Mike’s posts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Corey’s posts: Part 1, Part 2

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In his book You Lost Me, David Kinnaman writes:

There is a growing sensibility among young Christians that denominations emphasize believers’ differences while they would rather celebrate what Christians share in common. They don’t want to be defined exclusively by denominational categories. (p. 178)

The idea that church has been unnecessarily exclusive regarding beliefs and practices of Christianity is a key piece to understanding a Millennial remake of the church.

This plays out in a number of ways. First, Millennials are far more interested in finding points of agreement rather than points of disagreement. They do not understand the need to separate from someone over the 5% of ideas on which they differ. They would rather learn from the person they disagree with while staying in relationship with them. This makes room for a richer, deeper expression of Christianity that allows for different perspectives and traditions to continue to have a voice. Last night at our Launch Bible study, for instance, we talked about the beginning of Lent and why that has been an important season in the church. Most of the group had no background in liturgical Christianity, but they were intrigued and challenged to consider setting aside a time of the year for a specific focus on Christ and his death and resurrection.

Secondly, this attitude of inclusiveness makes room for those who are on the fringes to have a place in the community. One church I know of in Minneapolis that is made up of a large percentage of Millennials highly values the opportunity for everyone to have a voice. During one recent church service, a guest speaker was talking about financial issues and why it was important to give generously. At one point, he was interrupted by a homeless man who regularly attends the church who tried to articulate that what the speaker was saying didn’t make sense for him in his context. The speaker was flustered and didn’t know how to respond to the interruption and asked someone to have the man removed from the service. The church revolted against the speaker because everyone is allowed to have a voice, even if their perspective differs.

The challenge to this dichotomy of exclusion/inclusion is that Millennials have a hard time ever acknowledging that there may be beliefs/practices that do not fit into the historic Christian story. A Millennial church will have to find a way to discern truth from lies, good from bad, and together work to embrace practices that both deepen the faith and embrace the outcast.

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Yesterday, Mike and I wrote about the fact that one of the reasons that young people who had been connected with the church were leaving was related to the lack of integration between theology and the sciences. Young people struggle with that tension and have, in large numbers, chosen to side with science over religion.

Today, we tackle another of the issues that Kinnaman highlights in his research. He finds that most young people see church as shallow to the point of being virtually meaningless.

This sense of shallowness has a number of fronts. First, the belief system that young adults have inherited (moralistic therapeutic deism) has very little to do with everyday life. God is ‘out there’ somewhere, available when I need him, and generally wants me to be happy. However, there is no sense of how those feelings about God impact the decisions young people make or the values that they hold. The belief system is disconnected from any kind of overall mission in the world that young adults could embrace.

Second, young adults have few meaningful relationships with older adults in the church. Young people find depth in relationships, doing life together and learning together. If they are not relationally connected to mature Christians, they are unlikely to find anything of depth.

Finally, the church has unfortunately often settled for flippant answers and pithy phrases instead of diving deeply into the rich substance of the historic Christian faith. Too often, the message is the same that emerging adults hear from their parents: ‘because I said so.’

What could a Millennial church that takes this issue of shallowness seriously become? Here are a few suggestions:

• There would be a focus on relationships that are tied to mission – older adults engaging the world in meaningful ways alongside younger adults.
• There would be a renewal of the practice of discipleship – teaching young people the practices of following Jesus instead of simply ‘believing in God’
• Alongside discipleship, there would be a renewal of historic practices of the spiritual disciplines – exploring substance by deeply engaging the living presence of God in their lives.

This is just a start, but as the church becomes a church of substance, it gains the opportunity to reengage a wandering generation.

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David Kinnaman, in his book You Lost Me, offers six reasons why the church is losing this generation:

• Overprotective
• Shallow
• Antagonistic to science
• Out of touch with sexuality
• Unnecessarily exclusive
• Unfriendly to those who doubt

In this series, we will be examining these ideas and imagining a different kind of church. Today, we imagine a church that is Integrative – where science is not discounted and where the church integrates insights from psychology, philosophy and other sciences to better understand the world where God has placed us.

Having grown up in evangelical churches, I experienced firsthand the strange tension of being offered one set of truths from the church and an alternate reality from my school. There was always this deep distrust of science and psychology with built in assumptions that the “secular world” was intentionally developing an alternate view which would discount the need for God. Occasionally however, there would be celebrated moments where a scientific discovery helped offer insight into God’s creation or validating biblical truth.

The end result of this antagonistic attitude toward science is that science is only meaningful when it agrees with what I already believe. If there is an apparent conflict between science and the church, science is always wrong.

For many people, this tension is acceptable. Science is the enemy and the church must protect its children from the secular humanistic philosophy that it offers. However, Millennials increasingly have refused to buy into this perspective. When they see science and the church in conflict and the church refusing to admit that it might have something to learn from scientific discoveries, it becomes harder to side with the church. The church seems increasingly irrelevant and out of touch with reality.

