5 reasons why young people are seeking old ways of doing church

This migration began in earnest back in the 1990’s and is not coming into its own. I look at my own experience and understand that those of us, back then, were on the forefront of this migration among X-er’s, and now even more so among Millennial’s.

These are the general 5 reasons:

  1. Authenticity
  2. Rootedness
  3. Mystery
  4. Icons & Symbolism
  5. Participation

From the article:

“The departure of young people from “new” churches to “old” ones can be deeply confusing to many who grew up with strict denominational boundaries. However, it has the potential to lead to healthy, restorative spaces for many of God’s people. After all, we are all one church. As Brian Zhand expresses it; ‘we need the whole body of Christ to properly form the body of Christ. This much I’m sure of: Orthodox mystery, Catholic beauty, Anglican liturgy, Protestant audacity, Evangelical energy, Charismatic reality — I need it all!’

Read the post, here

http://www.churchinacircle.com/2015/03/31/why-young-people-are-seeking-old-ways-of-doing-church/

Deep Trends & Christian Institutions

For those who have ears to hear… What do you think?  It is my experience, and from what I witness and read concerning leadership in many denominational and even “emergent” structures, that we honestly only want to gather around us those who scratch our itching ears… we don’t want to step back and carefully consider what is going on around us and what then is necessary to do.  If it fits our preconception and personal want, fine, but it if doesn’t, we ignore or reject it – to our own peril.  Click on the link, below, for the article.

Deep trends affecting Christian institutions

What do you think?

College Students and the Hook-up Culture

A review by Caroline Simon of Donna Freitas‘ new book, “The End of Sex: How Hookup Culture is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused About Intimacy.” (Simon is professor of philosophy at Hope College in Holland, MI and Freitas was a former professor of religion at Boston College.) The book is written for a secular audience, but this review is from Christianity Today. Interesting propositions and insights on today’s college students and their attitudes and actions revolving around sex and intimacy.

A paragraph:

What Freitas finds most disturbing about hookup culture is that most of those who participate do so less than willingly. The students that she interviewed almost always saw their hookups as imposed by social expectations or as random acts—”It just happened” was a prevailing theme. In this context she has illuminating observations about the link between hookup sex and alcohol. Students “pre-drink” before going to parties because they want to be numb enough to do things that they would not do if sober. At some level they know that engaging with sexual behaviors of various sorts with strangers and casual acquaintances is demeaning. They brace themselves to do these things because they “know” that this is what “everybody” does at parties.

Where we are…

I’m reading Proverbs – seek wisdom!

Within the Church (and greater American Christianity) there is much “wisdom” that is going around these days on how to “save the Church” and increase involvement in Christianity among the increasingly disinterested and disaffected.

There is a standard and official, “This is what you have to do to survive and grow…” But, we tend to not really look around to see what is working, instead we tend to want to double-down doing what is subjectively familiar (even if not objectively working).

The parish I’ve served in for the past nine years has nearly doubled its average Sunday attendance within this time frame – and most of the new people are twenty-thirty somethings, singles, young-families.  Yet, if you listen to the “wisdom” of the zeitgeist that is going around concerning how our churches need to be situated, by what we do and focus on, we should have no one attending.  We seem to be the anti-zeitgeist (but not intentionally – we just don’t get caught up in all that “stuff”).

We never talk about inclusion or welcome.  Yet, we have tea-party people and Communists (literally – except for the religion part).  We have Socialist and stanch Capitalists.  We have people who think the next Pope should be a woman and people who think women shouldn’t be priests.  We have gay people marrying and people who think marriage is only between a man and a woman.

We never talk about diversity.  Yet, we have African-Americans, West Indians, and African-nationals; we have Hispanics and Asians and Middle-Easterners.  The majority is now Caucasian, but in the past they weren’t.  We have people who struggle mightily with belief in all this stuff and people who have amazing, deep, and simple faith.  We have people who have been members for literally 80-years and four new babies this past month.

Worse yet, our music is traditional (hymns for the 1982 hymnal with anthems and the like) our liturgy is non-fussy Anglo-Catholic with old fiddle-back chasubles (not all) with maniples, three sacred ministers, and “smells & bells.”  We are absolutely straight Prayer Book.  We use Rite I in our Sunday Mass and don’t change the words.  We celebrate “East-facing” with the priest leading the people all facing “East” together.  Frankly, we should be driving people out of the church screaming.  Yet, we are growing and struggling to keep up with the new people coming in.  Right now, we aren’t doing a good job with youth group ministry.  We don’t glory in all this, we don’t fight to maintain it, we just do it – it is just us.

Our sermons tend to be long for Episcopalians – probably closer to 15-minutes than not.  We don’t use all the buzzwords.  We rely on Scripture to do the talking.  We don’t emote all over the place, we don’t tell people that they should be liberals or conservatives or support the latest, greatest causes – we trust the people do determine for themselves what to be involved in as long as they obey the two great commands of Jesus (which they hear every week in the Rite I liturgy).

