The eCrozier

A priest in our Diocese recently told me the story of a young woman she met in the town where she serves. She said the young woman was distraught because she had been asked to leave the Church she belonged to. The reason she was invited to leave? She apparently was not appareled appropriately. I recall the priest telling me that the young woman had told her she was dressed quite casually and that did not meet the standards of her home church.

And we wonder why some young adults have given up on church.

Now, I am no clothes’ horse. On a good day both my socks match. Besides, I wear a uniform most days so my haberdashery is pretty much set. I grab the suit closest to the closet door, get dressed, and go. I don’t give much thought to my clothes. I do, however, think that what we wear does matter, but only somewhat. In a clergyperson’s case, it signifies her/his office. In the context of the Eucharist, the vestments we wear offer a similar signifying of office and role in the liturgy. The vestments are actually meant to make our individuality subservient to the role we are serving in the liturgy. So, rather than drawing attention to the wearer, they are supposed to be directing attention to the worship of God.

People wear clothes for all sorts of reasons, most of them harmless. They like the colors. They like the way particular clothes fit on them. Or, sometimes there is the obligation to wear what a loved one gave you as a gift. And, yes, some people wear clothes they think will attract attention to themselves or make some sort of statement about who they are (or what their status might be). This, cultural anthropologists tell us, is part of some primitive mating ritual that we’re all still trying to understand.  Some people, of course, due to lack of financial capacity, are greatly limited in their choice of clothes. They have to wear what they wear.

Jesus tells us in Matthew 6:25-34 that life ought to be more than about what we wear. He equates our anxiety over things such as that of striving for the wrong things in life, or at least as having a striving that is disordered. He lets us know that God knows we all need something to wear to protect our bodies. But, he tells us, we ought to be striving for God’s Kingdom and God’s righteousness and the rest of the stuff, like clothes, will be ordered behind that.

I don’t know what possessed a person to tell a young woman she was not welcome in church because she was too casually dressed. My heart went out to her. So I wrote her and said: “Although I have no authority over the people or the church where you experienced such rejection, please let me apologize anyway on behalf of all Christians everywhere. If you were rejected that way, then all Christians in a sense suffer from the negative image that creates. You are always welcome to come as you are to any Episcopal Church. Please do not reject God simply because some pitiful and thoughtless person rejected you.”

+Scott

David Kinnaman in his new book, You Lost Me: Why Young Christians are Leaving Church and Rethinking Church, reports on his research with young adults who were regular churchgoers as teenagers but who have left the church as young adults. He found a number of consistent themes of why three out of every five of young adults have disconnected themselves from church. I want to touch on a few of his findings here.

Kinnaman’s research shows that because young adults have wide-ranging access to multiple ideas, philosophies, and cultures, particularly through social media and the Internet, they often react negatively to their experience of church, which seems “stifling, fear-based and risk-averse.” Many of these young adults feel that the church ignores “the problems of the real world” by demonizing everything in secular culture rather than a more nuanced approach that would help them discern that which was edifying.

Another theme cited is their perceived tension between Christianity and science, seeing the church as being too quick to dismiss scientific theory. Particularly, they are “turned off by the creation-versus-evolution debate,” where they see the church as being arrogant in its answers about the physical world. They see the church as failing them in discerning how they can stay faithful to their beliefs while also living into their vocations, especially when they are in science-related industries.

Still another theme is young adult’s view of the church as it relates to sexuality. They see the church’s position as overly simplistic and often judgmental. Young adults live in a culture of hyper-sexuality where the time between the onset of puberty and the age of first marriage is now often 15 or more years. Kinnaman’s research shows that most young adult Christians “are as sexually active as their non-Christian peers, even though they are more conservative in their attitudes about sexuality.” The challenge to the church here is to be clear about what it believes while also graciously recognizing the complexity of the world in which young adults live.

Another persistent theme of Kinnaman’s research claims that young adults feel the church “is not a place that allows them to express doubts.” In fact, many of them do not see the church as a safe place where their doubts are taken seriously. Young adults say the church does not respond to their “most pressing life questions” nor engage them honestly in their “significant intellectual doubts.”

What his research tells me is that God is opening up a huge opportunity for our church.
At our best, we embrace the good things in our culture rather than automatically condemning them. We are open to truth whether its source is Holy Scripture or science. We are gracious and honest when it comes to addressing issues of human sexuality. And, we are not afraid of doubt or the intellectual challenges to faith. On the contrary, we embrace the challenge and the struggle of faith on all levels: intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. The Holy Spirit is trying to tell us something through young adults. Are we listening and will we respond?

