Why 20 and 30 Somethings Are Leaving the Church

I'm a couple weeks behind in my reading, but last month Christianity Today ran a really interesting piece on why 20 and 30 somethings are leaving the church.

As someone who's spent much of the the last 15 years trying to help 18-22 year olds grow up into the church, this article struck a deep cord in me.

It's worth a read for anyone who's a 20 or 30 something, who's in church or para-church ministry, or who finds themselves one of those 20 or 30 somethings who left the church along the way.

Check it out here.

Good Riddance to the Christendom Inoculation

So some of you (for reasons I can only imagine) follow along with me in spite of the fact that you don't believe most of the stuff I post about. Thanks for coming along anyway!

Let me explain a little something about my people who inhabit my corner of the American sub-culture, a.k.a. evangelical Christianity.

For much of our country's history, Christianity had a good bit of sway. Even when people didn't subscribe fully to all the tenets, the basic Judeo-Christian framework was still the core operating system.

"Christendom" is one name given to an era when Christianity functions as a quasi-moral compass in the broader culture. I recently heard one boomer talk about how his parents were committed Christians and his in-laws were not, but their lives looked basically the same on the outside.

Christendom ruled over "the greatest generation" of World War II vets up to the boomer generation, and so there was a good deal of commonality in terms of the day-to-day practices of many--obviously with lots and lots of exceptions. This was true even as there were tremendous assaults on the validity of the Bible and church authority throughout the early part of the twentieth century.

That's shifted a good bit over the past couple of generations. And many folks in my part of the world (particularly the really, really theologically and politically conservative ones) are really upset about the loss of "Christendom."

But I live and minister in a part of the country where Christendom still holds some sway. And at times I find it more difficult, not less, to talk about matters of faith in ways that are fresh and awakening.

"Inoculation" is when people get a weakened form of a virus or disease in order to build up appropriate anti-bodies to fight off the genuine form of the virus or disease. This is the deadly fruit of Christendom. They become inoculated with a weaker form of Christianity and thus resist the real thing.

Many of the people I work with have all the right vocabulary and all the wrong definitions. They think they already "get" Jesus, sin, grace, forgiveness, mercy, justice and the like. They don't (not that any of us do), and it's infinitely more complicated because they think that they do.

And that's in large part what I fight against as I wage war against Christendom here in the South. Christendom is not a friend except to those Christians who value a "same as me" cultural hegemony and familiarity and comfort over the genuine engagement with the truth of the gospel. Christendom is an enemy of the true gospel. Thank goodness it is dissipating...even here in the South.

Kierkegaard (a long-dead philosopher) has this to say: "Remove from the Christian Religion, as Christendom has done, its ability to shock, and Christianity...is altogether destroyed. It then becomes a tiny superficial thing, capable neither of inflicting deep wounds nor of healing them"

The Duplicitous Response to Tiger Woods Duplicity

So I'm a little amused by the media-world's reaction to the Tiger Woods saga.

Here's the deal: if we're going to worship sex as a god, it's going to have consequences. Give most any man the kind of temptations that Tiger Woods would receive on any given weekend and 95.9% of them would do what he did.

The thing that roots my commitment to my wife (perhaps strangely) is theology: what it means to be image-bearers of God, the God-ordained purpose of sexuality, a commitment to following Jesus no matter what the cost, and a growing understanding of what it means that marriage is supposed to mirror Christ's commitment to the church.

Mix in the power of God's Spirit. God's Spirit has worked in me over many years to shape my sexuality, my disciplines, my thoughts, my desires for marriage and to develop in me holy appetites for things more important and more eternal than sexual experiences. I pray that God will continue to develop and keep me. I'm not done battling for myself, my marriage, and my family. That battle will go on for most of my days.

But take all that away, and all you have is meager will-power contra raging hormones. Hormones will win that battle eventually in most cases. See Letterman, David, Clinton, Bill, and on and on and on and on.

I'm not saying that only Christians can be faithful to spouses. Obviously, some who do not hold to the same worldview that I do manage to honor their marriage vows. They would have to speak to their own motives for doing so. For myself, I can only see either the most will-powered, the most conscientious, or the least sought-after surviving apart from a commitment to something greater than themselves. .

Sadly, many who claim to (and some who indeed do) follow Jesus still fall into marital infidelity. For many, that point becomes a significant watershed place of repentance, awakening,and transformation co-mingled with the pain and brokenness.

Such is the power of the gospel, the power of the God who loves us and who offers forgiveness, that he can redeem even the most broken and willfully committed of acts.

I'm just saying that it's duplicitous for us as a culture to condemn a man who simply does what our culture has encouraged him to do for his entire life. It does not excuse what he's done. I believe what he's done is destructive and awful.