We don’t have an agenda, other than being the Body of Christ in this location – loving God with all our being and loving our neighbors as ourselves.

If we listen to the “powers that be” in current American Christianity we should stop doing just about everything we do.  Except, that is, if we listen and look around with humble hearts and seeking-to-learn attitudes and with open minds to listen and observe where God is building up His Church – those places that are growing like gang-busters, particularly among younger people – and observe what God is doing.

You see, those in power don’t need to be a block to what is coming.  There doesn’t need to be a “new movement” separate from the established institutions that live into new methods and approaches that resonate with the emerging generation.  They don’t need to be the block or hindrance, but too often they are.  At some point, we will learn or we will fade away.  “How do we not fade away?  Into the wild” we should go!

That, I think, is a good beginning point for employing wisdom.

Emerging Generations and the Church

I highly recommend this review of two books written in 2002 that appeared in the magazine “Touchstone”.  It is a great summary of the generational trends with regard to Christianity and the Church that began in the 1990’s among GenX’ers, and that have only increased over the past 10-years among the Millennials. The insights and the suggested trends are proving to be true!

The title of the review article is, “Orthodox Twenty Somethings,” and the reviewed books are: The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy
by Colleen Carroll, and The Younger Evangelicals: Facing the Challenges of the New World by Robert E. Webber.

Here are a few paragraphs that I find particularly compelling.

It isn’t supposed to be happening. Traditional Catholic piety is finding zealous practitioners at universities across the United States. The children of Planned Parenthood devotees are becoming advocates of Natural Family Planning. Nice suburban girls who ought to know better are making monastic professions in—you guessed it—traditional orders, and there are enrollment spikes on the charts of conservative seminaries across the Christian spectrum.

At the same time, some of today’s Evangelicals are unresponsive to the agendas of their immediate forefathers in worship, theology, and general “church strategy.” They are seeking instead “a biblically rooted, historically informed and culturally aware” evangelization of their hometowns, and the creation of new congregations attuned to the ancient faith. This isn’t quite supposed to be happening either.

None of this is supposed to be happening because it’s not the project for which two generations of Protestant and Catholic clergy have worked. And it’s certainly not what for decades a graying army of secularists has agitated for in American public life. The push for relativist moral teaching, “simplified” worship, interchangeable sex roles, and an utter separation of private belief from political expression has come from the pulpit as readily as it has been demanded by pseudo-intellectual elites. But against all odds, portions of a modern American society, which groans to find itself secularist, is returning in a quiet revolution to the fundamental truths of the Christian religion.

It goes without saying that “the primary cravings of young orthodox Christians in America—for tough time-tested teachings and worship imbued with mystery and a sense of the transcendent—are often the result of deficiencies in their childhood spiritual diet.”…

The evidence of public opinion polls shows a trend of twenty-somethings “clamoring for convention,” writes Carroll. The increase in Latin Mass attendance during the 1990s, for example, can be attributed to a “retro-revolt among U.S. Catholics,” rather than a nostalgic return by the elderly to a rite with which they grew up. Marie-Thérèse Scott-Hamblen, the young orthodox wife of a young orthodox Episcopal priest, may not have been the first to use the term “young fogey,” in The Living Church magazine in 2001, but she put her finger on a phenomenon that has reached even the most liberal denominations in the United States. As often as not, those who seek traditional worship in their congregations are young men and women whose only opposition is their parents’ generation of clergy and laymen. The older generation’s response tends to be in the negative; after all, worship has to be modern in language and form to appeal to “the young people,” that strange mass of mainline census data that never actually finds its way into a pew on Sunday morning…

The evidence of public opinion polls shows a trend of twenty-somethings “clamoring for convention,” writes Carroll. The increase in Latin Mass attendance during the 1990s, for example, can be attributed to a “retro-revolt among U.S. Catholics,” rather than a nostalgic return by the elderly to a rite with which they grew up. Marie-Thérèse Scott-Hamblen, the young orthodox wife of a young orthodox Episcopal priest, may not have been the first to use the term “young fogey,” in The Living Church magazine in 2001, but she put her finger on a phenomenon that has reached even the most liberal denominations in the United States. As often as not, those who seek traditional worship in their congregations are young men and women whose only opposition is their parents’ generation of clergy and laymen. The older generation’s response tends to be in the negative; after all, worship has to be modern in language and form to appeal to “the young people,” that strange mass of mainline census data that never actually finds its way into a pew on Sunday morning…

There is a built-in nostalgia for the pre-Constantinian Church in this worldview, which assumes the death of traditional Christendom and the birth of a new post-Constantinian model for Christian life—hence “ancient-future.”

