by Steve | May 15, 2018 | Magazine Articles, May/June 2018
Live nativity pageant at MCC. Photo by Caroline Chadwell, Penguin Photography International.
By Courtney Lott –
When my mom first considered the prospect of moving to Egypt, anxiety shouldered out excitement pretty fast. “Everything about your mindset changes if you want to go unnoticed,” she said. “Two Christians who had been there for awhile told me about clothing – making sure my arms were covered, pants are better, and keep your purse close to you.”
The effort to not stick out is an art for the ex-pats who live in Egypt. With a 90 percent Muslim population, it’s even harder if these ex-pats are Christians, like my parents. It is vitally important, then, to find a community of other believers.
When my parents discovered Maadi Community Church (MCC) not far from Cairo, it felt like stepping into an oasis. “The people in the church made us feel welcome immediately when they introduced new people and asked which country you came from,” my mom said. “Naturally, Dad said Texas and that got a pretty good laugh.”
With people from every tribe, tongue, and denomination in attendance, their influence spreads worldwide. Though the Muslim community shows disinterest in the church, they provide jobs for boabs (guards) and maids, and invite their children to the camps they host during the summer.
A multicultural haven, MCC strives to be an oasis for people like my parents. “[This] is an idea that has been around for a very long time,” says Rev. Steve Flora. “We’re using this whole metaphor of oasis as a place to come get refreshed. Not to stay and live and try to be safe gathered around the oasis like it’s a little fortress, but to be refreshed, recharged, refilled, and then you go out into the world.”
MCC impacts the world in a big way. From a refugee school that serves displaced people throughout Cairo, to training African pastors, to a prison ministry, the diverse congregation actively reaches out to the people in their community with the love of Jesus.
Through God’s goodness, MCC has outgrown the property they share with St. John’s Episcopal Church. Sharing a property with over eleven other churches limits their time and as well as their resources. Moreover, there is a unique, if small, window of opportunity for the church to gain coveted official governmental permission to find their own place of worship.
Since the time President Gamal Abdel Nasser created the modern state of Egypt in the mid-1950’s, the government has refused to grant new church licenses. Now, however, the government has begun granting new licenses for reasons unknown. Because of this, MCC is now seeking to raise funds to buy a building in Maadi.
“[A new building] offers, not only for us, but for other people, other churches, other organizations, another place that they can come and have church on a legally sanctioned church property,” says Flora. “For me and our family it’s an investment in the future, not my future so much, as the future of Egypt and the church.”
Please pray for Maadi Community Church as they seek their own property and continue to work to be the hands, feet, and mouthpiece of the Lord in a community that is not open to Jesus Christ. For more information on the work God is doing there, visit http://maadichurch.com.
Courtney Lott is editorial assistant at Good News.
by Steve | May 15, 2018 | Magazine Articles, May/June 2018
By Steve Beard –
The holy-rolling and guitar-swinging hymn singer who arguably gave birth to rock and roll and was buried in an unmarked grave for more than 35 years is finally getting the respect she deserves. For the fans of Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915-1973), the posthumous adulation is bittersweet.
Ignored and neglected for decades, she was finally inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame on April 14. “She is the founding mother who gave rock’s founding fathers the idea,” the Hall of Fame acknowledged. Sister Rosetta’s obscurity is both regrettable and pitiable. Her music and talents were gender-eclipsing, genre-defying, and ground-breaking. She was a finger-picking, gospel-rocking trailblazer on the guitar long before Jimi Hendrix, Chuck Berry, or Eric Clapton.
“Sister Rosetta Tharpe holds an important role in the evolution of American music; a great innovator, she not only unapologetically bridged the seemingly enormous chasm between secular and church music, she also helped pioneer the unique sound of rock and roll guitar,” Rhiannon Giddens, lead singer of the Grammy Award-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops, has observed. “Her infectious spirit, impeccable musicality, and sheer joy in her faith are obvious in every recording and are a source of great inspiration.”