What would a church look like that took these concerns into consideration? I think it would have the following characteristics:

• A posture of learning instead of a posture of knowing
• Holding secondary truths (those that are not central to the Christian story) with open hands
• Attributing meaning to the discoveries that science makes (science can offer facts, but the church can place those facts into a meaningful story of God and faith in the world)
• Engaging rather than simply discounting scientific discoveries that challenge accepted theology
• Being open with children and youth about potential challenges to current church teaching

None of these suggestions are harmful to the truths that the church holds, particularly the main truth about Jesus and his work of salvation.  What these suggestions do is create a new attitude which engages the world rather than being in opposition to the world. Certainly there can be a time and place for different perspectives and current scientific understandings can be wrong, but an overall attitude of learning can help reengage Millennials who are not interested in open hostility to the education that they have received.

Faith, Science, and the Millennials

The Biggest Career Mistakes Millennials Make

Pastoring Emerging Adults

What Makes a Good Young Adult Ministry?

Helicopter Parents Hover in the Workplace

When Did Programming Become the P-Word?

Facebook Generation’s Millennials Not Very Romantic in the Digital Age

Millennials, Religion, and a Reason for Hope

Employment Rate for Young Adults Lowest in 60 Years

Generation Y Remains Upbeat Thanks to Mom and Dad

Ten Characteristics of Young Adults

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Corey wrote this commentary on suburban homelessness for our local newspaper

The Changing Spirituality of Emerging Young Adults

How Can I Find a New Church?

The Mary Celeste and Understanding Adolescence

Europe’s Lost Generation

4 Things Millennials Want In Their Leaders

20 Points on Leading Millennials

There was much celebrating and rejoicing as the ark was carted down the road until the ox cart hit a bump, the ark began to slide off the cart, and a man named Uzzah reached out and grabbed it to prevent it from falling. In response, God struck Uzzah dead instantly.

This story is challenging, difficult to understand. It seems like such an overreaction on God’s part to kill someone for attempting to save the ark from crashing to the ground even if it violated some rule about not touching it. Even David, the man after God’s heart, was angry and frustrated. He went home without the ark, deciding that it wasn’t worth the trouble or danger.

There are a lot of stories like this one in the Bible.  Stories where it seems that things don’t make sense, where God doesn’t make sense. It seems that God can be angry, capricious, violent and vindictive.

But maybe sometimes we just don’t know all the details. Maybe there are gaps in the story.

Maybe Uzzah and his family had mistreated the ark for the years that they had possession of it. Maybe they had a long pattern of disregarding God’s desires and God’s way of treating his tangible presence among the people. Maybe the casual way he reached out and touched the ark (which was supposed to be carried by Levites using long poles rather than on a cart) was symptomatic of decades of controlling God and practicing the faith his way. And maybe God needed an event like this to serve as a wake-up call to remind the nation of his holiness and power as their faith was about to be renewed under David’s leadership.

Maybe none of that is true, but the reality is that we don’t know what is in the gaps in the story.

And we don’t know what is in the gaps in our stories.

When challenges happen, when our stories take sharp turns in unexpected or undesired directions, when we don’t know or understand what God is doing, maybe we don’t know the whole story. Maybe there are plot twists that are about to happen that we won’t see resolved for years down the road. Or like a poor movie, maybe they will never be resolved to our satisfaction.

But maybe they will. And as we learn to trust God through the gaps, we can experience a sense of peace in the middle of the turmoil.

When have you seen gaps in your story filled in years later? What gaps are happening right now in your life that you don’t understand where you may need to seek a new perspective?

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How Teenagers Communicate – 7 Things You Should Know

Sex on campus, the campaign trail, and in the classroom

Are We Scaring Kids Off of Adulthood?

Where Youth Ministry is Going

Why Young Adult Ministry Matters

Millennials and Baby Boomers: At Odds or Peas in a Pod?

13 Ways the Recession Has Changed How Millennials View Work

Happiness is the New Success: Why Millennials are Prioritizing

4 Steps for Effective Small Groups

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5 Messages Teens Need to Hear

Generational Transference

Why Young Adults Leave the Church

Population of Needy College Students is Exploding

Generation ‘Y’ asks ‘Why Us?’

The message that Millenials can do anything is a pervasive one in American culture, to the point that you almost feel like a crotchety old grandpa if you gently suggest to a 20 year old who failed math that she might want to rethink her career dreams of being a rocket scientist. While the clip takes it to a ridiculous extreme, it sadly doesn’t exaggerate very much.

We have created a generation of narcissists that have bought completely into the message of positive self-esteem that we have sold them over the past 20 years that they truly believe that there is no limit to their dreams, no ceiling to their abilities, and that everything they do is amazing.

I certainly don’t want to be the kind of person who crushes dreams. Sometimes those dreams do unbelievably work themselves into reality.

But more often, there comes an emerging adult identity crisis where a young person is crushed with the reality that their dreams are not going to come to fruition. For the young man that was sure he was going to be a rock star, a famous novelist, a brain surgeon or a Super Bowl MVP, this identity crisis forces him to start over in figuring out who he is in light of these new circumstances.

This identity crisis provides space for others to walk alongside and sensitively speak into the lives of emerging adults, offering hope and direction, and helping them to find identity in Christ rather than in unrealistic dreams.

How have you seen this “you can do anything” concept played out in emerging adults in your context?
What would you say to an emerging adult in the middle of an identity crisis?