I highly recommend reading the review if you want to understand what is truly happening within the cutting edges of American Christianity, rather than what those determined to maintain the status-quo would like us to believe.

Communion Without Baptism

Considering what is going on in the 2012 General Convention of the Episcopal Church right now with regard to resolutions related to changing the Church’s reaching to official acceptance of the unbaptized being given Holy Communion, I want to make more accessible the piece I recently wrote on the topic.

The piece that I wrote focuses to how emerging generations (younger folks) may or may not engage this issue (topic, point of contention, disagreement, fight, or whatever-else-it-might-be-called).  Primarily, what I say is that if we make this change for reasons related to “welcome” or “inclusion” or the removal of supposed “obstacles” to new people coming to our churches, that such reasons for such a fundamental change may play well with liberal-minded, Baby-Boomer sentiments, but it will be irrelevant for younger people.  Younger people deal with such issues from very different perspectives.

So that anyone who may want to read the essay/commentary without wading through irrelevent stuff, I have made a “Page” for my 2-cents worth of commentary.  Of course, you could just scroll down.

Here is the link:
http://www.hypersync.net/mt/communion-without-baptism-emer.html

Communion Without Baptism

The Millennial generation does not imagine they are accepting or rejecting the Christian Faith–they imagine they are entering into formation for a new way of life, and they expect the Church to initiate, guide, teach, equip, and send them. 

What follows delves into how this may play out when considering the practice of “communion without baptism.”

——————————————————————————————————–

The Lord GOD has given me

the tongue of a teacher,

that I may know how to sustain

the weary with a word.

Morning by morning he wakens–

wakens my ear

to listen as those who are
taught. (Isaiah 50:4-9a)

 

Isaiah’s words ring loudly if we take up the challenge to understand our times forthrightly and consider candidly the looming debates within the Church. I humbly pray that we as a Church may be as one who knows how to “sustain the weary with a word.” I pray that we all are awakened daily by the Lord with ears “to listen as those who are taught.”

We should recognize, even if unable at present to understand, that within Western culture and particularly American culture, we are undergoing a profound, long-term change.   This is absolutely true for the Church and Christianity in general, also. One advantage we have in the enduring Christian Church is that we’ve been around for a very long time and have seen this all before. The question is whether we will learn from the past or whether we will simply repeat the past mistakes and be subsumed by the present, temporary, and thin zeitgeist. Change is inevitable, and can be very good, but we have to question and examine the reasons and means for change – why, why now, how, to what degree, what might be the unforeseen consequences?, and so forth.

One of the current travails within the Church is how to stem the tide of decline so that we might again thrive. One of the aspects of change we are examining for the Church (and here I am speaking specifically of the Episcopal Church, the institutional expression of Anglicanism in the United States) is how to engage younger generations (really, for too many people it revolves are how to “appeal to”) younger generations.  One way proposed to appeal to younger folks is to remove all assumed “barriers,” including the need for baptism before the reception of Holy Communion, the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. Who are we, after all, to deny them something that doesn’t belong to us, anyway, right? The problem is – that plays well with Baby Boomer sentimental thinking, but not particularly well with younger generations in the aggregate.

So, what follows are some thoughts I have about “communion without baptism” as the issue plays out in the upcoming General Convention of
the Episcopal Church USA this summer.

 

Introduction:

communion from the cup2.jpgThe focus of this commentary deals with how the debate within the Episcopal Church over “communion without baptism” may be conceived of within the cultural melee experienced by “emerging generations”[i] and the place, needs, and hopes of younger people. The demographic we are primarily considering is the generation known as the “Millennials” or “Generation Y” – those who are roughly 11-29 years-of-age. This is a complex generation, and even while we are all still figuring out what makes them a coherent generation, there are reliable generational characteristics that can be generalized.

When dealing with the many theological, sociological, and pedagogical considerations concerning communion of the unbaptized, within the context of Millennials there are additional considerations that need to be taken into account: 1.) The influences of previous generations on the upbringing of this group of people; 2.) The general cultural context that this generation now inhabits and how they function within it; and 3.) The foundation upon which this generation builds its understanding of life, humanity, personhood, and the world and their engagement with it – their default “faith” or worldview. Each of these will be briefly dealt with below.

These additional considerations are couched within the overarching goals of being present with young people within their constantly changing contexts so to be a witness of God’s reconciling and regenerative presence and love, to learn how to translate the enduring,[ii]
living Christian Faith in ways that will resonate with them, and to discover the best means for bringing the emerging generation into the mystical Body of Christ and ultimately the parish community.

