What My Generation Needs From Church

The questions are constant anymore.

“Why are young people leaving the church?”

“What does this generation want from church?”

“How do we get millenials to stay/come back?”

It’s the great existential crisis of the 21st century church. Every denomination every where is bleeding people my age, for a myriad of reasons, some known, some unknown.

old-churchThere is a key factor in this migration that I think is too often overlooked. It’s not the only reason we are leaving church, but it’s a pretty big part of it.

Authenticity.

We want authenticity. We want authentic, unmanufactured experiences of the Divine.

My generation has been sold to since the day we were born. Advertising and commercialized products have been our constant environment. Every where we go, everything we do is marketed and analyzed and fine tuned to appeal to this or that demographic.

And frankly, we are sick of it.

We are sick of being told what to buy, what is important, what is cool enough for us. We are sick of being treated as numbered consumers, rather than individuals with a full, unique complement of desires and needs and ideas.

So when we walk into a church, the last thing we want is for that church to being hawking a product. We don’t need slick, PR-certified tracts of watered-down theology; we don’t need hip pastors and loud rock music and coffee bars and strobe lights.

We don’t need church to be sold to us.

When we walk into a church, we want to see a caring, authentic community of authentic people. We want to see real people enjoying being together. We want to be made felt welcome, warts and all. We want to see church happen in an authentic way.

My generation values authenticity very, very highly. We want  real experiences, not more stuff we’ll throw away in a couple years. We want to feel a part of something bigger than us, part of a community. We want people who genuinely care about us. We want to be a valued part of a church, not a butt in a pew, not a check mark on the diversity list. We want to be asked to be a leader, to serve on committees, to cook meals, to be trusted with the responsibility of being a member of a church. We need to feel like we are making a difference when we go to church, not just in our lives, but in the world. We need church to be about more than evangelizing; we need it to be a place of welcome and acceptance and authentic community.

My generation is telling church, get real.

Be church.

Do liturgy.

Serve communion.

Sing hymns.

Love others.

Accept people for who they are.

Be goofy.

Mess us sometimes.

Laugh.

Sing.

Cry.

Pray.

Stop being a rock concert.

Stop being a glorified PR firm.

Stop being a retail experience.

Then, maybe we will come back to church,

How Things Work Around Here

Things have been getting busy here at the blog lately, thanks to the popularity of my recent posts on Black Lives Matter and Kim Davis. I’m so excited about all the new followers and readers and commenters and everything; I really appreciate every person who takes the time to read my writing, or to leave a comment, or to share with others. You can’t imagine how wonderful it feels to see multiple years of blogging to basically nobody pay off finally.

All that said, I think I need to lay down a few ground rules, mainly concerning commenting. While 99% of your comments have been great, whether you agreed with me or not, a few have crossed some lines I want to set down in stone.

First, no personal attacks. I will not stand for blatant name calling or attacks against other commenters or myself. If you can’t make your argument without attacking, then your argument isn’t worth hearing. I have very little tolerance for it.

Stay on topic. If I write about something, try to keep the comments related to that topic, for the sake of others. There are other forums out there for you to go off on the topic of your choice; this blog, however, is not that place.

Avoid hate speech or hateful rhetoric. This one is a little amorphous, I know, but I know it when I see it, and if I see it, it will be deleted.

Please be patient with me. I am committed to responding to as many comments as possible, and to any personal messages I get. But I have two jobs, two kids, a wife, and all the other trappings of a personal life. I will respond, but you need to be patient with me. It could take me as much as a week to respond. I’m not ignoring you; I just want to respect the time you took to sit down and write to me by also sitting down and crafting something thoughtful in return.

Don’t be a troll. This encompasses a lot of the points I’ve already made, but if I see, hear or smell a troll, you will be gone. Again, this is at my discretion; I’ll be fair, but not overly lenient. Nobody likes a troll.

Address ideas, not motivations. Just because someone disagrees with you, doesn’t mean they are evil or corrupt or bad. They just disagree. Respect your fellow commenters (and your lowly blogger) by giving the benefit of the doubt.

All in all: comment with a spirit of grace and respect. If you do that, this will be very easy, and very fun.

Remember, this is my blog. I really love people coming here to comment and be a part of a budding community; that’s what I’ve always wanted. But I am the one who writes and reads all the comments and responds to as many as possible, and moderates. I set the rules, and I reserve the right to change them as needed. This is not an uncontrolled free speech zone; I will be using my discretion to ensure civility. I won’t be unfair or arbitrary, but I do want to enforce a standard of decorum, in the interests of fostering a positive and healthy conversation.

Of course, I’m always open to criticism or feedback. If you think I’m moderating unfairly, send me a message and let me know.

Again, I really appreciate all of you, and I want this to be a space where people of all views can respond to me and each other in an open and constructive way. Let’s value that and not abuse it.

