in which I "think with my fingers" about an article titled "Why Millennials are leaving the Church"

One recent morning at church, we were challenged not to "turn moments of ministry to moments of anger because [we] make everything about self..."**

Additionally, we heard: 

...relationships of unity and understanding are not rooted in emotion or romance {or nostalgia or any of the other "feel-good" emotions}... rather they are rooted in worship.**

And then recently, I read: 

Human beings by their very nature are worshipers. Worship is not something we do; it defines who we are. You cannot divide human beings into those who worship and those who don’t. Everybody worships; it’s just a matter of what, or whom, we serve.” ~Paul David Tripp

Ouch!

That first (the subsequent as well, but particularly the first) statement touches about every single relationship in and aspect of my life... if I let myself think about it and even a fraction of the implications in daily life.

While thinking about those quotes, I read an article entitled "Why Millennials are Leaving the Church..."

I see articles like that and they concern me. There's a tendency (at least in my circles) to dismiss - because of knowing of the author, knowing of that individual's perspective and of knowing that there's many areas of disagreement... But then again, I think I really should pay attention - not to determine the right or the wrong of what has been written but to get at the heart of the problem as the younger generation perceives it. I've got children who qualify as millennials - I think it is worth my effort to understand, not so that I can debate the right or the wrong, but to better prepare me for parenting my rapidly maturing and growing up young'uns.

Words like these make me start asking myself hard questions (all quotes are from the article) ~

"...young adults perceive evangelical Christianity to be too political, too exclusive, old-fashioned, unconcerned with social justice and hostile to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people."

"...young evangelicals often feel they have to choose between their intellectual integrity and their faith, between science and Christianity, between compassion and holiness." 

"...the evangelical obsession with sex can make Christian living seem like little more than sticking to a list of rules, and how millennials long for faith communities in which they are safe asking tough questions and wrestling with doubt." 

"...church-as-performance is just one more thing driving us away from the church, and evangelicalism in particular." 

"What millennials really want from the church is not a change in style but a change in substance... an end to the culture wars... a truce between science and faith... to be known for what we stand for, not what we are against... to ask questions that don’t have predetermined answers... churches that emphasize an allegiance to the kingdom of God over an allegiance to a single political party or a single nation... friends to feel truly welcome in our faith communities... to be challenged to live lives of holiness, not only when it comes to sex, but also when it comes to living simply, caring for the poor and oppressed, pursuing reconciliation, engaging in creation care and becoming peacemakers." 

"You can’t hand us a latte and then go about business as usual and expect us to stick around. We’re not leaving the church because we don’t find the cool factor there; we’re leaving the church because we don’t find Jesus there."

My first tendency, frankly, is to "amen" whole-heartedly because that bold-faced quote at the end is what I want my church to be, that is what I'm striving for as I pray and serve and work and minister. But then I must ponder: "How is it that the church, my church, is failing to communicate this goal, that this message is at their heart as well, to millennials and others?" I take heed, because I've heard similar sentiments, coming from the youth with whom I've worked and from my own becoming young adults.

I'm asking the Lord to show me if perhaps I am, and my church is, missing moments of ministry because others only perceive our disapproval and anger at sin (which sin rightfully should remain offensive to us) rather than a genuine challenge to live a holy life in every domain. 

Is it possible that I communicate a greater weight of importance centering on emotions and impressions and traditions of what's always done rather than worshipful service to the Almighty and relationships?

What do you think?

What other questions should I be asking?

How do we confront the precious people of the millennial generation with their sin, need for a Savior and His sacrificial gift as well as His daily sustaining grace? How do I grow so that my words and action communicate authentic worship and service, even when perspectives and understandings are different?

Any ideas?

**I think the opening quotes are by Paul David Tripp, but I didn't catch (or write down) the name.

On hot afternoons sitting by the side of the pool while the kids try and keep cool...

I've been reading young adult fiction again... although technically, I guess, when Orson Scott Card wrote Ender's Game back in the 1980s, he didn't realize how his book would appeal to that particular age group.

It did... Now there are middle school teachers teaching these books... and I'm encouraging my kids to read them and talk with me about what questions the books raise in their hearts and minds.

There's even a movie currently being made. The trailer was just released to You Tube this month.