Finally, over the last ten years, I have repeatedly heard and read from young people that the older “leadership of the Church does not listen to us!” We are continually trying to reconfigure the Church and its worship attempting to be relevant and accessible in ways we presume younger people will like. Yet, they are not impressed, literally. We recognize this by their growing absence. What they are seeking is something worthwhile to live for – something that proves to them that it is important enough, big enough, and hopeful enough for their consideration and devotion.[iii] Many are finding this in other expressions of Christianity, even as studies and anecdotal evidence suggest that the hope and life of historic Anglicanism is primed to take advantage of the spiritual disposition of Millennials.

“The mind of a person with understanding gets knowledge; the wise person listens to learn more.” (Proverbs 18:15)

 

Influence of Previous Generations:

It has been said of Baby-Boomers (born between 1946 to around 1960[iv]) that they are the first generation to reject lessons learned from the past. There was and continues to be a generational suspicion of, if not outright rejection of, established institutions, convention, and what came before them. The generation untethered itself from the past in order to create a new world. A continuing example of this can be seen in TV commercials extolling how the Baby-Boomers are overthrowing traditional thinking and remaking retirement for themselves. Yet, Baby-Boomers were enculturated and formed as children within a society that still valued the sense of continuity and understanding that rests
with tradition and elder-wisdom. There was a collective rejection of how they were raised.

It has been said of Generation X (those born around 1961 through 1981) that they are the first generation to draw meaning from popular culture. They are the “MTV” generation. This seems to be a natural progression from the Baby-Boomer rejection of lessons learned from past generations and their values. Where else are GenX’ers to find meaning, if the past is moot and untrustworthy – even dangerous? They find meaning from what is – now. Of course, the “now” is constantly morphing, particularly when considering the advent of the Internet and the continual re-framing of what is and can be known as true or final or valid – all ideas, all theories, and all concepts are equal on the Internet. Generation X is the first generation to be raised with the growing sense of being unconnected to anything sure and trustworthy.

Research reveals that the Millennial Generation (those born after around 1982 until somewhere from 2001through 2004) is the first generation where social networking and technology predominate in their everyday lives. They have access to more information and the ability for connectivity than any other generation. Members express a strong sense of abandonment by adults. As a result, Millennials have created for themselves a hidden subculture that
most adults do not see or understand.[vi] Their lives revolve around fast changing, capricious, and often-manipulative fads perpetuated through a pervasive media. Underneath all the hype and hoopla, our young people are weary and wary even as they express hope for the future.

Consider that in the aggregate, the parents of Millennials
(generally Baby-Boomers) are not raising their children in any particular kind
of faith.  Many parents do not want their
kids to be unduly influenced by what they consider to be antiquated and
confining past religious expectations. This generational sensibility continues
to compel adults to want young people to develop their own personal religious
faith in their own time, if any religious belief at all. Yet, parents do not
give much guidance or instruction to their children with respect to spiritual
development generally or Christian formation specifically. A consequence is
that adolescents without any formal religious education or experience arrive on
college campuses or into the adult world without an understanding for making
sound judgments of what is a legitimate faith expression or what is cultic,
spiritually manipulative, or emotionally harmful. Thus, it is reasonable that a
default, culturally generated faith such as “Moralistic, Therapeutic, Deism”[vii]
has developed to fill the void.

Consider that even for the Millennials who are being raised
within institutional religious settings, particularly Mainline Protestantism,
the general zeitgeist compels parents and adults to attempt to be more like
coordinators who want to help young people discover their own beliefs rather
than teachers of an enduring, consistent Christian faith. For their own good,
we make our children take music lessons or attend athletic practices, but we do
not make them be a part of the church. Thus, the example set by Baby-Boomer
parents and adults generally does not convey to young people that this
Christian Faith is important enough to teach and pass-on to the next
generation. They believe Christian life is, therefore, not worthy enough for
their consideration and involvement.

Consider that Millennials report having very good and
important relationships with their parents. They believe in a positive future
and have a sense of confidence in their abilities. They believe that the
existence of the institutional Church is good and important, yet they do not
believe that the Church has any relevance for their own lives. Ironically, part
of the reason for this is that young people do not believe that most of those
who go to church are in fact particularly Christian.[viii]

Adults rarely perceive their engagement with young people in
these ways, but this is what younger people generally report experiencing.

Questions that might be helpful to ponder: Have parents
abandoned their responsibility to be engaged as the primary movers in the
spiritual formation of their children? Has the institutional Church relinquished
its obligation to teach the enduring Christian Faith handed down from
generation to generation? Has the institutional Church itself been overwhelmed
and usurped by prevailing culture?  Why
do we find ourselves in a situation where fewer people among the emerging
generations find any relevance or alternative within the Church to what they
experience in the world? 

