Daily Radicals

Well.  We wanted dialog on this subject, and boy howdy, do we have some.  After reading comments by Earl Ruley on my previous post here, and Anna’s newest post here, I want to say that I didn’t mean to imply that people in their 20′s and 30′s were the only one struggling with the concept of Church right now.  I only mean to say this is the perspective I personally must write from, because it’s where I am and what I know.  And when I spoke of  Theological Mumbo Jumbo, perhaps I should have simply said Spirituality.  That said…

When I said I wanted to throw in the towel, I simply meant quit.  I half  joked about going to church on Ash Wednesday, and when asked what I was giving up for Lent, simply saying, “Church.”  However.  I didn’t.  I wouldn’t.  (I don’t think.)  I have friends in their 40′s and 50′s dealing with the same frustrations as me.  Our congregation has a youth room with no youth.  My 10 year old doesn’t want to go to Sunday School.  She says it’s not what she wants from church.  (following in her mama’s shoes too closely perhaps.)  Now.  If we’re all looking for IT and feel IT is not in our churches, shouldn’t we be able to define what IT is?

In the book UnChristian, on page 80 author David Kinnaman presents seven elements that should define a Christ follower:

• worshiping God intimately and passionately
• engaging in spiritual friendships with other believers
• pursuing faith in the context of family
• embracing intentional forms of spiritual growth
• serving others
• investing time and resources in spiritual pursuits
• having faith-based conversations with outsiders

I read this and found myself wondering… if these things define what a Christian should be and do (and I whole-heartedly agree with the list) then shouldn’t this also be a good outline for our faith communities and churches, as well?  For me, I think THIS would be a good place to start when defining what it is I’m looking for in a church.  No where on this list do I see:

• Must have fancy trappings.  Silver chalice, gold candelabras, expensive linens.
• Give only money to the unfortunate hoping that counts as service.
• Bad mouthing others.  (if we are doing this in the context of a church family, my kids can’t do this at home, adults shouldn’t get away with it at church)
• Counting bodies in seats instead of souls in His kingdom.

Am I making any sense?  I look at the title of Anna’s newest post, “ What will bring people to the Church?” and I find myself wondering, “does it matter?”  My first instinct is to say we should be worried about bringing people to Christ, not so much to church.  However.  What is the church if not the Body of Christ?  And, therefore, if we can lead others to church are we not then also bringing them into the body of Christ?  BUT if believers make up the body, then when two or more of us are together, (gathered in his name and all that) the Bible says he is with us.  Does that not make that gathering CHURCH?  It’s all so messy.  I say the building should be a FUNCTION of the people.  Not the whole point of going.  I’ve seen more of God on a beach on the Pacific than in some churches.  And I’ve been in churches that made me want to remove my shoes, for I knew I stood on holy ground.

When I’m in church I want to feel love.  To feel refreshed.  To feel lifted up, ready to face the coming week.

I want to feel Emanuel.  God with us.

That’s what IT is for me.

A comment left on Shari’s post got me thinking about how we must be careful as we discuss this issue of young people and the church not to lump everything together by generation. It would be far too easy to over-generalize, and thus to look for easy answers and/or easy places to point the blame.

This would be dangerous, and lead to who knows what sort of confusion.

The reason we’re talking about this from a generational stand-point is the very real fact of young people missing from the church. We want to know why that is, and how to reverse it, and obviously, we’ve got some thoughts on the topic, hence this blog! The reality is that it’s not just a problem of young people, older folks are leaving too, they’re just not as conspicuously and almost completely absent. The church in America is in serious decline, and we’re just addressing at this point one facet of the problem.

I am often asked how churches can get young adults into their congregations. It’s a question that some seem to think should have an easy answer, that there should be a hot new program available, a cool new way to bring contemporary music into the service, a coffee shop added to the fellowship hall or something that will shift churches into suddenly being places that young people are attracted to.

I want to suggest that the lack of young people isn’t the problem with our churches, but rather, what caused the lack of young people. We’re lacking in young people because the church in America, across all denominational lines, has in many ways forgotten how to be the church.