Here's a short conversation between two characters... I just love the many directions questions and thoughtful pursuit of even just this short two pages of the book could go.

"So you see, Anton, the key you found has been turned, and it may be the salvation of the human race." 

"But the poor boy. to live his life so small, and then die as a giant." 

"Perhaps he'll be... amused at the irony." 

"How strange to think that my little key might turn out to be the salvation of the human race. From the invading beasts, anyway. Who will save us when we become our own enemy again." 

"We are not enemies, you and I." 

"Not many people are enemies to anyone. But the ones full of greed or hate, pride or fear -- their passion is strong enough to lever all the world into war." 

"If God can raise up a great soul to save us from one menace, might he not answer our prayers by raising up another when we need him?" 

"But Sister Carlotta, you know the boy you speak of was not raised up by god. He was created by a kidnapper, a baby-killer, an outlaw scientist."

"Do you know why Satan is so angry all of the time? Because whenever he works a particularly clever bit of mischief, God uses it to serve his own righteous purposes." 

"So God uses wicked people as his tools." 

"God gives us the freedom to create goodness out of that evil, for what is what he chooses." 

"So in the long run, God always wins." 

"Yes." 

"In the short run, though, it can be uncomfortable." 

"And when, in the past, would you have preferred to die, in stead of being alive here today?" 

"There it is. We get used to everything. We find hope in anything."

"That is why I've never understood suicide. Even those suffering from great depression or guilt -- don't they feel Christ the comforter in their hearts, giving them hope?" 

"You're asking me?" 

"God not being convenient, I ask a fellow mortal." 

"In my view, suicide is not really the wish for life to end." 

"What is it, then?" 

"It is the only way a powerless person can find to make everybody else look away from his shame. The wish is not to die, but to hide." 

"As Adam and Eve hid from the Lord." 

"Because they were naked." 

"If only such sad people could remember: Everyone is naked. Everyone wants to hide. But life is still sweet. Let it go on." 

"You don't believe that the Formics are the beast of the Apocalypse, then, Sister?" 

"No, Anton. I believe they are also children of God." 

"And yet you found this boy specifically so he could grow up to destroy them." 

"Defeat them. Besides, if God does not want them to die, they will not die." 

"And if God wants us to die, we will. Why do you work so hard, then?" 

"Because these hands of mine, I gave them to God, and I serve him as best I can. If he had not wanted me to find Bean, I would not have found him." 

"And if God wants the Formics to prevail?" 

"He'll find some other hands to do it. For that job, he can't have mine." (pp 236-237, Ender's Shadow)

THIS! 

This is why I love reading young adult fiction these days. It seems that writers of this genre are one of the few who aren't afraid to engage youth and teens (and anyone else willing to read) with hard questions.

This single, simple dialogue about God touches on so many great topics, asks so many searching questions that don't have easy to find addresses as we search for answers in the Word. It challenges with questions that - in my experience with my young people - teens are often thinking but afraid to actually voice - things like God's plans, His almighty-ness, what it means to be His follower, suicide, war, obedience, hope, what seems like injustice from our perspective...

Literature often gives adults a bridge to cross into the minds and perspectives of those younger generations, helping to build trust, relationship and practice at asking hard questions and learning to seek answers to those questions together...

It is easy to see a book, hear a few things about it and make a general snap judgment pronouncement as to whether it is good, or bad. I used to think that I'd just screen all the books my kids wanted to read. 

That was realistic, wasn't it?

Yeah... until my oldest hit about 6th grade. Now, with 6 prolific readers checking out the maximum they can every few weeks from the library, there's no way I could begin to keep up. And just because it is something my second grader is reading doesn't mean it isn't as likely to be nothing worth reading. 

It became pretty obvious, pretty quickly that we needed to work on teaching our kids discernment regarding, when to stop a book because it was not encouraging them to think on right, pure, good, honorable... things. 

They needed to learn how to ask hard questions and to think about the messages contained within the book - and whether those messages honored God or dishonored Him and how they should respond. 

I needed to stop thinking I could protect them from all the ugly in a sin stained world - for it isn't what is on the outside that makes them sinful. That wells up from within. They needed.