 

The Cultural Dynamic:

The cultural environment within which Millennials have and
are growing up is substantially different than any other generation in the
history of the U.S. Family dynamics, the ubiquitous use of technology that
enables instantaneous access to entertainment and communication, relationships
that are not bound by geography or tactile presence, and the omnipresence of
information and opinion are but a few significant considerations. There is the
extension of the “latch-key” phenomenon of the 1980’s and 90’s where parents
exert less and less formal oversight of and casual engagement with their
children. For many Millennials, the parental project of raising their children
and instilling an ethical system has been turned over to the schools. This same
dynamic is occurring as parents turn over the Christian formation of their
children to the institutional Church, if they engage any religious practice at
all. Children are less likely to have family traditions, generational wisdom,
or religious beliefs passed on to them by their parents. Finally, constant
change has bred a sense of being disconnected to anything sure and a chaos that
seems to rule their lives.

We are all enculturated from birth into ways of thinking and
being within our social environs and within common culture. Enculturation
normally occurs unconsciously as the prevailing social norms and expectations
are conveyed through media, educational systems, family influence, and peer
relationships. Religious institutions are playing far less of a positive role
than in the past. Enculturation can “form” us positively and negatively. We are
“formed” unknowingly, but for the Christian a process of intentional
“re-formation” is important in order to identify and heal those aspects of
enculturation that are negative and harmful to our individual and social good.

The reality we face as Christians living in the second
decade of 21st Century America is that young people are “formed” by
aspects of popular culture that work contrary to their spiritual health – the
way of life we are called to by Jesus Christ that enables a sustainable society
full of beauty and at peace. This is most significant because they lack basic
understandings of Christian truths formerly communicated through the common
culture of Christendom that mitigated aspects of negative enculturation.

Taking into account the coming and going of various
Christian movements over the past sixty-odd years, we have seen great change in
American Christianity. We are now reaping the results of Mainline Protestantism
of the ’60’s through 70’s and American-Evangelicalism of the 1980’s with the
resulting politicization and polarization of religion coupled with the ending
of Christendom.[ix]  Church practice has developed into a kind of “therapy” church – within the churches it has become more important to try to
make people feel good about themselves (and the Church) than to teach the enduring
Faith tradition or challenge people to strive for the amendment of life through
Christ. This kind of “church” has resulted in little Christian growth and
maturation.[x]

We are well past the “Seeker/Church Growth Movement” of the
1990’s as a phenomenon primarily among Baby-Boomers with its reaction against
institutional Christianity and tradition. We are now beyond the “Emergent
Movement” coming into its own during the 2000’s, which was and continues to be
a phenomenon among primarily GenX ‘ers engaged in figuring out how to be the
Church within Postmodernism, which among other things opens again an acceptance
of mystery. 

Among Millennials, we are realizing the phenomenon of the
end of the “Constantinian-Era” of Western Christianity – a “Post-Constantinianism.”
Aside from changes in technology and some social structures, we have entered
into a social construct that has much in common with the way early Christians
experienced life within prevailing cultures that were at best indifferent and
at worst hostile to Christian faith and life.

The questions to ponder within current cultural contexts are
these: How does the Church respond within a culture that no longer supports
Christian notions of the human being, of ethics, of our world, and of our place
in the world?  How does the Church
respond to a generation of which the majority of members have no formal
religious education and very little meaningful religious experience? How should
the Church respond to younger people who seek a kind of “spirituality,” but
have little notion of what that means or how to attain it outside of cultural
trend, whim, or fickle personal feelings?

 

The Default Faith of
the Millennials:

The “National Study of Youth and Religion”[xi]
reveals that younger people have developed a sense of spirituality that the
authors define as “Moralistic, Therapeutic, Deism.” This is not just another
variant of the Christian Faith, the authors stress. It is an uncritical
something-else that has developed among younger people as a result of their enculturation.
They are usually not able to coherently articulate this as a spiritual
belief-system, yet it well describes their sense of a supreme-being and how
they engage with such a supreme-being and how that supreme-being engages them,
including how they are to behave. This god is out there somewhere, doesn’t
really have concern for human affairs, but is expected to hopefully bail us out
of trouble when we need it, and the highest moral ideal is to be nice (which is
not the same as loving your neighbor as yourself).

Regrettably, the authors write that this default “faith” of
younger people is not a result of churches teaching the Christian Faith badly.
This is, in fact, the “faith” that primarily Mainline Protestantism is now
teaching by example to its young people.[xii]
As a priest recently said, “My church is full of unconverted people.” It is
very difficult for those who do not effectively know the Christian Faith and
the life resulting from such a Faith to instill in the emerging generation a
meaningful and consequential Christian understanding and experience. We are
collectively living a deficient form of Christianity, and young people know it.

Consider that with respect to religious or spiritual
beliefs, an understanding of the self, and knowledge of Christian faith and
praxis among emerging generations, research reveals the dire need for clear and
consistent teaching from the Church. We need to reengage our teaching ministry
– the process of catechetical formation among people who know little about the
Faith. In these days, an institution that cannot clearly articulate its
beliefs, its purpose, and its uniqueness will quickly lose the interest of
younger people. Too many other things are gaming for their attention.

