ymCafe

Last month, we looked at how we attract young people to our church by living out the call of the gospel by getting out of the church building and living in relationship with people. Young people are looking for a faith that is real and lived-out, something that is overtly spiritual, something they can sink their teeth into.

In the midst of sometimes turbulent times for mainline churches, I think we secretly wonder if the mainline has anything left to offer, especially in light of the claims made in articles such as last month’s Tennessean (7/6/08), which claimed outright that young people prefer non-traditional worship.

Pulling from my experiences working with a non-denominational church before moving to Tennessee, I’ve noticed some trends in these alternative worship services. First of all, at the church I was working at, we started experimenting with periods of silence, call and response sections of the service, communion where everyone came forward to the same table to receive—things I have since discovered have been part of the Anglican tradition for a long, long time, and possibly led me to feel more at home here in the Episcopal Church once I tried it out.

Yes, these services usually use contemporary worship music, something that some of our churches in the diocese would find very difficult to incorporate, but I don’t believe that young people’s preference for a church rises or falls based exclusively on the music. Again, I believe it is the way that a congregation lives out its faith and practices community that draws people, not just young people, but people of all ages, to our churches.

And because I’ve witnessed the adoption of practices, if not straight from the Prayer Book, then pretty close, in non-denominational and less traditional churches, I think that what we have in our tradition is a huge asset to attracting people, but especially young people.

So, you may ask, if all this is true, why is there a huge gap of young people in our churches? Well, part of that I think will be the subject of perhaps another article, but I think one part at least is that we as the body of Christ sometimes forget that the body of Christ is a family. And in families, we interact with people of multiple generations; do life with people of different ages; hold gatherings with multiple generations present. It’s easy for us to look to the church to provide our social needs, and as we think of being with friends, we typically picture people our own age. I know I do. But we as the body of Christ are called to more than that. It’s great that we find friends and social interaction at our churches, but we are called to be ambassadors of the gospel (2 Cor 5:20), and to be known by our love for one another (John 13:35).

Imagine what we could be like as we reach out to people in our sphere of influence no matter how similar or dissimilar they are to us, and start doing life with the people around us, including them in our heritage and in the glorious message that we’ve been entrusted to impart.

I often get questions from churches (and not just in our diocese either) that sound like this “how can we attract more young people?”

Well, thought I, sounds like a good thing to discuss in Connections this time, especially given last month’s article in the Tennessean (7/6/08 ) on young adults’ preferences in worship. So let’s take apart the statement and see if the answer lies within it somewhere.

“How can we attract more young people?” Well two questions pop into my head: (1) why do we want to attract them? And (2) what do we mean by attracting them?

See I think it all boils down to this word “attract.” What’s behind the question? Are there people in our church who feel a call to disciple the younger generation(s)? Is it a question of mission? Because mission as I understand it isn’t primarily about attraction, it’s about finding, seeking, and discipling.

Something’s been bothering me about the question of “attracting young people,” regardless of which of the several reasons is behind it.

The thing is, most of the people, and like I said, regardless of the wonderful motivation behind it, asking this question, want a program or solution to bring young people into their existing church structure.

Well, I think I’ve happened on the solution to attracting young people as I was musing on this.

Get out of the church.

That’s right leave.

Because you see, the church isn’t that building no matter how cute, historic, grand, beautiful, or whatever it may be. The building is an incidental. You are the church.

So go out and start taking the church—and the fantastic message of life in Jesus—to people you know.

Just live life in relationship with people, not from your church (gasp, I know).

Live life in relationship with people with no agenda. Share with them what excites you, hopefully Jesus is on the list, if not, perhaps you should start by doing a little soul searching and having a few in depth Jesus-times yourself.

As you share your life with people, including how you live in relationship with Jesus, they might get interested. Or they might not. But at least they won’t be in the very large category of people that don’t know a single Christian.

Some statistics for you.