I also needed to understand that the Holy Spirit speaks His messages, impressing them deep into our hearts in many languages and experiences. A book that spoke deeply to my son's heart was nothing more than mindless entertainment for me. A book that could have easily draw me into sadness and depression instead elicits a sense of wonder at the complexity of human relationships and leads her to ask questions about how God could be seen in those different situations.

Too bad there isn't a 3 step formula to teach discernment. 

Rather, in my experience, learning discernment results from a lot of trial and error and in the process, increasing sensitivity, ability and willingness to hear God's voice and accept His truth.

By definition, that means there will be tries resulting in great success. And there will be some pretty epic failures as well. 

I want to celebrate the life impacting books with my children. I want to encourage them as they learn their own boundaries. I want to offer them a hand up when they fall... I want them to learn to let all that they do become worship, sacrifice and service to the Almighty.

L'élégance du hérisson... or, in English? The Elegance of the Hedgehog

American culture has shifted - one of the key outcomes of recent events in the United States has so clearly proven this fact.

Thus, when I started reading this book and initially found it slow and even, at times, offensive (i.e. post-modern thought, some vulgarity, characters with whom I found it hard to relate, occasional philosophical wanderings that required careful reading to understand the point), but I kept reading beyond the first 80 pages because the title intrigued me.

We have a bit of experience with hedgehogs - and I kept reading because the title intrigued me. I wanted to find out why and how someone could describe a hedgehog as elegant. Cute? I totally got that. Interesting? No problem seeing that one either. Sweet personalities? They are... but also in our experience, they scurry along, a bit awkwardly, they don't climb well - easily tumbling off steps and ledges. Regardless, they are gentle and shy creatures who slowly warm up to people, but retreat to a prickly ball as soon as they are startled and are then difficult to get to open up again...

After the first 80 pages, though, I had finally grasped the ebb and flow of Barbary's writing. I enjoyed the distinctly European flavor (the book was originally published in France) and I certainly found the characters intriguing. And then, I began uncovering treasures in the text: 

"...tea is no minor beverage. When tea becomes ritual, it takes its place at the heart of our ability to see greatness in small things. Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment? The tea ritual: such a precise repetition of the same gestures and the same tastes; accession to simple, authentic and refined sensations, a licence granted to all, at little cost, to become aristocrats of taste, because tea is the beverage of the wealthy and of the poor; the tea ritual, therefore, has the extraordinary virtue of introducing into the absurdity of our lives an aperture of serene harmony. Yes, the world may aspire to vacuousness, lost souls mourn beauty, insignificance surrounds us. Then let us drink a cup of tea. Silence descends, one hears the wind outside, the autumn leaves rustle and take flight, the cat sleeps in a warm pool of light. And with each swallow, time is sublimed." (p. 87)

"True novelty is that which does not grow old, despite the passage of time. ...The contemplation of eternity within the very movement of life." (p. 96-97)

Profound Though No. 8

If you forget the future

You lose

The present

(p. 121)

"...just by observing the adults around me I understood very early on that life goes by in no time at all, yet they're always in such a hurry, so stressed out by deadlines, so eager for now so they needn't think about tomorrow... But if you dread tomorrow, it's because you don't know how to build the present and when you don't know how to build the present, you tell yourself you can deal with it tomorrow, and its a lost cause anyway because tomorrow always ends up becoming today, don't you see? So we mustn't forget any of this, absolutely not. We have to live with the certainty that we'll get old and that it won't look nice or be good or feel happy. And tell ourselves that it's now that matters: to build something, now, at any price, using all our strength. Always remember that there's an old people's home waiting somewhere and so we have to surpass ourselves every day, make every day undying. Climb to our personal Everest and do it in such a way that every step is a little bit of eternity. That's what the future is for: to build the present, with real plans, made by living people." (p. 124-125)

"Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside, she's covered in quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary -- and terribly elegant." (p. 139)

"So here is my profound thought for the day: this is the first time I have met someone who seeks out people and who sees beyond. That may seem trivial but I think it is profound all the same. We never look beyond our assumptions and, what's worse, we have given up trying to meet others: we just meet ourselves. We don't recognise each other because other people have become our permanent mirrors. If we actually realised this, if we were to become aware of the fact that we are only ever looking at ourselves in the other person, that we are alone in the wilderness, we would go crazy. ...As for me, I implore fate to give me the chance to see beyond myself and truly meet someone." (p. 141)