Questions to ponder as we think about faith development
among younger people: If the culturally inspired, default spiritual
understanding of a growing majority of Millennials is no longer built upon a
foundation of historic Christian thought and practice, how must the Church
respond? What is the teaching responsibility of the Church when approached by
those who know little or nothing about the Christian understanding of humanity,
the world, and God’s call to us? How do we live in ways that bear witness to a
God who is personal and comes among us, who is engaged with us through history,
and who desires us to come into the fullness of Christ?

 

Final Considerations:

Consider that there is a difference between respectful
listening so to learn how to better engage and teach emerging generations and,
alternately, a kind of listening that ends up relinquishing the obligation to
teach so to avoid controversy or perceived affront. It is always easier and
less controversial to be an impassive spiritual guild rather than a forthright
teacher.  We tend to think that being
less demanding and more vague will mean more interest and participation. This
way of thinking is continually shown to be false.

Consider, too, that there is a difference between giving the
consecrated elements of Holy Communion to unbaptized people for pastoral
reasons and the giving of the elements to unbaptized people as a matter of
course for reasons surrounding hospitality or inclusivity. As is evident in the
aggregate, that emerging generations are not responding to an increased focus
on “hospitality” and “inclusivity.” There is a desire for community,
fellowship, and diverse environments assuredly, but these things are not
understood by Millennials within the same concept of “hospitality” or
“inclusivity” that is proffered by many leaders within the Church at this time.

Consider that notions that emerging generations are not
interested in their spiritual lives, in church attendance, or learning about
the enduring Christian Faith are all simply myth, often used by leadership to
make excuses for the absence of young people from the Church. There are a
plethora of churches and Christian groups that are growing and thriving among
Millennials. The problem is that our Church, along with many, have all lost the
collective ability to not only experience the fullness of the Life in Christ
among present members, but have relinquished the project of learning how to
translate and pass on the enduring Christian Faith and practice to the next
generation in ways that resonate with them.

Could it be that we no longer listen to learn, effectively?
Could it be that we no longer are able to give comfort with a word in ways that
emerging generations can receive?

 

Conclusion: Bringing
it all together –

The churches in which I grew up considered both baptism and
the Lord’s Supper to be only symbolic. We were baptized at an age of
accountability only as an outward sign of a decision already made. We received
communion crackers and grape juice only as a remembrance of Jesus’ sacrifice
and resurrection. There was no sacramental understanding and no “means of
grace” held within the elements. The church in which I spent eight years as a
lay campus pastor before becoming an Episcopalian is growing with over a
million more members in the U.S. than the Episcopal Church (with probably two
million more showing up on Sundays) and approximately 70 million members
worldwide – nearly as large as the entire Anglican Communion. Yet I can say
authoritatively that the continued growth in these kinds of churches is not
because people have a warm feeling of welcome as a result of being allowed to
take communion regardless of where they are in their personal or spiritual
lives. And, these are not churches where the members leave their brains at the
door.

Most all indicators among younger people point in a
direction where clear teaching, rigorous yet fair expectation, and deeply held
beliefs-proven-over-time are what they are seeking. They do not want to be told
what to believe out-of-hand. This can help explain their declining interest in
Evangelical and Roman churches. Yet, they seek something efficacious by which
to be challenged – not just the same, old thing they experience in a wearying
common culture.

We know that there is an increasing sense of loneliness and
narcissism among emerging generations.[xiii]
Technology is passé. Moving forward, an important ministry of the Church will
be to re-teach in word and by example how to have and maintain low-tech,
tactile, supportive, and multigenerational relationships.

Millennials are seeking something that is not bound by the
chaos of constant change. Those who are truly trying to find God and develop a
spiritual understanding of life are seeking examples of real alternatives to
the morass of prevailing culture among people who claim this enduring Faith.
They are seeking something that is not trite or superficial and something that
proves to be profoundly consequential.

Changing the Canons and teaching of this Church to provide
as normative communion without baptism will have profound consequence concerning
what this Church has taught and lived for centuries as part of the One Holy
Catholic and Apostolic Church and for our ecumenical relationships, but such
change will not cause a re-engagement of Millennials with this Church. It will
not provide for younger people collectively an example of vibrant and
significant belief. It will have little consequence for the Church as it tries
to attract a new generation of faithful Christians.

By providing an open invitation to come and explore this radical
Christian reality, we give young people who have little real knowledge of
Christian belief and practice the freedom to seek and question and wrestle with
the implications of this Faith. When they believe themselves ready to heed the
call of Jesus to enter into more formal relationships with God and other
parishioners in the context of the mystical Body of Christ, we make available
to them baptism – the initiation into the Church. Finally, when they believe
that they are ready to take upon themselves the profound significance of
Christ’s death and resurrection through the reception of the consecrated
elements of Holy Communion, they have a good understanding of what they are getting
themselves into. They have then determined for themselves that this life in
Christ is truly what they seek.  This is
not an effort to usher them into an exclusive club, but to meet them where they
are as they seek that which remains sure and true over time and demonstrates a
way of being that is life altering, with immense and eternal consequences. Centered
on Christ, this is a word that sustains the weary.

