Faith Is Action
I’m at our Lutheran World Relief Board meeting in Baltimore and during one our discussions about the future of LWR, it was noted that we consistently have high appeal to members of the emerging generation who want to see faith put into action.
Except, as one of our Board members, a president at a Lutheran College reminded us, the emerging generation isn’t interested in faith in action but rather believe faith is action. Echoing St. James, this generation would argue that, “faith without works is dead.”
Going to church every Sunday? Joining committees? Arguing about theological differences? (You know, the kind of things the church is known for….) These are of very little interest to today’s younger generation. In fact, and according to researchers like David Kinnaman, author of unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity…and Why It Matters
So my question is simple: is this good news or bad news for the Church? Not just congregations mind you, or Synods or seminaries or camps and all the rest of the ecology of “church” connected primarily with institutional, congregational life, but for the Church in the sense of the Body of Christ sent to proclaim God’s grace in word and deed?
Two comments…First, I am a mother of 6 children, now in their teens and 20’s and I am an ELCA pastor. There have been many opportunities in the church to discuss an assortment of topics – but my children along with many others – experienced conflict in theology and practice in a mighty way in 2009. Because they were children and/or youth – they experienced this conflict as bystanders. For my children, they observed first-hand the local church behaving badly and I think they are simply tired of the church getting in the way of acting out the life of a disciple! Second, on a recent college visit to an ELCA Liberal Arts College, during our campus tour we noted advocacy, small groups, action groups and so on revealing students living out a community committed to inclusivity, justice, compassion, forgiveness, stewardship – discipleship! Yet, when we were standing in the chapel, the centerpiece to the campus, our tour guide said she had never been in the chapel for anything but announcements and that she didn’t know of any Christians let alone – a Lutheran. As far as her religion class she liked how they didn’t even have to talk about God at all. Yikes, had no one helped this young person connect the dots of the community life she was experiencing to a life of discipleship? She was living in a community filled with the life giving example of God’s grace but didn’t know it. This amazing gifted and passionate generation is unaware or disengaged in the conversation about faith. We wonder about the future of the church they are the church today!
This is something that frustrates me, baffles me, and saddens me. Certainly faith is action. I understand that there is a generation, and perhaps generations to come, who live out their faith in ways beyond the walls of the church, outside of the Sunday morning hour.
But why can’t it be both/and? They can teach older generations how to do church better. Where are they going to hear the proclamation of God’s Word? Where are they going to receive the body and the blood? Why can’t they come to church on Sunday, show us how to do it without a committee with a meeting with an agenda, tell us when we’re getting hung up on theological differences, and drag us along to where we can put our faith into action?
I am a Lutheran (ELCA) pastor (40 years) whose two sons, age 23 and 36, have no time for the church. Both are responsible young adults with successful professional positions. Both have seen the ugly underside of institutional church life (synod and congregations): interpersonal political manipulation and disputes over organizational control.
Their critique of the whole business is to be non-institutional Christians. (Jesus is OK, but the way some people in charge of his church are not.) Going to church, joining committees, and arguing theology are of no interest to them. BUT when a neighbor or a family member is in need, they’re first in line to help out.
So, in this case study, faith is in action in the emerging generation, but not in and through the church. My guess is this is not an isolated example.
What I have come to find, being a millennial myself (and also now a pastor), is that for a long time, the Church has held up worship as the primary trophy of what we do. Coming in second and third place are missional living and incarnational faith, respectively. Millennials are tired of watching people hold up their trophy of the perfect worship service (where God is experienced), but then the trophy goes on the shelf for the week, and the other two collect dust.
The reason that so many young people have a problem with this is that it is hypocritical (as Kinnaman rightly points out in both of his books). Young people today are trying to reverse the order of the trophies. They desire incarnational faith first. From that flows missional living. These people truly and whole-heartedly want to make a difference in the world.
The push then becomes getting millennials to understand that these two things need to be lived out in and through a community effort in the local church. They need to know that their efforts are good, but are even better lived out with the efforts of an entire community of people who are on the same plane as them.
My analysis is this: If the Church switched its thinking and behaving from which trophy it held up first, millennials would come back to church. If millennials saw churches participating in the life of their communities, rather than expecting people to come to theirs, than the church would explode with new, young life. If the Church became incarnational again, which is what Jesus called us to do in the first place, than we’d begin to see the instant changes that took place shortly after Pentecost. If the Church became incarnational as the primary effort of sharing the love and salvation of Jesus in a real, tangible way in community, then missional living in the church would outflow, and worship would mean something to these people who are leaving the church.
What it’s going to take is a local effort, with a global mindset, to change the heart and attitude of the Church. The problem isn’t necessarily those who are leaving. Perhaps they understand what church is better than we do. But the edge the church has is that community is needed in the efforts to change the world around us. We need each other to make the difference. The Church needs young people to help live out the life of the Church and her mission. Millennials need the Church in order to truly make their efforts matter.