Tharpe grew up in a conservative church setting that was simultaneously progressive about women in ministry, loud musical instruments, and an expressive worship style that encouraged hand clapping and dancing. In some quarters, this lively expression was looked down upon and dismissed as undignified holy rollin’, but this was the high-octane incubator for Rosetta that gave her permission and a platform to express her gifts as a young woman.
Tharpe’s mother was a mandolin player and a traveling evangelist with the Church of God in Christ, the African-American Pentecostal-Holiness denomination founded in 1897. Accompanying her mother, Rosetta began playing “Jesus on the Mainline” on the guitar at age four. After years of playing in revival meetings and church services, Rosetta moved to New York City in 1938 and became the first gospel artist to be signed to Decca Records. She performed with Cab Calloway at Harlem’s segregated Cotton Club and was featured at John Hammond’s “From Spirituals to Swing” sold-out event at Carnegie Hall.
“She sang some gospel songs that brought the house down,” Count Baise recalled. “She sang down-home church numbers and had those old cool New Yorkers almost shouting in the aisles. There were lots of people out there who had never heard that kind of singing, but she went over big.”
Sister Rosetta’s star was on the rise. She was, after all, the first solo gospel artist to play at the famous Apollo Theater in Harlem. While the white audiences were thrilled to hear African American gospel music for the first time, many of her church supporters were aghast that she was taking what was known as “sanctified” music into nightclubs. Walking the tightrope between the tabernacle and the spotlight – and making a living as a musician – would prove to be both a burden and challenge for her entire life.
Sister Rosetta was famous for her raucous and rollicking music and mega-watt smile. But it was her guitar work that mesmerized audiences – saints, sinners, black, white, men and women. “Rapidly finger-picked notes press up against full-on power chords that linger languidly in the air,” Dr. Gayle Wald writes in her Tharpe biography Shout, Sister, Shout. “She squeezes notes from the high end of the pitch, relishing the gentle fuzz of distortion, then cajoles the instrument, commanding, ‘Let’s do that again.’”
In 1942, Billboard magazine called her music “rock-and-roll spiritual singing” – a decade before the phrase was commonplace. Tharpe attempted to “inhabit an in-between place where the worlds of religious and popular music intersected and overlapped,” Wald writes. “Even when limiting herself to a church repertoire, she stuck out as a loud woman: loud in her playing, loud in her personality. In concert, she combined the spontaneous fervor of religious revivals with the practiced production values of Broadway variety shows.”
The revolutionary nature of what she was doing didn’t go unnoticed by up-and-coming superstars. “Sister Rosetta Tharpe was anything but ordinary and plain,” said Bob Dylan. “She was a powerful force of nature.” She influenced Tina Turner, Aretha Franklin, and Karen Carpenter. “Say, man, there’s a woman who can sing some rock and roll,” Jerry Lee Lewis once said. “I mean, she’s singing religious music, but she is singing rock and roll. She’s … shakin’ man … She jumps it.” She was also Johnny Cash’s favorite artist.
“Elvis loved Rosetta Tharpe,” proclaimed Gordon Stoker of The Jordanaires, the back up vocal quartet for Presley. “Not only did he dig her guitar playing but he dug her singing too.” Before backing Elvis, The Jordanaires toured with Tharpe – flipping the cultural picture inside out as a white quartet sang back up for an African American performer.
In a belligerently segregated era, she was a striking figure with high heels and ornate sequined dresses accessorized by a Gibson SG guitar strapped over her shoulder. “As a black woman with few outlets for public speaking, Rosetta fashioned a distinct means to speak through her guitar,” Wald writes. “As a woman who could outplay her male counterparts, she managed the ‘threat’ of her virtuosity to men by undercutting it with disarming humor and a dose of feminine decorum.” Thankfully, modern day fans can watch a handful of grainy YouTube videos, including scenes where she was guest host of TV Gospel Time on NBC.