(Special thanks to The Rev. Amy Coultas for the beginning summation!)

Respectfully submitted for consideration by:
The Rev. Robert Griffith, SCP
Imago Dei Initiative
Brooklyn, NY



[i] By using the term “emerging,” there is recognition
and expectation that the process of understanding a new generation is forever a
process in flux, always emerging along with the young people who are growing
up.

[ii] By using the word “enduring,” there is the
recognition that within the deep and ancient stream of Christian Tradition are
aspects that remain constant over time, through trial and persecution, within a
plethora of cultures and languages, and that always inspire the worship of and
relationship with Almighty God.

[iii] Research studies are numerous, but consider the
“National Study of Youth and Religion” (NSYR) and the Barna Research Group
findings as examples. For a brief list of research organizations and for a
short bibliography of articles and books pertaining to changing culture and
emerging generations, see http://imagodeiinitiative.org/inquiry.  (Last accessed April 19, 2012)

[iv] Dates based on Strauss-Howe Generational Theory. See
for more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss-Howe_generational_theory
(Last accessed April 19, 2012)

[v] See the research findings reported in the books:
Clark, Chap (2005). Hurt: Inside the
World of Today’s Teenagers;
and (2011) Hurt
2.0.
Grand Rapids: Backer Academic.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] See below for a fuller explanation of this default
“faith.”

[viii] See the report from the Barna Research Group:
Kinnaman, David, & Lyons, Gabe (2007). 
unChristian: What a New Generation
Really Thinks about Christianity and Why It Matters
. Grand Rapids: Baker
Books. See: http://www.unchristian.com/ (Last accessed April 19, 2012)

[ix] For our purposes, we are defining: “Post-Christendom”
as the end of official social institutions supporting and encouraging a
Christian worldview; “Postmodernism” as the philosophical system that has come
to predominate educational and social understanding, but more specifically
expressed on-the-ground and within everyday life; and “Post-Constantinianism”
is recognized when even the culture and social-fabric no longer support or encourage
a Christian worldview and when within local contexts Christianity becomes the
minority belief system.

[x] See the article: “When Are We Going to Grow Up? The
Juvenilization of American Christianity,” Christianity Today Online; posted
June 8, 2012.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2012/june/when-are-we-going-to-grow-up.html?utm_source=connection-html&utm_medium=Newsletter&utm_term=2407189&utm_content=128084430&utm_campaign=2012
(Last accessed 6/16/12)

[xi] NSYR website: http://www.youthandreligion.org/ (Last
accessed Apirl 19, 2012)

[xii] See – Dean, Kenda Creasey (2010). Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our
Teenagers Is Telling the American Church
. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
For more information: http://kendadean.com/almost-christian/ (Last accessed April
19, 2012)

[xiii]Marche, S. (May 2012). 
Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? Atlantic
Magazine
. Retrieved April 13, 2012, from
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-facebook-making-us-lonely/8930/

A Generation In Transition

I just came across the findings of the “2012 Millennial Values Survey” conducted by Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs.  The title of the analysis paper is, “A Generation In Transition: Religion, Values, and Politics among College-Age Millennials.”  I’ve just perused the 51-page document, but it looks very interesting!!

Download the .pdf file here: http://publicreligion.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Millennials-Survey-Report

Let us affirm our faith…

For those who have ears to hear! The following quote comes by way of Kendra Creasy Dean in her book, “Almost Christan: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church” (2010), p. 70. Dean was one of the researchers for the “National Study of Youth and Religion.”

“Creeds are articulated beliefs. The theologian William Placher defends the importance of creeds by citing Lionel Trilling:

‘It is probably true that when the dogmatic principle in religion is slighted, religion goes along for awhile on generalized emotion and ethical intention — morality touched by emotion – [but] then it loses the force of Its impulse and even the essence of Its Being…

‘Even if I have a warm personal relationship with Jesus, I also need an account of what’s so special about Jesus to understand why my relationship with him is so important. If I think about dedicating my life to following him, I need an idea about why he’s worth following. Without such accounts and ideas, Christian feeling and Christian behavior start to fade to generalized warm fuzziness and social conventions.'”

Find the book on Amazon.

Fetishation of Social Media

An article on the HuffingtonPost, by Arianne Huffington, entitled, “Virality Uber Alles: What the Fetishization of Social Media Is Costing Us All.”  Below are some paragraphs that I thought summarized the gist of the article…

Going viral has gone viral. Social media have become the obsession of
the media. It’s all about social now: What are the latest social tools?
How can a company increase its social reach? Are reporters devoting
enough time to social? Less discussed — or not at all — is the value
of the thing going viral. Doesn’t matter — as long as it’s social. And
viral!

