Daily Radicals

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.

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.

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.

My wonderful husband, Jody, posted a quote from E. Stanley Jones recently where he discussed what happens when you separate an individual gospel from a social gospel.

An individual gospel without a social gospel is a soul without a body, and a social gospel without an individual gospel is a body without a soul. One is a ghost and the other a corpse… (The Unshakable Kingdom and the Unchanging Person. Abingdon Press, 1972. p. 40.)

In other words, faith without works is dead, but we are only justified through faith–our works will never get us there. They are only the fruit of our actions. This goes along with something I was just reading in Chasing Daylight by Erwin McManus. He succinctly summarizes the entire book of James by saying that “if you know what is right to do and you do not do it, it is sin” (p.37).

So it’s not enough to be happy about the fact that Jesus died to save you unless you do something about it… care for the poor, feed the hungry, and so forth. But the flip side is, if you only care for the poor and feed the hungry and do not proclaim Jesus, then you’re not getting anywhere either. You can’t split up the gospel, it must be proclaimed as a whole with word and deed together.

If there’s one fact that I should know about myself, is that I think better when I’m walking. Sometimes I hear God clearer when I’m walking too, and I’m talking about the kind of walk that’s just to walk, not for the purpose of getting anywhere. So to that end, I just spent about a half an hour walking around my backyard. Now, my backyard is pretty big, but after about two trips around the parameter, I was bored of that, and decided to start walking in straight lines back and forth across the yard.

Only problem was, I kept drifting back and forth, mostly back, but I couldn’t seem to walk in a straight line.

We live in the country and have a yard, as opposed to a lawn. A lawn is a nice, uniformly green, flat and level strip in front of houses in a subdivision. A yard on the other hand is basically a piece of field that we continue to reclaim from going completely wild, although it seems to try it’s hardest every week in between mowings.

Anyway, all that to say, there’s bumps, and small holes, and different kinds of grass that make for clumps, and some sticks blown down by a storm this week, and so every time I stepped on one of those, I was thrown off course.

Now, my problem was quite simple really: I was looking at my feet and the ground right in front of them. And I wasn’t making much progress.

So I fixed my eyes on the fence post in front of me and walked towards it. You know what, I still got pushed off course by those little bumps, but in no time at all, I was right back where I was supposed to be.

You see, when I was looking at the post and getting thrown off track, I knew I was off track because I had something to measure myself against. When I was looking at the ground, I had know way of knowing how many little detours I was taking all over the place. But with a clear goal in mind, and keeping that clear goal in sight, small course corrections were all that was needed.

I spent an amazingly long time inside the Episcopal Cathedral in Nashville on Saturday as our diocese (the Diocese of Tennessee, which represents the middle part of the state) attempted to elect a new bishop.

What I witnessed was very disturbing to me as I saw clergy voting against their own laity.  Let me explain: in our diocese it requires a 2/3 vote from both the clergy and the laity on the same ballot to elect a bishop.  If you want to read more about the election itself or what was going on Saturday, click on the link at the bottom of the post to read more.  I’m happy to explain, but what happened sparked some thoughts in me on the role of clergy and the direction of ecclesiology in general.  Saturday’s events revealed a clear dichotomy.

I heard many grumblings about clergy who couldn’t get their parishes to vote with them, but what I was concerned about along with a number of the other younger members present was clergy who weren’t listening to their parishes (and the Episcopal church wonders why it can’t keep it’s younger members… they aren’t listening to us, that’s why!  Only one of us involved in the hallway rant sessions between votes was actually a voting delegate… how sad is that!)

Here’s where the issue in ecclesiology comes up.  Apparently, some clergy think that since they are clergy, people should automatically listen to them.

Nowhere in scripture is it supported that the clergy are the end-all in teaching, in fact, the opposite is true.  Otherwise, the language of the priesthood of all believers (2 Peter 2:4-9) and the role of the Christian as an ambassador of reconciliation with God (2 Cor. 5:18-21) would be nonsensical.  Also, Ephesians 4:11-12 makes it very clear what the role of church leadership is: “The gifts that he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of the ministry, for building up the body of Christ.”  So who has the work of the ministry?  The entire church, not the clergy alone.

And if these clergy don’t realize that their lay people are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing, then they are unfamiliar with Scripture (or have decided that it no longer means what it says).  And even if they have the excuse that all those clergy somehow never read Ephesians, it was read to them in their ordination service word for word (see the Book of Common Prayer p. 533).  And then, they never actually read the catechism that supposedly teach to their lay people where it says, “The ministry of the lay persons is to represent Christ and his Church; to bear witness to him wherever they may be; and according to the gifts given them, to carry on Christ’s work of reconciliation in the world; and to take their place in the life, worship, and governance of the Church” (BCP p. 855).  Not to mention article 20 (BCP p. 871) which states that “…it is not lawful for the Church to ordain any thing that is contrary to God’s Word written, neither may it so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another.”

So, top-down ecclesiology would be that the Holy Spirit speaks through the leaders of the church and is then passed on to the lay people.  Bottom-up ecclesiology would be that the Holy Spirit speaks through the church—not just the clergy—and that the Holy Spirit will never contradict something that is written in Scripture.