Youth yearn for voices to be heard

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/08/2018 (2948 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I had a chance to talk about church with a couple of evangelical millennials recently.

During the conversation, they expressed a deep commitment to their faith. But they weren’t so sure about the churches they attend.

The way church is being done today just doesn’t seem to be doing it for them — especially the emphasis on the sermon. Services felt too much like educational programs, with a few songs thrown in.

“I can get all the information I need about faith on this,” said one, pointing to his phone.

So what did they want from church instead?

“I want to experience the presence of God,” he said, as the other agreed.

They aren’t alone. Growing numbers of younger Christians feel the same way, says John Seel, author of the new book The New Copernicans: Millennials and the Survival of the Church.

Seel, who directs the New Copernican Empowerment Dialogues at the Sider Center at Eastern University in St. David’s, Pa., uses the experience of 16th-century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus as the central theme of this book.

Just as Copernicus posited the then-radical and heretical idea that the Earth revolves around the sun, today’s New Copernicans see the world of faith different from what their elders are telling them.

For Seel, 65, a father of three millennials, the book is a warning to church leaders — especially evangelical leaders — to start making space for this new way of believing.

“There is a looming cultural frame shift, largely carried by millennials, which if ignored is poised to threaten the evangelical church,” he writes, adding this shift also affects mainline churches and Roman Catholicism.

According to Seel, this shift is marked by how millennials reject enlightenment and analytical ways of practising faith — a binary approach where things are either/or, true/false and right/wrong — to a more intuitive, exploratory, non-judgmental and inclusive approach.

It’s also a rejection of the more propositional approach to faith characteristic of so many churches, a way that starts with the head before moving to the heart and hands.

Millennials, he says, do it the other way around.

They “prioritize lived experience over abstract reflection,” he says, not the “intellectualist model of education” that many churches continue to promote today.

They are also more open to different ways to ascertaining truth, he says.

For them, faith is “an uneasy and ever-changing mix of viewpoints and perspectives… more opaque angles than straightforward reasons, more picture than proposition, more poetry than prose.”

Their spiritual journey is “best understood as trust, rather than merely a cognitive category associated with certainty… more open road than mental fortress,” he says.

If churches that still have youth want to keep them, they will need to create space for them to share their views and find ways to accommodate new ways of thinking about faith, he says — not double down on biblical absolutes, doctrines and moral codes.

And if they don’t?

Then millennials will drift away, he says, noting that the ranks of the “nones” are already being filled by many young people who no longer feel welcome in established churches.

For me, the book resonates with my experience with many millennial Christians — and with older Christians, too.

It makes me think that being a New Copernican isn’t a matter of age; more and more Christians of all ages are feeling a sense of unease about the way Christian faith is taught, promoted and practised by many churches today.

One thing that surprised me about the book was how few references there were to the LGBTTQ* issue. This has become a demarcation line between many younger and older Christians.

When I asked Seel about that, he acknowledged it’s a key issue. But he didn’t write much about it, he said, because of the polarizing way it is framed by many evangelicals today.

To spend too much time on it would have distracted from the main point of the book, he suggested — and maybe prevented some from reading it altogether.

Along with Copernicus, another metaphor used by Seel in the book is the Titanic.

Just as the captain of that doomed ship believed it was unsinkable, some church leaders today are overly confident of the future of their way of practising faith. But there are icebergs ahead, Seel writes, so they better take heed of the danger.

The iceberg presented by millennials, he says, “isn’t going anywhere.”

“The only question is how soon we will have to face it.”

jdl562000@yahoo.com

The Free Press is committed to covering faith in Manitoba through our Religion in the News project. This reporting continues because readers like you step forward to fund it.

Donate now to support our reporting on religion.
Your donation is eligible for a charitable tax receipt. BECOME A FAITH JOURNALISM SUPPORTER