The media world’s fetishization of social media has reached
idol-worshipping proportions. Media conference agendas are filled with
panels devoted to social media and how to use social tools to amplify
coverage, but you rarely see one discussing what that coverage should
actually be about. As Wadah Khanfar, former Director General of Al
Jazeera, told our editors when he visited our newsroom last week, “The
lack of contextualization and prioritization in the U.S. media makes it
harder to know what the most important story is at any given time.”

Our media culture is locked in the Perpetual Now, constantly chasing
ephemeral scoops that last only seconds and that most often don’t matter
in the first place, even for the brief moment that they’re “exclusive…”

Michael Calderone about the effect that social media have had on 2012
campaign coverage. “In a media landscape replete with Twitter, Facebook,
personal blogs and myriad other digital, broadcast and print sources,”
he wrote, “nothing is too inconsequential to be made consequential…

“We are in great haste,” wrote
Thoreau in 1854, “to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to
Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to
communicate.” And today, we are in great haste to celebrate something
going viral, but seem completely unconcerned whether the thing that went
viral added one iota of anything good — including even just simple
amusement — to our lives…. We’re treating virality as a good in and of itself, moving forward for
the sake of moving.
“Hey,” someone might ask, “where are you going?” “I
don’t know — but as long as I’m moving it doesn’t matter!” Not a very
effective way to end up in a better place…

“But as Twitter’s Rachael Horwitz wrote to me in an email, “Twitter’s algorithm favors novelty over popularity.”

“Indeed, to further complicate the science of trending topics, a subject
can be too popular to trend: In December of 2010, just after Julian
Assange began releasing U.S. diplomatic cables, about 1 percent of all
tweets (at the time, that would have been roughly a million tweets a
day) were about WikiLeaks, and yet #wikileaks trended so rarely that
people accused
Twitter of censorship. In fact, the opposite was true: there were too
many tweets about WikiLeaks, and they were so constant that Twitter
started treating WikiLeaks as the new normal.”

So, the question remains: as we adopt new and better ways to help people
communicate, can we keep asking what is really being communicated? And
what’s the opportunity cost of what is not being communicated while
we’re all locked in the perpetual present chasing whatever is trending?…

These days every company is hungry to embrace social media and virality,
even if they’re not exactly sure what that means, and even if they’re
not prepared to really deal with it once they’ve achieved it.

Or as Sheryl Sandberg put it,
“What it means to be social is if you want to talk to me, you have to
listen to me as well.” A lot of brands want to be social, but they don’t
want to listen, because much of what they’re hearing is quite simply
not to their liking, and, just as in relationships in the offline world,
engaging with your customers or your readers in a transparent and
authentic way is not all sweetness and light. So simply issuing a
statement saying you’re committed to listening isn’t the same thing as
listening. And as in any human relationship, there is a dark side to
intimacy.

“The campaigns can sort of distract reporters throughout the day by helping fuel these mini-stories, mini-controversies,” said the New York Times’
Jeff Zeleny. Mini-stories. Mini-controversies. Just the sort of
Twitter-friendly morsels that many in the media think are best-suited to
the new social media landscape. But that conflates the form with the
substance, and we miss the desperate need for more than snackable,
here-now-gone-in-15-minutes scoops. So we end up with a system in which
the media are being willingly led by the campaigns away from the issues
that matter and the solutions that will actually make a difference in
people’s lives. 
[emphsis mine]

Read the whole article.

What might this say for the Church and its obsessive, and at times pathological, preoccupation with social media?  Are the same observations written in this article true for us?  I hear from so many sources of younger people that older leadership in charge simply do not and will not listen (see the bold paragraph, above).

The enduring aspects of the Church in her liturgies, her patterns-of-life, and her foci mitigates against such trendy irrelevancies, yet many of us seem to think that everything must change now, often, and quickly, for its own sake, or we will be become irrelevant. Too often we think that which has endured must be sacrificed for the sake of trendy popularity. We willingly sell our patrimony for a bowl of desperately sought affirmation.

If you pay attention to what younger people are actually saying (in the aggregate), even if it isn’t what we want to hear, we might learn something that actually helps our situation. What I hear and see in the arrogate, and tell me otherwise form sources other than your own opinion, is that younger people are seeking after time-tested substance that is proven by its ability to endure and survive over time (and over time doesn’t mean over the last 30 years). We are tired of the chaos of constant change devoid of substance.  What is sought are examples of real lives that demonstrate a sense of proven surety built on consequential relationships focused on something other than self.

Virality doesn’t give such things – the type of things that give meaning to one’s life and a sense of true accomplishment and worth.