But I believe that because of a ton of other things that I believe that our culture en mass does not. On what grounds is the media throwing stones? And what's with all these glass houses everywhere?

Perhaps here, too, I am conflicted. Which symptom of cultural dis-ease would be worse: for the condemnation to rain down (in spite of the fact that there is no actual reason why most do so) or for no one to note or even care? Perhaps the latter would be far worse.

But both options would be indicative of cultural sickness. And perhaps that, in the end, is the point. Let's call it what it is: sickness. And let us, along with Tiger, repent and turn back to the God who made us (sexuality and all) that we might live the life we were made for.

Child Pornography and Sunday Morning Worship

Yesterday morning I was reading a disturbing front-page story about a man who got tangled up in the underworld of child pornography.

His story was part disturbing, part tragic: sexually molested as a child, discovering his dad's porn magazine a few years after that, drugs and alcohol addictions conquered, sexual addictions that remained un-conquered and that eventually over-ran his life. And now he's awaiting sentencing, minimum of five years.

A separate story ran next to it about how the internet has fueled the exponential growth of the child pornography industry over the past ten years.

Yesterday was Sunday. So of course I'm reading this as we're getting ready to go to church. And a part of me wondered: what's the point of sitting in a room of beautiful (and not-so-beautiful) people and singing songs and listening to someone talk about a good God when messed up stuff like this is going on in the world?

I went to church smarting. I was angry at the crap in the world and wondering what good it did to go to church in the midst of it all.

And then I got there. And then I noticed the words we were singing, the truths that we were being taught. I took the bread and the wine. And I remembered what good it all did.

Everyone worships something. The man in the article had his life built around sexual addiction that fed a disfigured industry that led to a disfigured soul and the exploitation of kids. That's the power of worship, mis-directed: lives not just destroyed but mangled in all directions.

And so I must be there on Sunday mornings. I must be reminded to worship rightly because my culture invites me to worship wrongly--and then they wonder what happened when it careens out of control.

Child pornography happens because right worship doesn't. We exist to worship, and so we will--one way, one thing, or another. And so I must worship God. And I have come to believe that he has made himself known in Jesus in a uniquely historical way.

And so I worship this God, so that I might not fall into my own version of a mangled and disfigured life with consequences in every direction. And I call others to do so as well, that they, too, might worship rightly and avoid the destruction that inevitably follows a life of mis-directed worship.

Child pornography needs Sunday morning's worship. To be sure it's not a magic potion, not a cure-all--there's all kinds of broken, messy, mis-directed worshipers gathered on any given Sunday morning in any given church.

To worship on Sunday morning does not guarantee that right worship will happen. But to not worship on Sunday morning, almost certainly guarantees that it will not.

From Hormones to Organic: Our Bi-Polar Obsession with Technology and Safety

The other day Kelly let me in on a conversation swirling around her mommy world: is our culture (specifically parents in our culture) overly-concerned about safety?

From obsession with chemicals in foods to mandatory bike helmets to the doing-away with all the "cool" playground equipment that we had when we were kids, have we just become flat-out paranoid?

My take is that we are a bit paranoid, but that's just half of the equation.

As a culture, we are obsessed with perpetually pushing the envelope in terms of bigger, faster, more and more. Our insatiable demand doesn't always allow for considered evaluation of consequences.

So, for example, we create farms where we inject with hormones to bulk up the beef. But then years later we begin to wonder if the hormones are doing strange things to our kids. Ergo, witness the fresh wave of obsession with organic foods, particularly marketed to parents as safer alternatives to the aforementioned hormone-injected beef.

Jacque Ellul is a dead French guy who wrote prophetically about the consequences to a people when they focus on means rather than ends. He argued that the technological society loses its soul in the relentless pursuit of expediency without any regard to the larger and more important questions of meaning and purpose.

As a technologically-obessesed culture, we will always be a bit bi-polar. We will always be making phenomenal advances that promise much. And we will be regularly reaping the un-intended and un-expected ramifications of those advances.

And for some of us in parent-land, that makes us a little bit overly-obsessive about safety.

East Meets West on Northwest

I was in an airplane yesterday (Northwest--don't fly them, they charge you $15 for every bag you check), coming back from Madison and I got into an interesting conversation with a guy from India about the cultural differences he noticed between the U.S. and India. It gave me space to think about the things that I love and am concerned about for our country...all on the fourth of July holiday weekend.

His overall thoughts on American culture were positive. He noted, however, that Americans did not have as strong an emphasis on family bonds.