+Scott

If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we’ve to pretend that Jesus is just as selfish as we are or we’ve got to acknowledge that he commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition. And then admit that we just don’t want to do it. – Stephen Colbert

Many young adults, if surveys are accurate, get their news and opinions from people like Stephen Colbert, who, if you do not know, is the host of a faux-news show on the cable channel, Comedy Central. As funny a cultural critic as he is, no one could recommend him as a source of accurate, unbiased news. In fact, his whole affected stance is an ironic satire of the talking heads of cable news. Yet, his popularity among young adults indicates that he is exposing a reality, or at least a learned perception, about much of contemporary Christian practice in the Church. David Kinnaman, President of the Barna Group, in his research has discovered that many young adults too often see Christianity as “hypocritical, insensitive, and judgmental.” So, clearly, Christianity has a real perception problem among young adults in our culture.

We Christians are called to represent to the world Jesus’ life and teaching as normative for all human beings, and his death, resurrection, and ascension as salvific for all creation. Kinnaman’s research, however, suggests that we in the Church are not doing that well for people under 30 years old. Young adults in this country, as noted above, increasingly use words like hypocritical, insensitive, and judgmental to describe their view of the Christians they meet. And these same young adults readily contend that they observe a form of Christianity in the Church that they believe Jesus never intended. Kinnaman, states that: “Millions are cutting their connection to church—and even their faith—during their young adult years.” He observes that no previous generation has experienced such dramatic, compounded cultural change. And their anti-institutional mindset is different than that of young adults in past generations.

We in the Church could look at this data and facilely conclude that young adults are fickle, immature (some are, to be sure), and that they’ll come back to us once they get married and have children. We could dismiss their critique of Christians and the Church as overly generalized or, at least, grossly uninformed. We could ignore their observations of hypocrisy, insensitivity, and judgmentalism. We could wait until they see how wrong they have been and then humbly come to us asking us to take them in. We could do all of those things. Or, we could hear what they are saying to us and be open to the possibility that some of what they are saying just might be true.

Maybe, just maybe, there is a significant gap between what Jesus taught and how our Church presents itself to the world? Maybe young adults (and everyone else, for that matter), if they encountered our congregations, would not recognize Jesus in the words and actions of the people there? If that is the case, then we have in us the power to do something about it. We can begin to fashion our life together in the Church in a way that reflects the image of Jesus in all that we say and do.

+Scott

In a previous Ecrozier I mentioned that more and more folk have come to define themselves as “spiritual, but not religious.” There are probably different reasons for this, but the one that seems to pop up for me as I talk to strangers (and I do, the purple shirt is a great conversation starter, I’m discovering) is this: “religion” has come to equate for many as a word that describes “rules, rigidity, and dogma,” while “spiritual” connotes for them “openness, wonder, and seeking after God.” So, for many of these folk, the least likely place to find spiritual direction and insight for living a holy life is in the church, the institutional epitome of religion.

On Palm Sunday morning in Savannah I struck up a conversation with a young father who was jogging down the avenue pushing his infant son in one of those jogging strollers they have these days. He had a “Cornell” t-shirt on so I congratulated him on his team going so far in the NCAA tournament. He smiled thanking me. I then asked him if he belonged to a church. His smile never left his face and he said: “No way, that’s not for me. I am a runner and I do yoga. That’s how I connect to God.” He then nodded politely and continued on with his jog. The church has been for folks like this jogger a “taillight” rather than a “headlight” for lighting a way to a holy life (full disclosure: I borrowed that image from Dr King).

Of course, religion is getting an unfair rap in all this. Religion simply means “that which holds things together” for us (the ligio part of “religion” is the same root used in the world “ligament,” which, as we know, holds our bones together so we can stand upright and walk). People are looking for ways to make sense of their lives. They are looking for ways “to hold things together.” It is just that they are finding other ways to do that apart from the church, which they see as representing a wrathful, angry God looking for ways to punish humanity.

As I travel around the towns and cities of our diocese, I see a lot of people out and about on Sunday morning who are clearly not going to church. Please do not tell me that all the people in your parish neighborhood already belong to a church so there is no way for your church to grow. My eyes tell me something else. If we want these folk, particularly the younger ones, to come into our fellowship (and please tell me you do), we are going to have to focus on “openness, wonder, and seeking after God” in our approach and not “rules, rigidity, and dogma.” And that is right up our alley as Episcopalians. That is playing to our strength. Now that does not mean we should ignore doctrine or the canons or anything else. It simply means that we cannot lead with those.

This Sunday we will have a lot of people in our pews who, when they were last in church, we were singing “Silent Night, Holy Night.” We have an opportunity in our preaching and in our hospitality to touch them with the truth of God’s redeeming love and to invite them into a community that will light the way to a holy life.

+Scott