"Eternity: for all its invisibility, we gaze at it." (p. 246) 

   "...maybe the greatest anger and frustration come not from unemployment or poverty or the lack of a future but from the feeling that you have no culture because you've been torn between cultures, between incompatible symbols. How can you exist if you don't know where you are? What do you do if your culture will always be that of a Thai fishing village and of Parisian grand bourgeois at the same time? Or if you're the son of immigrants but also the citizen of an old, conservative nation? So you burn cars, because when you have no culture, you're no longer a civilised animal, you're a wild beast. And a wild beast burns and kills and pillages.   I know this is not a very profound thought but after that I did have a profound thought, all the same: I asked myself, what about me? What is my cultural problem? In what way am I torn between two incompatible beliefs And in what way am I a wild beast?" (p. 253)

"...beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It's the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you can see both their beauty and their death.    ...I thought, does this mean that is how we must live our lives? Constantly poised between beauty and death, between movement and its disappearance?    Maybe that's what being alive is all about: so we can track down those moments that are dying." (p. 268-269)

"When did I first experience the exquisite sense of surrender that is possible only with another person? The peace of mind one experiences on one's own, one's certainty of self in the serenity of solitude are nothing in comparison to the release and openness and fluency one shares with another, in close companionship..." (p. 273)

"If you want to heal

Heal others

And smile or weep

At this happy reversal of fate." 

(p. 286)

   "They didn't recognise me," I say.I come to a halt in the middle of the pavement, completely flabbergasted.   "They didn't reconise me," I repeate.He stops in turn, my hand still on his arm."It is because they have never seen you," he says. "I would recognise you anywhere."   ...And I wonder how well I myself can see."(p. 299-300)

   "I have finally concluded, maybe that's what life is about: there's a lot of despair, but also the odd moment of beauty, where time is no longer the same. It's as if those strains of music created a sort of interlude in time, something suspended, an elsewhere that had come to us, an always within never.    Yes, that's it, an always within never.   ...from now on, for you, I'l be searching for those moments of always within never.   Beauty in this world." (p. 320)

Not only is the writing/translating captivating... encapsulated within, I stumbled over such exquisite truth. And, as you can see also see, I eventually did discover the meaning behind the book's title. More significantly, however, I glimpsed how God has created bridges through the longings within those refraining post-modern thought - doors flung wide open to share the reason for the hope within. God has called His people to be His ambassadors. How can we relate to others if we don't understand where they are... from where they are coming? 

I firmly believe that every culture (even post-modern ones) will contain elements of God's truth and His beauty, because man is created in the image of God.

Themes like

• longing for eternity and for significance, 
• seeing beyond the surface to the person within, 
• the dichotomous struggle between beauty and death, 
• the basis of true friendship and how we need other people, 
• how the future is built on the little choices made today, 
• the benefit and beauty of serving and helping others
• our selfish, self-centered eyes are generally blind to others and therefore we only find ourselves reflected instead of knowing and truly being known,
• seeing infinity in a moment.

reflect our amazing God and therefore we should use them to build...

Any of these ideas could become a bridge to connect otherwise seemingly unconnectables. 

I'm facilitating a discovery learning unit about bridges for a group of gifted 2nd graders  (they will eventually design and build their own bridge) and last week we discussed how balanced pushing and pulling forces are what makes a bridge stand. Somehow, I don't think that concept only applies to purely physical bridges... When we seek to link two seemingly incongruent thoughts or perspectives, there will be some uncomfortable tension - or pulling; there will also be some squeezing and pushing - or compression. And that is good, for that is what prevents catastrophe and collapse.

It is those forces, in balance, that not only cause the bridge to stand alone, but to also support the weight of those crossing back and forth.

In this book, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, I hope I've found some tools to begin building such bridges. I hope I'm brave enough to start using them.

***************************************

What are you presently reading that challenges you and forces you to consider perspectives outside of your typical box?

Do you see God reflected in aspects of the culture in which you live?

What do you think about this idea of building bridges... and the uncomfortable tension and compression you might feel as a result?