Tharpe’s recording of “Strange Things Happening Every Day” with boogie-woogie pianist Sammy Price in 1944 was the first gospel song to make Billboard’s “race records” Top Ten. A smart case has been made that it might be the first rock and roll record. That’s why her fans find sweet comfort in the Hall of Fame nod. “All this new stuff they call rock ’n’ roll, why, I’ve been playing that for years now,” Sister Rosetta told London’s Daily Mirror back in the 1950s. “Ninety percent of rock-and-roll artists came out of the church, their foundation is the church.”
The historic relationship between the church and rock has fluctuated between resentment to hostility – sometimes justifiably. Rosetta fought hard to stay in the good graces of the church that nurtured her. That didn’t always work out but she would be the first to remind the church that there must be some way for the amped-up joyful noise of ecstatic worship to be shared with those who will never enter a sanctuary. To those who would tell her “come out from among them and be ye separate” (2 Corinthians 6:17), she might respond, “let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:15-16).
During one spat with detractors, she responded: “God has said, ‘If I am for you, I am more than the world against you.’ He has also said, ‘Hold your peace, I will fight your battles,’ and that is what I am going to do and carry on for the Lord.”
Sister Rosetta suffered a stroke in 1970 and died three years later at the age of 58. Her widespread popularity had waned in comparison to previous decades. Her funeral was far more modest than her larger-than-life personality. Sadly, she was buried in an unmarked grave. As word of this travesty was discovered by fans more than 30 years later, money was raised for a proper tombstone. “She would sing until you cried and then she would sing until you danced for joy,” it now properly states. “She helped to keep the church alive and the saints rejoicing.”
Steve Beard is the editor of Good News.
by Steve | May 15, 2018 | Magazine Articles, May/June 2018
Delegates study legislation at the 2012 United Methodist General Conference in Tampa, Florida. A UMNS photo by Mike DuBose.
By Scott Kisker –
With the 2019 called General Conference looming, it is time to address the risks posed to our United Methodist polity as a peculiar articulation and preserver of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church.
The United Methodist Church is set up as a conciliar catholic church – the only one I know of. This means that, in our polity, the highest earthly authority is not bishops. While the bishops gather in what they call a council, that council is not our highest authority. Rather, the highest authority in The United Methodist Church is a particular regular lay and clergy council, which we call General Conference.
This General Conference is catholic (I use “catholic” here in the sense of representing the whole of The United Methodist Church). General Conference includes proportional participation from global United Methodism. This catholic council has allowed United Methodism to avoid captivity to peculiar cultural contexts better than most mainline Protestants — resisting some of the pressure to capitulate to culture and turn the worship of Yahweh, the Creator, into that of a tribal deity.
Our catholic council, General Conference, is the instrument of unity in our polity. It is instituted to preserve unity of teaching and practice among the people called Methodists. It is where we decide “what to teach, how to teach and what to do.” This is not a faux unity that in practice allows people to conform what they believe and how they behave to the forces within their particular time, place, and ethnicity. And every culture and era has its principalities and powers.
We hear a lot about contextuality, as though it were an unquestionable good. This rhetoric tickles contemporary ears, but it has a mixed track record in history. There are legions of examples in the modern era alone where churches have accommodated to the evils of their times and cultures, deforming the gospel. “Contextualization” of the Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church allowed for slave holding in the American South beginning in 1808, as well as the acceptance of racist segregation in the name of “unity” for the formation of The Methodist Church in 1939.
Resistance to the pressures of time and context is hard. But resistance is essential if a 2,000-year-old revelation of the Word in flesh is to be passed on to our children for their salvation. The good news is that our instrument of unity, a catholic, global General Conference, disciplines us to contend with one another cross-culturally for the truth of the One God, and to preserve the faith “believed at all times, in all places, by all peoples,” as Vincent of Lerins wrote.
Bishops in our polity hold an itinerant office. They are responsible for Word, sacrament, and order in the church as elders, but not as a separate order from other elders. Their office is an extension of, and attached to, the office of elder. They are not Lords of the Church or princes of a diocese. They cannot speak for the church, even ex cathedra. Their authority comes from the General Conference to do a particular job. They are sent forth as officers to hold members and congregations and annual conferences accountable to the doctrine and discipline established by our catholic council, the General Conference. In their apostolicity, their duly sent-ness, (apostello means “to send”), they visibly connect Methodists across space and culture to the General Conference, not to themselves.