It’s not just that we don’t have young people in our churches any more; we have very few new people. We have stopped making disciples of people of all ages, and a lot of what we perceive as church growth in some places is caused by existing Christians moving from one church to the next. Along with that, we treat children and youth as the “future of our church,” when in reality, they are present members just like adults and should be integrated and discipled as such.

What will bring people, young people included, back into the church? We as the church need to do some deep soul-searching and self-evaluation. We need to remind ourselves why we are the church, and what we are supposed to be doing as the church.

The church is the body of Christ, the community that is supposed to be bringing the light of the gospel, the truth of Jesus Christ, and the love of God to people around us. But we are failing. We have allowed ourselves to become more concerned with politics than the gospel, more concerned with taking stands on issues than caring for the people affected by those issues, more concerned with being “right” than loving. And, friends, we are dying a slow and painful death, a death that cannot be averted by trying to suck young people into our congregation.

The answer is to remember why we are the church. We were commissioned by our Savior to “go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.” We were commissioned to “Teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I have given you. And be sure of this: I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:19-20, NLT). Simple, yes, but so profound.

We must become again a community that loves each other and aches with God’s heart over the state of our world. We must become a community that makes disciples, that teaches, that cares for the orphan, the widow, the outcast, the unseen: those “victims of hunger, fear, injustice and oppression” (The Book of Common Prayer, The Episcopal Church, 1979, p. 392) all over the world.

Only in this will we begin to see people coming back into our midst, people of all ages, because only in this will the church, once again, be the church.

I’ve just started reading the book unChristian, by David Kinnamen and Gabe Lyons.  The book deals with the results of their studies among the generation they are calling “Busters” (roughly Gen-X, or in this book those born between 1965 and 1983) and “Mosaics” (roughly Gen-Y, or in this book, those born between 1984 and 2002) and how those generations view the church and Christians.

Specifically in chapter two, the authors are introducing the six broad themes that emerged as they studied young “outsiders” view the church.  According to this study, young “outsiders” view the church as:

1. Hypocritical.  Okay this is nothing new, Christians have been called hypocritical for a while by those outside the church.
2. Too focused on getting converts.  Thus, making people feel like “targets” for conversion instead of people to be in relationship with.
3. Antihomosexual.
4. Sheltered.  As in “out of touch, old fashioned or boring” and “not willing to deal with the grit and grime of people’s lives.”
5. Too political.  As in “overly motivated by a political agenda.”
6. Judgmental.  Again, not new, but important to realize.

Okay so, I’m not surprised by any of these in the list, and I believe that they are most likely an fairly accurate brush-stroke of how young “outsiders” view people in the church.  But here’s something the authors aren’t looking at, in fact, I’m not too sure anyone is looking at this.

These themes pretty much top the lists of young insiders view of the church as well.  Ask some 20 or 30-somethings in your congregation.  In addition, I think you’ll find that people our age, for I am in that bracket at age 29, find that while we’re repeatedly told that by older folks in the church that they’re so glad to see us, and they “welcome” our ideas because their so “fresh and full of energy,” the up-shot is that we basically get patted on the head and told “that’s nice, but wait till your about twenty years older and then we’ll really listen to you.”

Of course, that’s not the exact phrase, but I hear this sentiment over and over again from people in their 20′s and 30′s and even into their early 40′s.  I spoke with one person recently who said she felt like that and she’s 36 and still waiting to be treated like a grown-up.  And let me tell you, there’s no reason for her to not be treated like a grown-up given her profession and level of experience therein.

In the Episcopal church, and I’m guessing it’s true of many other churches as well, there’s this concept that we need young clergy.  And we do, most of our clergy are second-career and in their 50′s and 60′s.  But when we get young clergy, those young clergy are also treated with nearly the same sort of attitude as the young folks in the pews are treated.

I’ve spent a lot of time recently talking with churches about treating their teens as current members of the congregation, listening to them and inviting them into all areas of the church life, but what has become more and more apparent to me as I’ve done this is that the same is true of pretty much anyone under 45.

