And Finally
Many churches seem to be asking, “How do we get young people back in the church (so we don’t die)?” At its best this question comes from a desire to see the church we love healthy and full of long life. It’s an important question–but rather than being a starting point for brainstorming strategies, I wonder if it might lead us to find some other guiding questions.
A few weeks ago I was having breakfast with Randy Smit, and he was sharing some wisdom from a book called Original Blessing by Matthew Fox. Fox explains that if we think of our religious life exclusively in terms of original sin and redemption (rather than creation blessing), we end up with fear as our psychological starting point—we have trouble trusting the goodness of the world, others, or even ourselves. He observes: “Gandhi understood the weakness in such a distrusting religious faith when he said, ‘What is gained through fear lasts only while the fear lasts.’ This means that religion built on fear must keep preaching its own fears in order to keep the religion going.” This keen observation from Gandhi also helps to explain why many people leave religion in the West: “because they are growing up and growing out of fear and into trust” (82).
The question of curiosity that Randy posed and I picked up was: Does this ring true for our twenty-somethings at church?
I began to wonder. Are we potentially perpetuating a system based on fear that our younger generation finds unnecessary? How can we meet and support our young people outside the church in their places of spiritual trust? What gifts can this perspective give us as a worshipping body to grow “out of fear and into trust”?
As we find ourselves in the midst of this time of Lent, a time of self-examination and turning toward God, let’s set anxious questions and strategies aside in order to grow out of any fears that bind and control us into a broad place of trusting faith. This might look like changing our question from, “How do we get young people back in the church?” to “How are young people leading us into ever expanding trust in the bigness and goodness of God?”
~Peace, Andrew