Through an extraordinary procedural move at our 2016 General Conference, a group of bishops, aided by some influential pastors, managed to prevent the will of General Conference for corporate discipline from being articulated. By an appeal to “unity,” they were able to get a plan passed to transfer the power to mediate conflict in our church from our instrument of unity (the General Conference) to themselves, a less catholic, less accountable (thanks to jurisdictional divisions) group with no intrinsic authority to resolve such issues.
Given what the bishops have indicated, they are likely to propose in 2019, the temporary authority they managed to acquire in 2016 seems to have encouraged more presumption of authority. Anything like what could have passed General Conference in 2016 (the avoidance of which was the reason for their maneuvers) looks unlikely to come from the council of bishops. That alone should give the church pause. Should General Conference accept any proposal from the bishops other than, perhaps, a proposal that bishops uphold their vows to enforce the doctrine and discipline discerned through general conferencing, the General Conference will have demoted themselves and elevated the council of bishops to a position in our polity it was never intended to have.
Though many bishops do not realize it, if they are successful in pushing through either of the plans they have said they are seriously considering, they will undermine the conciliar and catholic nature of our church, thereby unraveling the very logic of Methodist ecclesiology. The catholic council for United Methodists, General Conference, will be impotent for anything that matters. “What to teach, how to teach, and what to do” will become a regional, local, even individual concern.
The irony is that this is all being done in the name of “unity.” In practice we will have divided the church into congregations or regions or ideologies, while crying “unity, unity,” where there is no unity. Definitive for being “United Methodist” will be where you live and who is your bishop. That is not unity. That will only accelerate the forces of tribalism and atomization. Our connection will, at most, be to our bishops, who, despite the rise of their council’s status, will de facto be subject to the whims of culturally captive conferences or congregations.
We will not be a catholic church. The global nature of our discernment of the Spirit will, for practical purposes, be at an end. We will not be a conciliar church. Our council, the General Conference, will be a pageant. General Conference will no longer be where we do the difficult work of cross-culture discernment, will no longer have authority for the global church, and will no longer bind us together. We will have rendered useless the instrument of United Methodist unity.
Should the bishops succeed, there will be little of historic Methodism left in a reconfigured United Methodist Church. The council of bishops will have made unrecognizable the historic Methodist understanding of the unity of the church, the catholicity of the church, the apostolicity of the church (and their own apostolic office), not to mention the sanctity of the church and 4,000 years of sexual ethics by communities who worship the one creator God.
Our name will be rhetoric with no content. We will be neither United nor Methodist. More crucial though, we will have surrendered our claim to be “Church.” All Nicene marks (one, holy, catholic and apostolic), as historically interpreted by Methodists, will have been obliterated in a new United Methodism.
Scott Kisker is Professor of Church History and Associate Dean 
of Masters Programs at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. He is the author of Mainline or Methodist? Recovering Our Evangelistic Mission (Discipleship Resources) and is one of the contributors featured in Holy Contridictions: What’s Next for the People Called United Methodists (Abingdon).
by Steve | May 15, 2018 | Magazine Articles, May/June 2018
Camp meetings and other types of religious services were conducted regularly by Methodists. (Lithograph of 1829 camp meeting, Library of Congress).
By William Payne –
As The United Methodist Church prepares to meet in St. Louis next year for the special-called General Conference to decide its future, now is a good time to take a sober assessment of the state of our current denomination.
• Over the last forty-eight years, it has lost over four million members. The numerical decrease equals the combined memberships of the United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church, and the Presbyterian Church USA.
• American Methodism has declined from 6.5 percent to 2.15 percent of the American population.
• Today, one-third of the UMC’s membership is over sixty-five. Another 30 percent is between 50 and 64. Only 9 percent is under thirty.