A story from another book related to this subject that I want to deal more in depth with later is the story of a young man who had left, I believe a baptist church, at the age of 18 saying, “well, it’s not like you see 18-year-old deacons in the church now do you?”

My questions is, why not?  And how does the church expect to keep young people when they aren’t willing to have young people actually involved in the whole scope of the church?  Oh, sure, young people can do youth ministry, or work in the nursery, or children’s ministry.  But put them on the vestrys and boards and then actually listen to what they have to say?  This just isn’t happening very many places, and so young people are dropping out of church by the hundreds and thousands, and you know what, it starts at age 16.  When they can drive.  As soon as they have the option, they are choosing not to come.

More on the integration of teens at ymCafe.

Our gospel reading this morning was from Mark 8:31-38

(If you go to a liturgical church, you probably already knew that…)

ANYWAY.  I sat there thinking about how Jesus said, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”  This hit me like a brick today!

First, I can’t hear this particular scripture without having Anna come to mind (see I was paying attention when you explained the Crossway name to me…)  Second, It made me wonder how this applies to MY life.  Doesn’t this sound simple?  Just take up (c’mon pick it up) your cross and follow him already.  But what about that first part?  LET THEM DENY THEMSELVES.  Ouch.  That part’s harder.  That says ditch your agenda.  Nothing you do is gonna cut it. You gotta play by HIS rules.  Then there’s the part when he says, “follow me.”  that’s right.  FOLLOW HIM.  Never did he say follow the church, the state, the culture, your own mind.  Your life (MY life) needs to be all about following Jesus & spreading his gospel.  That’s it.  The point.  Here I keep saying I’m trying to figure “it” out and Jesus himself went ahead and told me what “it” is.  That simple.  Huh.  Go figure.  Follow him.  FOLLOW HIM!  GO!

I just got back from a overnighter at a church that I was helping with. Our topic of conversation tonight was understanding yourself as God’s beloved child and living out of that identity instead of all the labels that get put on us. The exercise was to take a stack of name tags and write one word on each, either an adjective to describe you or a name you’d been called.

I was struck by the number of opposites that appeared: people being called things that were diametrically opposites. I have to wonder sometimes how people see such different things in the same person. I guess it’s all a matter of perspective. For example, I’ve got “conservative” friends who think I’m “liberal”, and I’ve got “liberal” friends who think I’m “conservative.”

I’ve been called a feminist and yet there are others who share that label who wouldn’t want me being a feminist because I’m married, and happily married to boot.

And this all got me thinking because the longer I stay in church and watch the people of God interact with eachother, the more it hurts to watch. Different sects throw different labels at eachother, some call eachother “not Christian” based mainly on a failure of one party to agree with something the other thinks, and usually the debated point isn’t something that essential to the Gospel.

After I took a job working with multiple churches and their youth and young adult ministries, I quickly learned to discard all sorts of opinions and labels handed to me about others I’d be working with and form my own opinions. The funny thing was some took it upon themselves to “warn” me about certain others, and almost universally I found their warnings needless.

The thing is, none of these labels matter.

Here’s a grand secret! We are loved because we are God’s children, not because of anything we can earn by our doings. No matter how much we do, God will not love us more!

Ok, so I admit, sometimes this rubs me the wrong way. I know that would never occur to any of you, but I have to confess… I mean, if I’m doing more for God then that dude over there, shouldn’t God like me more??

But he doesn’t. And it’s a good thing too, because, after all, who is the standard of what “more for God is?” Of course, I’d like it to be me, but that’s just not the case…

And since I mess up frequently…
Get it wrong frequently…
And ultimately know that I can never do enough…
It’s a huge relief to let go and realize that God loves me because I am his child. Period.

This concept of understanding ourselves as the beloved of God is fundamental to the identity of a Christian… This has to be our core identity… and if it becomes our core identity, then we are free to see others as the beloved of God too and to realize that the only label we need for any other person on the planet is beloved.

