Eunice and I returned from the annual Young Adult Conference at Bethany Beach, DE, and we had a pretty good time. There were something like 50+ young adults there. The topic at hand was Marcus Borg’s “Heart of Christianity”. The idea was to help us young people gather some new ways to look at our faith in our changing world.
The weekend was fun, but there were challenges. The young adults gathered there were diverse in opinion and experience. Simply put, the old tools are quickly failing them. Church is already becoming something relegated to their past. Only a minority of young adults maintain a strong connection to their church home.
I went through a similar period in my life. Eventually, I found new tools to talk about God and make meaning out of my life and this world. When that happened, I found the church as a useful place to be, though I was still very much in tension with that world. It felt like I was always going in and out of separate cultures - the culture of the world labeled as bad and the culture of the church labeled as holy.
This dichotomy colors more than we realize of modern church life, and it’s why emerging church leaders are tossing it out. Church should be out there, anywhere, where God’s love is at work. And many theologians are easy to point out that God is already at work out there… so the question is - why aren’t we at work with God? Why do we gather in little walled communities on Sundays for a few hours and complain when we are called back to that community for meetings and responsibilities? Is that really the modern faithful life? Is there more? Why is the world out there so bad, when the church is often so messed up too?
I think that is my hope for the young adults at the conference - to not be afraid to rethink church and faith into something that is holistic - mind, body, soul. We cannot be a faithful follower of Christ if our relationship with each other, with the earth, with culture is so stunted. We must be like Christ, walking in the midst of it, wading through it, making sense of it, and calling others to join us in our painful walk.
It’s time for us to create new tools (and rediscover some of the old ones that our grandparents once tossed out).
June 27, 2007
Can we talk about those old tools, which particularly interest me as one of the old-timers? I envy you for the experience you had.
David