In my routine re-reading of Scripture, I recently came across the passage where Jesus states his core mission in terms of proclaiming release to the captives. We have all studied the text. It dawned on me that this looks different by context. The spiritual liberation of people who are living under grave political injustice is going to be different from the liberation of people who are addicted to their own social privilege.
A lot of ink is getting spilled in commentary over the plunging interest in church in the West, even in the USA. The younger you are, the less likely you have any interest in darkening the door of a church. There are multiple dynamics in play. We have not listened deeply enough to the people lately in terms of the places and points in their lives where they are deeply troubled and even held hostage. Jesus came to offer those folks freedom from what ails them. But churches often preach to the perceived ailings of another era.
The aging, middle class, don’t-rock-the-boat sensibilities of most American churches is tone deaf to the deepest longings and hurts of most younger Americans. Jesus came to offer revolution, not mild therapy and sappy music, suited for Grandma.
German Methodists are making some progress in church
planting in a land that is majority atheist. They are deploying young clergy and
challenging them to design ministry that makes sense for their friends –
thinking entirely out of the box of convention.
I asked one German pastor-planter (whose church is thriving) what was
the median age of his church. He
answered, 21. I had not heard
of any UMC with a median age that young in years, not even among church
plants. He started by reaching young
adults, people in their 20s. They
inherited a frumpy closed church building, and decided it made better sense to use it
as a climbing center than a worship room.
Hundreds of people a month come there to climb (in a community a
couple hours from the Alpine foothills).
The young adults began to have kids.
Now, twelve years into the plant, they have 100 children below the age
of 10: hence, the low median age. The
church is pretty mainstream – but it is designed to point the Gospel toward the
places of hopelessness in young German lives:
*Climate change
*Economic injustice
*Helping the victims of the Russian War in Ukraine
*Finding hope for their children’s future in a land where birth rates have fallen low due to a lack of such hope.
I learned that about half the families in that church are housing war refugees in their homes. Not exactly what I would call casual consumer-Christianity!
In olden times, American evangelical Christians pointed the Gospel towards
*Alcohol addiction that ravished lives and families
*Slavery
*Forces that destroyed marriages
*Fear of Hell
On the Hell front, increasing numbers of modern people do not hold a worldview that includes eternal damnation. Seeking to save someone from something that they do not believe in is probably a road toward church extinction.
But, back from Germany and from 1850s America to Kansas and California and Michigan in the 2020s: have you spent enough time with the young adults who are avoiding your church to discover what really matters to them, and really troubles them and what enslaves them? Where do we point the Gospel exactly, when we don’t really know the people which we are seeking to reach?
Preach freedom to captives, Jesus is telling us. Pay attention to the places where people are afraid, overwhelmed, discouraged and desperate – and design a ministry accordingly. Church was never intended to be Grandma’s house. It should always be revolutionary at its core. And if it doesn’t make Grandma blush occasionally, we are probably losing our way.
The Cathedral of Hope in Dallas was planted about forty years ago by Michael Piazza, a brilliant young pastor, who looked around for people living in darkness – and he found young men dying of AIDS. Everywhere. And the churches were doing almost nothing. So, Michael and his friends pointed the light of Jesus into that darkness, loved a lot of people on their deathbeds, and grew a church to 3000 souls in short order. They embraced LGBTQ folks along that journey. And Grandma blushed… while Grandpa just turned up the volume on his Fox News.
Reaching people for Christ is not nearly as hard as we want to make it.
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