My friend Anna and I have decided to put our heads together, hoping to use this blog as a place to share our dialogs on faith with others who might feel the same.  Welcome.

Those of us in the under 40 set seem to be suffering from a crisis of faith.  Not a LACK of faith, but a basic uncertainty of what to do with the faith we have in our everyday lives.  Many of us believe in God and Jesus Christ.  We’re trying to live good, moral lives, raise our children to be responsible, caring adults, and care for those less fortunate than ourselves.  Many of us have tried church.  A lot of us are IN church.  But it doesn’t feel right.  It’s not a good fit.  It’s not working for us.  We are a flexible generation, used to adapting our lives to fit our needs, from our jobs, to our educations, our family structures and our communities. We question, and we demand answers.  We give, and expect to also receive.  We are apt to complain to a company if a product does not meet our expectations, comparison shop rather than blindly remain brand loyal, write our congressmen on issues we feel passionate about, and exercise our right to vote.  Unfortunately, the church, as an institution, is proving to be unable to flex with us.

There’s no better way to illustrate this than with a personal example.  WE are a modern Gen X family.  My husband works a job he loves, on a really oddball weekend night shift, and I am a stay at home mom.  Neither of us chose to finish college, for we couldn’t see how it fit into our future plans.  This by no means makes us UNSKILLED.  (The man can run a nuclear reactor for Pete’s sake!) His hours and my being home allow us an enormous amount of time together.  Not only as a couple, but as a family.  This would not be the case if we didn’t homeschool too.  We homeschool not so much because of our Christian values, but more because it’s what works for our family.  It’s an extra bonus that we can use this opportunity to really share our values and our faith with our girls at the same time.  Our daily lives are anything but the typical “American Pie” existence. Often at church we find people don’t understand why my husband will come to church tired, in dirty work pants (having come straight off a 12 hr night shift position he accepted so he could still come to church.)  People question our decision to homeschool, while complementing us on our children.  And most people don’t understand what I do all day, while at the same time wondering how I “do it all” around our small farm. In short, we don’t fit in anyone’s box.

We both grew up in church.  He in the Church of the Nazarene, me in the United Church of Christ.  We went to Sunday School, summer camp, our mothers were in the choir, etc.  Despite all this, we didn’t meet because of our faith.  By our mid 20′s we’d both grown away from the church (disillusioned by the members we saw acting in a very UNchristian manner) and were doing our own thing.  I think the only real reason we’ve ended up back in the church in our 30′s (United Methodist, then Episcopal, and now Anglican) is that we wanted to raise our girls “right” and also that we moved to a very conservative small town when we first moved to TN, and to live there without a church home is to walk around with a sign just ASKING people to annoy the crap out of you about church.  I think of it as the “fresh meat” syndrome.  Besides, it seemed a good place to make some friends with small kids and similar interests & values.

HOWEVER, we’re finding church to still be full of the same attitudes we fought against as teens, and we find we’re still treated as children by many of the people in our parents’ generations.  Despite finding a denomination whose doctrine we agree with, church is still not a good fit for us.  Our faith is as dynamic and passionate as everything else in our lives.  We are not satisfied to just sit, smile nice, shake hands and leave.  Yet after 3 years in the same congregation we’re still the new couple, don’t truly feel included, and whenever we speak up with new (sometimes radical) ideas, people get uncomfortable.  I was recently told I’ve never been a joiner.  Well,  I’ve never been a quitter, either, and I’m SURE we’re not alone.

We are just one young family with a faith story similar to many others.  Our generation is out there seeking God, and the church is leaving us dissatisfied, wanting more.  Anna & I want to explore several really good books that have been written on the subject of the younger generations and our attitudes towards Christianity.  Many of these books however, are written by those who belong to one of the older generations, and are mere observers of this phenomenon.  Here we hope to offer a first hand account.  We are a part of this new generation of believers.  We are daily radicals.

I’m sitting here trying to work out some thoughts and several conversations have been running around in my head of late.

