Over the past dozen years of working with high school and college students as a pastor and teacher, I’ve seen lots of people make a case for the Christian faith to young people. The rap isn’t all bad, to be clear. There is much to commend and, even in those areas of ineptitude, grace abounds, the Spirit draws straight lines with crooked sticks, etc.
However, at the risk of sounding like a young foggie, there is a manner of student ministry that is as common as it is destructive. I don’t even have to describe it in great detail for you to know what I’m talking about—it’s goofy, it’s gaudy, it encourages students to put live goldfishes in their mouths.
It has to be noted that this really did “work” for a season. In the 80’s and 90’s, there were real incentives to being a Christian, you got some social capital out of going to church—heck, you’d probably even get a spouse! There was a feeling, though, that church might not want you. It was formal, you were casual; it was serious, you yucked it up on the weekends; it was pure, you were sinful. There was an assumption that the living room of the church was essentially good, the problem was that the front door was imposing and the foyer was daunting.
In that context, the less formal, serious, or otherwise fastidious the speaker was, the more likely the listener was to feel accepted, welcomed, at home. So, I don’t want to impute bad motives to those I’m criticizing. Perhaps they too find their means unseemly, but it’s all towards a good end. Here’s the thing, though: the reasons people aren’t Christian today are different than the reasons they weren’t 30 years ago.
Maybe this story will help: several months ago, I had a conversation about faith with a very thoughtful sophomore in college. He brought up issues surrounding traditional Christian teaching on sexuality. He politely but firmly told me that he found the ethic I described—the one held by Augustine, his grandmother, and Barack Obama during his first term—regressive, oppressive, and otherwise morally bankrupt. This conversation isn’t unique at all. Indeed, even when it doesn’t happen explicitly, it’s no doubt happening implicitly every time we share our faith in the Modern West.
That episode illustrates this important but overlooked point. Today, people stay home on Sunday not because they view themselves as deficient, but because they view the church as deficient. I’d argue that seeing how many marshmallows one could stuff in their mouths never provided a compelling motive for students to stay in the church, but today it can’t even get them to come in the first place. We thus needlessly beclown ourselves in front of young people to our own peril.
There is good news: the Christian faith is inherently deep, it really does provide a credible, serious explanation for reality. Before it gave us lime green shirts that ripped off the Sprite logo to say “Spirit,” it gave us the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. We don’t need to lower the bar of formality to become welcoming. Rather, we need to raise the bar of thoughtfulness to become relevant, credible witnesses to the slain lamb who has begun his reign.