He also suggested that Americans did not have the value on education that Indians did. His take on the rapid rise to the world stage for India had to do with several generations of extremely well educated people. As companies were looking for places to expand, India had a groundswell of well-educated, hard-working people ready to hire...and for cheap, too.

Here again he noted the emphasis on the individual over the collective or family. In India, you study, no matter what your interests are. In America, if you're an artist, maybe you have more freedom to pursue that apart from classical formal education.

He felt that there was room here in his own family to try to bring together the best of both worlds--education and individual "empowerment."

I agreed with him that American individualism is both our strength and our downfall. My faith tradition sprang up from a culture that more highly emphasized the collective over the individual. As such, we often mis-read our own sacred texts, assuming that the "you" is the individual rather than the community. Our cultural lens throws us off.

I wondered about the educational piece. My experiences with Chinese and other eastern students is that the family and collective pressures often have a high toll on the students souls. If education and achievement becomes everything, then we forfeit our souls.

If our white temptation is to make ourselves gods, I wonder if the temptation in the east is to make the collective/the family god.

And lastly, the American education system has never been the best in the world and yet we've had vastly disproportionate economic impact around the globe.

That's because education does not always equal innovation. Our economic system has always had multiple on-ramps into it, and innovation and ideas and invention have always been a strong value, no matter who or what the source.

It is innovation that has driven our country's economic engine. The people at the top of the Dean's list often get there because they follow the rules. Innovators don't always follow the rules. Often, they're the C+ student who's brilliant but selectively interested.

I wonder if in an increasingly technological society, the need for education will increase and if we will finally pay for our inability to propel that "average middle" into a stronger academic track.

But at the end of a very engaging conversation on July 5th, I was glad to be a part of this messy, wonderful, obnoxious, turned around, innovative, upside-down country of ours.

No Attention Span Needed

My friend Margaret sent me this video after my post last week about my obsession with my cell phone. He's talking about the effect that media culture has on our souls.

As if to prove his point, about half-way through this really thoughtful and engaging 8-minute clip, I started to write an e-mail. Oh, the irony.

Check it out, stick with it, it's not bad...for a Wheaton guy.

Okay, after a couple of failed attempts at my first post with a video embeded, I'm realizing that I don't really know what the crap I'm doing and I'll have to get some help. Either I'm doing something wrong or it's just not working.

Sorry, here's the link, maybe one of you can help me figure out how to actually put it here in the body of my post: No Attention Span Needed

Blogging like It's 2029

So Prince is a genius. He releases an album on October 27, 1982 he post-dates the title track: 1999. He makes money the first time around and he makes money 17 years later, when 1999 rolls around.

Ditto George Orwell. He writes a book, post-dates it: 1984. Only one mistake there: he was dead by 1984.

Memo to all aspiring song-writers and authors: if you're going to write something, be sure to post-date it. But make sure it's a reasonable bet that you're still alive by then so that you can cash in on the goods.

I think I'm going to start post-dating all my blog posts from here on out.

The Last Word on Christians in Politics

Okay, so maybe not the real last word, but the last word from me for a while. This passage of Scripture has profoundly shaped how I think about political stuff (so much so that I've blogged about it before), maybe it'll be helpful for you as well.

Joshua was leading the Israelites into their promised destiny after forty years of wanderings in the desert. Here's what happens from Joshua 4:

Now when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, "Are you for us or for our enemies?" "Neither," he replied, "but as commander of the army of the LORD I have now come."

If ever any government or people-group had an officially God-sanctioned mandate to do something, it was Joshua with the Israelites. Yet even here, even as God's People, the Israelites, are about to take the land promised to them by Yahweh, the angel of the Lord refuses to take sides other than His own.

God is not a Republican. He is not a Democrat. He is not for America. He is not for Israel. He is ultimately not on any side other than his own. God is passionate for His own kingdom, His own glory. We dislike people who are like this, but God is a little bit different.

For a human to worship anything other than God is idolatory. If God were to exalt anything over Himself, even and especially humans, he, too, would be an idolator. So thankfully He doesn't. He is always and ultimately for Himself...which blesses us immensely. In so doing, he remains good. That is good news.

Circling back to Christians and politics, this is not to say that Christians should not affiliate or be committed to specific political parties. Christians are needed in both major parties to be salt and light.

But we do so as aliens, strangers, always. Neither party is the kingdom of God. Both have major flaws. We must soberly see those flaws clearly and work with love and faithfulness first to the Lord and secondly to the political parties we affiliate with.

This is not un-like our relationship with our jobs. A Christian IBM'er is to work faithfully and whole-heartedly, but ultimately realize that IBM is not the answer to the world's problems and there are going to be fundamental differences in terms of ultimate purpose.