I’m the coordinator for youth and young adult ministries for the Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee, and so I often get questions from churches (and not just in our diocese either) that sound like this “how can we attract more young people?”

And something’s been bothering me about those questions, regardless of which of the several reasons is behind it.

The thing is, most of the people, and like I said, regardless of the wonderful motivation behind it, asking this question, want a program or solution to bring young people into their existing church structure.

Well, I think I’ve happened on the solution as I was musing.

Get out of the church.

That’s right leave.

Because you see, the church isn’t that building no matter how cute, historic, grand, beautiful, or whatever it may be.  The building is an incidental.  You are the church.

So go out and start taking the church, and the fantastic message of life in Jesus to people you know.

Just live life in relationship with people, not from your church (*gasp, I know*).

Live life in relationship with people with no agenda.  Share with them what excites you, hopefully Jesus is on the list, if not, perhaps you should start by doing a little soul searching and having a few in depth Jesus-times yourself.

As you share your life with people, including how you live in relationship with Jesus, they might get interested.  Or they might not.  But at least they won’t be in the category of people that don’t know a single Christian.

Some stats for you.

The number of non-Christians a person knows has an inverse relationship with the length of time that person has been a Christian.  So the most mature Christians, who should be out there making disciples, don’t know any non-Christians. Hmmm…

The average number of conversions per 100 people in mainline denomination per year is… Are you ready?

One.

And those of you non-mainline folks, your rate of conversion is actually better.  I know you knew this. But wait, what is it?

One point seven.  Yup, nearly double, but still, per one hundred? sort of pitiful.

People, our entire mission as the church is to make disciples.

And we’re failing!  Churches that are growing are mainly getting Christians from other churches.

It’s a giant shell game of “find the Christians.”

So what we’ve been doing, isn’t working.  People will no longer “come and see.”

Get out of the church.  Get into the world.

It’s time we tried out that whole “salt and light” thing again.

Just go.

It struck me the other day that something had been bothering me. Someone asked me back at the beginning of my new position what success in this job would look like. And it wasn’t a bad question, but something in me didn’t like the question. I answered anyway with what I wanted to see happen. But as I’ve processed life and ministry these past six months, taking time in the transition to look back and reflect as well as looking forward and dreaming, I realized that none of the things I’d like to see happen are things I can make happen. It’s going to take God working on the hearts of many people as well as those people choosing to be sensitive to him. I have every confidence that the first is already happening because God is always trying to work on our hearts. The second… well, only time will tell.
And so I’ve surrendered success because when living out the call of God on your life, the call is not to success as can be measured by any human standard, but to faithfulness. What we all long to hear at the end of our journey is “well done, good and faithful servant.” I think this is key: he doesn’t say successful servant. In the parable of the talents, the one given two talents that came up with two more and the one that turned five talents into ten both heard those words when they reported back to their master. It was the one that buried his talent and didn’t do anything with it that didn’t. So it wasn’t the size that counted, not the number of talents made, but the faithfulness to the task which the servant had been assigned.
I see this also in the life of Ezekiel. In the first part of chapter two, God tells Ezekiel that he is being sent to a stubborn people, who probably won’t listen to him, but he is to go and proclaim this message that God wants them to hear. How’s that for a call? “Hey Ezekiel, I heard you were getting a new job. What do you think success will look like?” Uh… right. But God clearly lays out what he wants Ezekiel to do in chapter 3. “Son of man, let all my words sink deep into your own heart first. The go to your people in exile and say to them, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says!’ Do this whether they listen or not” (vv. 10-11).
Now, this isn’t a call to be lazy or to be brash and not thoughtful about the way we try to get the message of God across. After all, we’ve been entrusted with the very words of God, and should have a holy awe and fear about speaking those to others. And if we’re living into the call of God on our lives, we need to walk in fear and trembling mixed with the confidence that he who has begun a good work in us will complete it (Phil. 1:6). That we are capable because he has equipped us with everything good that we may do his will, working in us that which is pleasing to his sight and all of that only through Jesus Christ, to whom be honor and glory for ever and ever” (Hebrews 13:20-21, paraphrased).
And in the end, realizing that God has called us to be faithful sets us free from the limitations of trying to succeed. Success is limited in its definition, especially in ministry because sometimes the results are years down the road. So we are not called to success. We’re called to faithfulness. The results have always been solely up to him.

