The previous sections of this discussion emerged from my reflections on the future of theological education in Churches of Christ, which is deeply bound up with what we imagine the future of this part of Christianity to be. Educating young men and women – the Millennials along with Gen Xers and Baby Boomers entering second and third careers – will look different in the future because of the church’s needs will look different. But different how? What do we need to innovate, and what to conserve? How do we help men and women cultivate the imagination necessary for bearers of God’s good tidings in our time?
Let me suggest a few things for discussion.
Rule # 1: Self-awareness is good.
Over the past half century, Churches of Christ have gone through a number of phases, not everywhere and not all at once, but still in fairly recognizable ways. We shifted from a confessional group that defined itself by a fairly small set of doctrinal distinctives (some biblically rich and some not) to a group more focused on self-help and consumerist approaches. Sermons changed from “God’s views of appropriate music in worship” to “10 steps to a better family life.” And since the shift was largely driven by Baby Boomers, the emphasis on programming, media, popular music, and other practices that made us less different from the dominant culture were all the rage. Some of that change was helpful, some was inevitable, and some is worth keeping. Much of it, however, was pretty lightweight stuff, and the processes of change sometimes expended a huge amount of energy that left congregations incapacitated for further spiritual growth and addicted to finding the next cool gimmick, when they weren’t blown apart completely. Surely it is time that those of us in progressive churches acknowledged at least some of these problems. Sectarian legalism sometimes – too often – has given way to a cheap grace that glibly demands that God forgive us no matter how uncommitted we are.
Of course, it is easy to overstate the problems, and no one could reasonably want to return to the sectarian past. Or, to put things much more carefully, the truth is that the Holy Spirit worked to enable men and women to live Christian lives both during the times we want to forget and the times we spent forgetting them (forgetting them over and over, ironically – but that’s another story). Christian men and women in our churches have done extraordinarily good and gracious things over and over regardless of the dominant ambience of our congregational lives. So maybe the first thing we should say about our identity – the first step in self-awareness – is that we have been and are a blessed people through whom God has helped many others. We can celebrate that, in spite of our very real flaws.
Rule # 2: It’s not about programs.
It is tempting in our environment of change to fall back on learned behavior, and for churches that means seeking the next dramatic program. Millennials not part of your church? No problem! We’ll create a program that will bring them in.
The problem with such an approach, however, is that it assumes that human beings are just out there waiting for us to market to them, if only we can do it correctly, but that once the marketing has taken effect, we can just turn it off and convert folks to a lifestyle of commitment impervious to other marketing messages. As many Baby Boomer churches in the Willow Creek mold have learned, however, the outreach program that soft-pedals commitment does not naturally lead to a Christian lifestyle unless significant re-messaging happens. But in that process, the risk of the bait and switch approach is high. In other words, we risk treating human beings as something less than that title would deserve. Our methods do not honor people as God’s creation sufficiently well.
For Millennials, in particular, such an approach is highly unlikely to work because this is a generation that is (1) highly sophisticated in its consumption of media messages; (2) fairly cynical about the motives of powerful people trying to sell them something; (3) interested, however, in genuine community and long-term service; and (4) significantly less familiar with Christianity than the Boomers were. That is, we can no longer operate parasitically on prior generations of Christian experiences in the way that Baby Boomer churches did. We have to start over. And just launching programs without trying to launch community will not work. In truth, it ought not to work because it demeans people and separates them from God, who calls us all into full humanness in imitation of the gracious autonomy of Jesus Christ. These claims, if they are even close to being right, lead us to Rule 3.
Rule # 3: It’s about community.
I have been fascinated, like many others, with the Occupy Movement and its attempts at democratic, participatory decision-making. My fascination comes in part because I am sympathetic with many of the movement’s desires and demands and because I think that, with all its problems, it has put its finger on something many Americans feel today. Many of us, especially those just entering adulthood, feel radically disenchanted with the dominant culture’s construal of power, status, and wealth. Interestingly, the mostly secular people involved in Occupy share some deep instincts that are pervasive in Scripture and front and center in the gospel message. They believe that the economy exists for people, not people for the economy. And they want to do something, somehow to bring about that healthier reality. Shouldn’t churches be on board with that sentiment? Surely the Jesus we preach and worship was, at least if you believe the Four Gospels.
So what to do? How do we give our young people a stake in the church’s work as it lives into the mission of bearing good news? Can we (1) make sure that our news really is good, (2) that is live-outable day to day, (3) that it includes a lifestyle of truth-speaking in love, and (4) that it is open to everyone, including the most vulnerable among us? It would be hard to argue that most congregations look like community, but in even the most frozen, formalized, fractious churches there are tokens of God’s community because the Holy Spirit continues to act among us. Can we not, then, build from what we have to something richer and more robust? Has not God given us all we need to be what we need to be? Yes, if we allow this to happen.
Unlike the artificial communities sometimes created by church programming, authentic Christian community cannot simply include people whose values, experiences, and expectations are just like mine. Somewhere I read, “What thank have you, if you love those who love you?” Christian community must include the vulnerable, the outcasts, the dysfunctional, the unsuccessful. Otherwise, it is not Christian enough. Of course, such community demands much harder work than the homogeneous units we often seek to create, but out of the struggle and joy of life together, we come closer to the God who created and loved us all. Hence the next idea.
Rule # 4: It’s about God, who is for us.
Like many other American Christians, I have heard all my life the extraordinary text of St. Paul, “If God be for us, who can be against us?” Not an offer of cheap grace, the rhetorical question functions as a sort of invitation. Do we not wish to be in the presence of the Almighty Creator who ordered the world in such a way that we could flourish within it, gave a history and a set of norms to a people so they could live freely, and triumphed over death itself by raising Jesus as the “firstfruits of those who sleep”? Would it not be the case that, if such ideas are true, they would compel a radical alteration in my way of being with others? And would not a community that resulted from such an idea, or rather, such an experience, spend much of its time seeking to be in God’s presence by pursuing the means of grace such as prayer, forgiveness, service, and so on? Christian answers to these questions would surely lead us to rethink our ways of worshiping, serving, and sharing the gospel with others.
Yet the truth is that many of our congregations do anything but this. When we speak of God at all we take refuge in easy clichés and, frankly, a sort of thinly disguised narcissism. So, for example, Jeremiah’s great promise that God has not forgotten Israel (plural “you”) and will work to redeem a whole people devastated by foreign invasion, enslavement, and death so that it can find its place anew (Jeremiah 29:29) has become a pretty little plaque on a wall about God’s alleged provision of whatever we want whenever we want it (singular “you”). Far from being just an innocent little bit of bad interpretation of the Bible, is not this domestication of a powerful, but raw text, really just a travesty? Do we really imagine that God has nothing better to do than provide us with the things we can easily provide for ourselves while we neglect to care for those among us who are vulnerable? What Bible do we read? What reality do we see around us?
As I write this, I see my own attempts to control God and feel keenly the “we” in the paragraph above. There is no “I” vs. “you” here. For all of us, can we let God be God, and ourselves be God’s servants, and thus the servants of each other? Can the church be humble enough to speak on behalf of God rather than using God language as a warrant for doing what we wanted to do all along? I hope so. And I believe so. Because God is for us, and even when we are against ourselves, as we often are, nothing can separate us from this God. There is a future for our churches, if we let there be. If we are humble enough, imaginative enough, and generous enough a new generation of leaders will arise among us who can help us seek the table of a generous God nurturing a generous people.
Please respond to these ruminations, scattered and imperfect as they are. Let us reason together, so that our sins can be as white as snow!