The number of non-Christians a person knows has an inverse relationship with the length of time that person has been a Christian (Dan Kimball. They like Jesus but not the Church. Zondervan, 2007). So the most mature Christians, who should be out there making disciples, don’t know any non-Christians. Hmmm…

The average number of conversions per 100 people in mainline denomination per year is… Are you ready?

One.

And those non-mainline folks, their rate of conversion is actually better. And they wouldn’t be surprised to hear that. But wait, what is it?

One point seven. Yup, nearly double, but still, per one hundred? sort of pitiful (Lyle Shaller. From Geography to Affinity. Abingdon Press, 2003.).

People, our entire mission as the church is to make disciples.

And we’re failing! Churches that are growing are mainly getting Christians from other churches.

It’s a giant shell game of “find the Christians.”

So what we’ve been doing, isn’t working. People will no longer “come and see.”

Get out of the church. Get into the world.

It’s time we tried out that whole “salt and light” thing again.

Just go.

Extra: Do young people prefer non-traditional ways of worship like the Tennessean claimed? I think no. In fact, I think our rich Anglican tradition gives us a leg up on ministry with young people, but I’m out of space, we’ll have to explore that later!

Take a look at some of the upcoming or newly released movies next time you’re in a theatre. Fantasy books-turned-movie such as Eragon, Stardust, The Golden Compass and The Seeker have popped out in rapid succession, making me wonder if there’s something going on here that we should be paying attention to.  While these movies may be a blatant attempt by studios to cash in on the box office returns of the Lord of the Rings, Narnia, and, of course, the now ubiquitous teen hero, Harry Potter, I think there’s more going on here.

See, from the studios’ perspectives, they’re just making what they think will sell to the most marketed to audience in our culture—teenagers.  But what is selling is worth noting.  All of these stories have something in common.  Young people setting out on dangerous quests to change the world.

And these stories present possibilities to ponder such as people have a purpose and a destiny, and concepts like you can’t use evil as a means to an end because in the end, evil will always win.  Teens are gobbling up stories that involve young people risking their lives for others, sacrificing their wants and needs for the protection of others, enduring great hardship to achieve their goals.

Such stories stir something in our spirits, dawnings of a realization that maybe, just maybe, we’re in a story that’s bigger than we are.

I was privileged to hear Sarah Arthur, the author of The God-Hungry Imagination (Upper Room Books, 2007), speak.  She read a passage from The Two Towers where Aragorn and his traveling companions, Legolas and Gimli, encounter the Riders of Rohan and inquire after their friends the hobbits, who have been kidnapped.  When the Riders haven’t heard of Hobbits, they try asking about “Halflings” and one of the Riders responds:

“Halflings! But they are only a little people in old songs and children’s takes out of the North.  Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in daylight?”

“A man may do both,” said Aragorn.  “For not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time.” (p. 434 of the one volume edition).

In this short exchange there’s a sense of past, present, and future, along with the possibility of legends walking the earth.  In her book, Arthur observes: “without a past or a future, it’s difficult to find meaning in the present” (p. 26).

We live in a world that has lost its stories.  With the modern age came a sort of snobbery towards things in the past because what we had accomplished in the present was so amazing and so advanced that suddenly past generations looked benighted and hopelessly behind where we found ourselves rapidly ascending towards the pinnacle of technological and scientific breakthroughs.

Without a past, however, there’s no way to learn and get a vision for our place in a larger story, or have hope for a future.  Mere achievements alone do not suffice.

And our young people are longing for connection to a narrative that is bigger than they are.  As Arthur puts it, “ the church is the living story we’re inviting young people to participate in” and then asks, “What kind of story is your church telling?” (p. 30).

In order to reach our young people, “we must become bards: poets charged with the task of keeping and imparting the stories, languages, values and beliefs of a culture.  We take the many texts of our hearers’ lives and thread them through the warp and weft of the Christian narrative until patterned meaning emerges” (p. 31).  We take their stories and help them fit into Christ’s story, giving them a past, present and a future as they learn to be his disciples.

And we can build on the opportunities presented us in the stories they are connecting to now in the form of the books and movies mentioned and show them how legends really do walk the earth in the God-man, Jesus Christ, and what that means for their lives.