I’ve been reading The Sabbath, by Abraham Joshua Heschel, a book which I’ve owned for several years and have yet to actually read. He starts out with a sort of polarization of time and space, saying:

Technical civilization is man’s conquest of space. It is a triumph frequently achieved by sacrificing an essential ingredient of existence, namely time. In technical civilization, we expend time to gain space. (p.3)

And what he means by “space” is basically all of the “stuff” of life, the things we do, the things we work to earn, all things that can be categorized by their “thinghood.” Time on the other hand isn’t a thing like all these other things are. He calls it a realm where “the goal is not to have but to be, not to own but to give, not to control but to share, not to subdue but to be in accord.” (p.3)

In making time subservient to space, or using time merely as a means to an end within space, Heschel argues that we then cause a dread of time, and time becomes the enemy, “a slick treacherous monster with jaw like a furnace incinerating every moment of our lives” (p.5). And in doing this, I think, we lose the essence of what it means to live.

I’ve been pondering for some time now what it means to have abundant life and what that would look like because I feel like most of us, myself included, often settle for far less than the abundant life that Jesus said he came to give us.

And the abundant life is not a life abundant in things. It’s not a better car or a bigger house. It’s a feeling of well-being, of peace, of being able to enjoy life, to stop and smell the roses, to enjoy friends, to be.

But we don’t live like this.

Oh, you might say, that all the things we do are important, lots of them have to do with people, and we have to get all these things done. (I know you think this, I do it all the time).

The thing is though, we don’t. We’ve bought a such a load of crap from our culture where somehow busyness became the highest good, a moral thing where “keepin’ busy” is the only appropriate answer anymore to “how’s it going?” “Oh, keepin busy.”

How have we sold our birthright for such a watery pottage that we think we are only valuable if we’re keeping busy?

Or maybe we’re afraid of ourselves. We’re afraid if we did stop, if we just sat and were, that we would discover something we didn’t like, and if we just stay busy enough, we won’t have to see that.

I think it’s both. Somehow all of us have ended up racing the clock no matter how old we are because we feel there’s all these things that have to get done by a certain time. Never mind if there’s actually a deadline or not. We make them up.

It’s not a bad thing to have goals, but it’s bad to sacrifice really living in pursuit of these goals.

I want to make time my friend, and the secret to that, according to Heschel, lies in the Sabbath. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.

Yes, but I’m not Jewish. Well, the same God that inspired the New Testament inspired the Old, and handed down the Ten Commandments. It’s all part of a continuum. Clearly, there are parts of the Torah that Jesus fulfilled, but based on his regular get aways to spend time with the Father, I think the Sabbath is one thing that never goes out of style.

See, the point of the Sabbath is that we can rest, and acknowledge that it’s not our labor that’s doing it anyway. We can completely cease from doing, and realize that the world is not going to come to an end.

We can just be.

Be still and know…

Be still and know that he is God.

“For where shall the likeness of God be found? There is no quality that space has in common with the essence of God. There is not enough freedom on the top of the mountain; there is not enough glory in the silence of the sea. Yet the likeness of God can be found in time, which is eternity in disguise” (p. 16).

I’ve been reading blogs again (yay!) and rediscovered one, and found a new one that were both talking about similar things in different ways.

Glenn Innes muses on an Einstein quote “The kind of thinking that will solve the world’s problems will be of a different order to the kind of thinking that created those problems in the first place” and applies that to trying to do surface level changes in the church, more visuals, shorter sermon, more candles, or whatever.

While over at The Forgotten Ways, the new blog I ran across tonight, Alan Hirsch quotes a friend who has developed a strategy to take out Al Qaeda by using the “strategies” of the Christian sub-culture.  It’s hilarious, and thought provoking.