Thanks so much, and I look forward to interacting with you all.

Grace and peace

Justin

Kim Davis is Not a Martyr for Religious Liberty. She’s a Tool of Religious Right Hysteria.

The plight of Kim Davis has taken America by storm this week.

kimdavisThe Kentucky county clerk’s steadfast refusal to carry out her job, followed by her imprisonment for contempt of court, is the stuff Kirk Cameron and Kevin Sorbo movies are made of. Whether you think her a martyr or a bigot, you have to admit: this is dramatic stuff, especially for the apocalyptic crowd.

I’ve read two takes on the situation this week that I really enjoyed, and that I want to riff off of a little bit.

Over at Religion Dispatches, Sarah Posner is as usual a refreshing source of common sense and clarity, by cutting through the rhetoric and getting to the heart of the situation:

Religious freedom, of course, has long been seen as the hot 2016 culture war issue, so it’s not surprising to see some of the candidates line up to support Davis. Religious freedom is a new litmus test on the right; of course abortion is still there, but now religious liberty is the proxy for opposition to marriage equality.

But if you listen to what Davis is saying, her real argument is that God’s authority trumps that of the courts (a truly odd statement for someone who is employed by a court), not that her religious liberty is under siege.

And over at Patheos, Brandan Robertson keeps religious liberty in the mix, but explains how Kim Davis is actually undermining freedom of religious expression:

Kim Davis posed a great threat to the religious liberties of our nation by refusing to carry out her duties as an agent of the state, issuing marriage licenses to all couples, regardless of their sexuality or gender identity. Davis forced her Christian faith on the people of Rowan County, and violated their right to be able to receive equal treatment from the government, regardless of their sexuality, race, religion, or values. If Davis was able to continue serving as the county clerk, she could, in theory, continue to refuse to grant marriages licenses or provide services to everyone she disagrees with, which would, in effect, completely dissolve the religious freedoms of the people in her county.

I think together, these two takes on Kim Davis make such an important point. Davis is not some private citizen made a martyr by a rampaging federal government intent on stamping out Christianity. Kim Davis is a state employee, an agent of the government, tasked with carrying out the duties of that government. When she goes to work, like it or not, she has a duty to check her Christianity at the door and do her government job.

Our government is one that makes no special priveleges for, or discriminates against, any religion. By refusing to do her job on religious grounds, Davis is discriminating on behalf of the government she represents against the citizens who have a right to equal treatment under the law, the right to receive a marriage license from the state.

Kim Davis has no right to her government job. If she doesn’t want to do it, she can step down. If she is more interested in working for what she see’s as “God’s law” then she should go work for a church (though, knowing what kind of church she likely comes from, they probably wouldn’t let her.) Nor is she some sort of brave martyr. She is breaking the law, as upheld by the Supreme Court just over two months ago. She is refusing the serve the citizens of Rowan County, Kentucky fairly and equally. She is acting as an agent of religious discrimination, instead of a beacon of religious liberty.

The sad thing about this is, Kim Davis is merely a tool of the religious right. Her jailing will last long enough for it to play well with right wing email appeals for money to fight secular liberalism. Folks like Mike Huckabee and Ben Carson and televangelists everywhere care little for the plight of Davis outside of her use as a fundraising tool. I’m sure she will make the rounds of speaking and interviews with all the usual suspects after this, but her fame is temporary.

She’s the perfect stand-in for the religious liberty fight in that sense. The religious fears and concerns of white middle America have become fodder for raising money for right wing politicians and opinion leaders who actually can do very little for those they are taking money from. The actual contours and ideas of such a complicated idea hold little appeal for them, and thus they will never actually enact policy that could actually do anything, as 1) religious liberty is a real non-issue, and 2) to do so would eliminate it as a fundraising tool. The legislating options around this are nonexistent; instead, these guys raise money and then govern in a way that devastates places like Rowan Co, Kentucky economically.

So, when Kim Davis resigns and goes home finally, she will be forgotten. She will go back to her life, and Mike Huckabee will go back to New Iowa or New Hampshire or wherever the next “Crisis” pops up. Religious freedom will still be assured in America, but right wing politicians will continue to use things like this to rake in the cash on false pretenses.

As Christians, we should be ashamed that this is what is being allowed to be the face of our faith in America right now. It should outrage us that those we consider “Religious leaders” are more concerned with fear mongering and raising money than spending time on real injustices in America. It’s stuff like this that is at the root of the rapid decline of self-professed Christians as detailed in the Pew Report this summer.

This is not the face of a loving, compassion filled, merciful faith. This is small-mindedness, cruelty, and greed masquerading as religion. It’s infuriating, but it’s what we have come to expect from mainstream American Christianity.