What story is your church telling?

If you are signed into wordpress while looking at a wordpress blog, then you’ll see a blue tool bar at the top of your page with a series of drop-down menus that allow you to access your dashboards among other things. The far right tool bar, as I just accidentally discovered, is labeled “blog info” and the last option on the drop-down menu is “report as mature.”

And that word struck me. “Mature.” Of course, the meaning in the context of the drop down menu is that someone has posted x-rated content on their blog, something wordpress.com tries to discourage. But instead of, say, reporting as “lewd” or “inappropriate” we have to report this material as “mature.”

The fundamental implication would be, then, that those who do not wish to view this material are immature.

Of course, none of us strives to be immature. We even have ideas in Scripture that we want seeds (lives) to mature (Luke 8:14), and is equated with having reached fullness in Christ in Ephesians: “until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ” (4:13). (See also 1 Cor. 2:6; Phil. 3:15; Col 4:12; Heb. 5:14; James 1:4 NIV).

So we are told to strive for maturity in Christ, and yet one of the things I would think of as being a marker along that pathway to maturity in Christ would be refusing to view “mature” websites…

Where am I going with this? The clash between the kingdom and culture stood out to me as I reflected on this, and it shouted to me how we as the church, and especially we who work with youth need to help our students through meaningful rites of passage in teaching them what it means to be mature in in Christ and in practical ways in life as adults.

So here’s to being immature mature people!

I’m working on a section for the youth worker’s manual (see the downloads under edt resources) and I’m trying to summarize how girls and boys approach spirituality. Now this might not be differences so much as comparisons, but I have a theory that the way that girls and boys approach spirituality is different along the way, even if the end result looks the same.

To this end, I’ve been reading Losers, Loners and Rebels: The Spirituality of Boys, and trying to do some research on girls because there isn’t much out there that addresses the topic like this book does for boys.

Humans in general are drawn to stories that are bigger than theirs. If you want proof, go to a sports bar when the Titans (or insert name of local team) are playing, as Jody and I did this afternoon. People congregate around a common thing they find worthy (worship at its most basic definition), and fellowship around that common thing.

Now, as great as football is, it doesn’t answer life’s questions, especially when the Titan’s lose by 2 points after a nearly miraculous start to a final drive and an awesome comeback in that last part of the third quarter going into the fourth. Something in the universe just doesn’t seem right, but folks go home, pull of their jerseys with the number 10 on them, and go on about their lives.

But meta-narratives–overarching stories, stories that are bigger than our stories and give us some way to connect our stories and thereby make meaning of them–are the reason we have religion. People want meaning.

But, since men and women are actually different, I think it stands to reason that we approach spirituality differently. And what I’m wondering is where that starts, what that means for youth, and how we can better reach out to both boys and girls in our youth ministries.

Here’s a starting place. Where are the men in church on a Sunday? Look around, most churches have better than 60% (and that’s a modest number) women in their congregation. Maybe not up front in the vestments, but look in the pews. Where are the men? I found them. They were at Buffalo Wild Wings watching the Titan’s game.

It reminded me of that scene from the Simpson’s movie when the world looks like it’s ending as they are being sealed in a giant dome, and the people in the church and the people in the bar run out to see what’s happening. Except for the preacher, the people in the church are women, and the people in the bar are all men.

But it’s not just men who are absent from church, it’s young people. There’s that huge gap of missing 18-35 year olds–and that attrition starts at age 16, when they get their driver’s license, according to a new LifeWay study (Suzanne, do you still have a link to that, I printed it out, but I’m not sure I have the link any more…).

So what’s up, folks? And what can we do to change it? What have you noticed about girls and guys in your youth group? Perhaps if we each just start observing our kids, we’ll arrive at some ideas as to what’s different about their spirituality…

The Duck of Minerva has a thoroughly thought-out post on “What Harry Potter inherits from Star Wars.” This post discusses the way stories like this become constitutive myths for an entire generation.

