures, and worldly enticements. In the face of such opposition, many of our young men and women will (and have) honored our Savior admirably. They will cling to truth and love their neighbors and smile at the future. They will trust in the God who is good, even when things are difficult.

There are other students, however, who will not walk this path. As they drift away from the world of their childhood, they will also drift away from the truths they once claimed to believe. Doubt and skepticism towards the world will turn into even greater doubts and deeper skepticism of the Word of God and the Church. As I consider how to strengthen our youth in the Lord, our time in 1 Corinthians recently has reminded me that one of the greatest threats to the next generation comes not from the world, but from within the church itself.

Among those I have spoken to who have walked away from the church, regardless of their age or background, I don’t think I have ever heard someone say they left because there are people who sin in the church. Instead, a refrain I have heard many times, and you likely have as well, is that church was abandoned because it was full of hypocrites.

Is a hypocrite the same thing as a believer who sins? Not necessarily. There are two kinds of sinning believer. There is the believer who acknowledges sin, confesses sin, and repents from sin, and there is the professing believer who…does not.

People don’t consider a bakery to be a fraud just because one of the pies has a little dust on it. The dust is a problem and needs to be removed, but you still have a store full of delicious pies. If, however, you walked into a store and discovered that behind the rows of trendy pie labels and hidden beneath sugar-glazed crusts were nothing but artfully disguised mud pies, then you might be tempted to take your business elsewhere. This is the difference between a church of people who sin and a church of hypocrites. It’s the difference between mud that gets on an apple pie, and mud that pretends it is an apple pie.

Paul is warning the Corinthians that if a pie has sin on the outside, then it is possible that sin runs right through to the center. If you stick a toothpick in several places and get mud, mud, and more mud, and the pie resolutely clings to its label of “fresh, homemade, huckleberry pie,” then there is a problem. It appears this may be a so-called pie, and not an actual pie, just as Paul warned against the “so-called brother,” whose unrepentance may indicate they are not an actual brother at all. It’s up to God to sort out those who are His or not, but it is up to the church not to leave an apple pie with no sign of apples in it on the rack.

What a gift it would be to the next generation to see our church honestly and regularly dealing with the “dust” in our lives and guarding against the unrepentant sin that communicates fraudulent faith to the next generation.