I think history will show that the late-20th century move of evangelical Christians aligning themselves with the conservative right was pivotal in terms of mobilizing evangelicals to re-engage the political and social arena.

And I hope that the 21st century will show us mobilizing into every area of society, including both political parties, as agents of blessing, full of faith, hope, and love.

"The Coming Evangelical Collapse" Freak-Out Meets Evangelicals for Obama Bumper-Stickers

Yesterday I linked at the end of my post to an article by a current evangelical (which generally means "theologically conservative," for those of you outside our little fish pond) who predicted "the coming evangelical collapse." This aticle has generated much buzz in my part of the world--I've been forwarded a link to the article several times.

Here's his first reason why the collapse is coming:

Evangelicals have identified their movement with the culture war and with political conservatism. This will prove to be a very costly mistake. Evangelicals will increasingly be seen as a threat to cultural progress. Public leaders will consider us bad for America, bad for education, bad for children, and bad for society.

I think here the author, as in other places in the article, has a pulse on something but overstates and misses what has already happened around him.

Evangelicals, especially in their 30's and under, have already shifted away from being solely politically conservative. We are no longer in the hip-pocket of the Republican Party, thank goodness. The preponderance of "Evangelicals for Obama" bumper stickers are a small window into this movement.

Many, many 30-something and younger evangelicals voted for Obama. I did. I'm theologically conservative and socially/politically moderate. I voted for him while simultaneously preparing to work against him in regards to the abortion issue. It's not much different from backing Bush in previous elections while simultaneously preparing to work against him when it came to issues of the environment, gun control, and bending over backwards for big business.

Much of evangelicalism has waken up to the realization that we cannot be in the back-pocket of any one political party. What's pushing many of us past the stale old partnership with political conservatism is doing what evangelicals have always been famous for: reading our Bibles.

This is not to say that political liberalism is more biblical--it's to say that neither of them are biblical, so we must walk as faithfully as we can between the two and not be either groups "pet."

I've got theologically evangelical friends and students that I work with who range from libertarian to practically socialist. There's a political broadening already happening that will help evangelicalism to mature and continue to have an influence in our culture.

This is a good thing, and something that I think just might stave off "our collapse"...at least for a couple more years.

For a more comprehensive (and thoughtful) response to the article, check out Christianity Today's response here.

Irreligious-izing of America

Yesterday I read a story about a recent survey showing that America is becoming less and less religious. Specifically, less Christian. A couple of thoughts in response:

1. I think that the overall trend is true: Christianity is moving to the global South and East. America has only to look to Europe to see its religious future: a small band of faithful among a largely post-Christian, secular culture. I think that this might happen within the next 50 to 100 years.

2. The survey finds that the biggest losers are the mainline churches: Methodists, PC-USA, United Church of Christ, the Episcopal and Lutheran churches and others. Many of these churches have drifted so far away from historically faithful Christianity that they can barely be called Christian any more. Good riddance.

And so from this perspective, I think that this shift to a less culturally "Christian Nation" is a good thing. There are fewer people living a lie. There's more integrity in saying that you don't believe something than to go through the motions of some Sunday morning ritual that is done mostly out of habit or to gain social and/or business contacts.

It also sometimes makes for easier conversations about Jesus. One evangelism specialist I talked to said that his response rates in the more secularized, less churched North is way higher than his response rates in the more culturally-churched South.

People have been inoculated in the South with a weakened form of Christianity. They know the words but have all the wrong definitions. They think they know Jesus, but they don't. They have a truncated picture of him but they don't realize it.

3. Of course, the flip side of the good thing is that there is an experience of grace even in cultural Christianity. For example, to know the ten commandments and to somewhat live by them has a blessing innately woven into it. To attempt to live life cut off from our Source and our Purpose or the operating instructions given to us has innate consequences.

4. In the end, the article notes that evangelical churches, particularly mega-churches, are the ones that buck the trend and are booming. This makes sense as the corollary to point 3 above: as people grow tired of religious stuff that means nothing (as generally exercised in the mainline church), they either leave the church or they search for the real thing.

I think that that this is a unique time for the church in America. There is so much shifting ground both within the church and in the broader culture.

Evangelical Christianity is uniquely wired to respond to these changes because we've always believed that we had a message worth communicating to the culture, no matter what the cost. It remains to be seen if we've got what it takes to deal with the incredibly complex challenges coming at us right now.

One (Christian) commentator thinks that evangelicalism in the U.S. will collapse in the next 10 years along with the mainline churches. Some of it--maybe much of it--needs to die. It'll be interesting to see how it all unfolds.