I thought it was a great parallel between the two, especially because as myths, both stories have huge amounts of truth in them, as we’ve been discussing on the previous Harry Potter post. And anytime you have a myth with truth in it, there’s echoes of the true myth that is the gospel.

I recently finished reading the long-awaited final installment of the Harry Potter series, and discovered several things the church could learn from Harry about what teenagers are looking for.

As early as the first book in the series, we learn that Harry is destined for a fight that could prove deadly. A terrible villain is looking for him and trying to kill him. Certain adults recognize this battle cannot be fought exclusively by them and that this young man eventually must face this villain. However, these adults, especially Dumbledore, some teachers, parents of his friends, and his godfather all work to make certain that Harry is equipped with what he needs before he faces the final battle that could kill him.

Starting at the age of eleven, Harry lives in constant awareness of the danger facing him. But he knows that unless he faces his enemy eventually, people he loves are going to get hurt and killed because his enemy won’t stop pursuing him. So he involves himself wholeheartedly in this fight, both being prepared by these mentors and helping teach other teenagers what he has learned.

And here’s the thing, the adults don’t prevent the teens from taking part in the struggle against evil. Wherever they can, they protect them. Whenever they can, they equip them, but they don’t pat them on the head and tell them to wait until they’re older and can be “real” members of the fight against evil.

Here is where we the church need to take notes. Kenda Dean, in Practicing Passion, talks about how teenagers are looking for something that they would be willing to die for. Teenagers are passionate, less cynical than most, and are still crazy enough to think they can actually make a difference in the world, something a lot of the rest of us too often forget.

And teens are not blind to the cost of such passion. Fighting for something means battle wounds. Teens are okay with that because if it’s worthwhile, it will always be worth it, even when it’s not fun.

This means that teens should be flocking to Christianity left and right because after all, where else do we see such a rich heritage of people willing to lay down their lives for what they believe it, or people persecuted for the simple act of claiming Jesus as Lord?

And this Jesus we claim is none other than the one who laid down his life for all of us, the ultimate act of a loving God. The passion of Christ both led to the cross, and was embodied in the cross. Jesus did battle against evil by giving up his life and then coming back again from the dead, thereby defeating the power of death. Sound familiar? Harry goes willingly to his death in order to stop Voldemort from continuing to do battle against the people he loves. As it turns out, this was the only way to destroy Voldemort (read the book for an explanation). And of course, it doesn’t kill Harry, he comes back to defeat Voldemort and save the day. While he didn’t defeat death itself or rid the world of all evil, the end of The Deathly Hallows shows us a teenager willing to die for his friends.

So if the parallel between what teens want and Christianity is so strong, where are they? Dean suggests the church “has largely sanitized love of suffering, leaving Christianity with a mealy-mouthed niceness that fails to ring true to young people who know in their bones that love and heartache go together” (p. 4).

How do we reach teens and draw them into the community of faith? We must rediscover the passion of Christ and the passion of martyrs all over the world who know all too well that love and suffering go together. Not only will we reach teenagers who are longing for something to be passionate about, but I venture a guess that we’ll discover something that’s been missing in our lives for far too long.

Thanks for the object lesson, Harry.

I moved this from another blog. The original post was on May 22nd.

“Help! I’ve been kidnapped by a monster who’s trying to relate to me!” This from Arthur, the teenage heir to the throne of Far Far Away after Shrek musters every bit of slang you could possible cram into less than a minute of screen time in an attempt to “reach” the teenager and relate to him.

I’ve enjoyed all of the Shrek movies for the emphasis on being who you are and that looks are not all they’re cracked up to be, but I have to say that this line above is my favorite by a long shot, and I can’t wait till the movie comes out on video.

After all, I think that it captures the feelings of many a teenager when an adult tries to be too much like them, thinking that’s what it takes to relate to them, when in fact teens are longing for adults to be adults and to just love them and come along side them and start walking through life with them.

No urban dictionaries needed here, folks. You can just be you, love kids, and hey, you’re in youth ministry…