• The Western Jurisdiction membership has plunged by 10 percent since 2013.
Sociology of religion theories explain that when churches try to lower the barrier between biblical faith and secular practices by embracing secular values, traditional members become alienated and secular people aren’t evangelized. Moreover, spiritually hungry people who could be evangelized are more likely to go to traditional churches. In short, contextualizing Christianity to accommodate secularism is not a proven approach for reaching unchurched secular people. To put it bluntly, large percentages of people are still going to church. However, the UM share of the pie has grown exceedingly small.
The marriage and sexuality debate illustrates this issue. Every U.S. denomination that has embraced gay marriage and the ordination of gay clergy has experienced drastic numerical declines. Most of those denominations rightly anticipated that traditional members would flee to other churches. However, they wrongly believed that large numbers of unchurched gay and gay-friendly people would fill the void by joining their churches. The common notion that LGBT people will become practicing Christians if the church endorses homosexuality hasn’t proven true. In reality, churches that hope to win the secular masses must challenge secular identity by presenting an alternative identity, one that appeals to some unrealized felt need and feeds a spiritual hunger that can only be satisfied through a transformational relationship with Jesus.
Fortunately, American Methodist history offers a point of reference from which the current malaise can be analyzed. Early American Methodism was evangelistically potent and fully counter-cultural. From its founding to the mid-1800s, it experienced exponential growth. In 1812, it became the largest denomination in America. This is the great miracle of Methodism. In a mere twenty-seven years from its founding in 1784, Methodism fully upended the established churches with its message of holiness, exuberant worship, and experiential faith.
The relentless emphasis on holiness and spiritual growth necessitated a corresponding stress on keeping the discipline. For example, Methodist preachers didn’t give altar calls to invite people to join the church. Instead, they pleaded with the people to flee from the wrath to come. When a hearer felt deep conviction, the awakened person would be invited to join a Methodist class. Through participation in the class, the seeker would experience guided spiritual growth. After six months to a year, the new class member could be given a class ticket and be enrolled in the society. Only those who were enrolled in society were counted as members.
Because of the need to keep the discipline, the circuit riders tested the members on a regular basis. Those who didn’t follow the rules were purged from the society or returned to probationary membership. Wesley defended the need for purging members who didn’t evidence growth in grace because half-hearted members destroyed the spiritual vitality of the church and hindered others from going forward in grace.
Early American Methodism was so intent on maintaining its stringent membership standards that the relationship of members to participants was 1:12. One arrives at that number from the correspondence of the bishops. In 1791, Bishop Coke bragged that the adults which made up the Methodist congregations equaled 750,000. If Coke would have included children, the number would have swelled to over one million! In that year, the membership was 61,082. In 1797, Bishop Asbury said that one million people were their regular hearers. No one knew Methodism better than Asbury.
Based on the bishops’ estimations, approximately 18.5 percent of the US population participated in Methodism during the 1790s even though the membership only equaled about 1.5 percent of the US population.
Furthermore, if one counted participants instead of members, American Methodism would have become the largest church in America a mere decade after it was founded! As appealing as that might have been, the bishops knew that they could not lower the membership standards to allow attendees to join until they accepted the discipline. Yes, in early America, being a Methodist meant that a person was a disciple of Jesus Christ.
Today, from their exalted places in heaven, Bishops Coke and Asbury are pleading with the current bishops to keep to the discipline. Will the UM bishops remember our heritage and the reason why God raised up the people called Methodist? Placating the progressive wing won’t grow the church, gain social influence, stave off massive membership decline, evangelize the secular masses, or advance the reign of God.
In addition to its disciple-making apparatus, early American Methodism grew because stalwart circuit riders bravely endured great privation to preach the gospel to the burgeoning population. Circuit riders didn’t live in parsonages or drive comfortable cars when they did their work. They didn’t even preach in many church buildings. Rather, they traveled the country by horse. Since they didn’t earn enough money to sleep in taverns, they had to get lodging wherever they could find it.
The total dedication of the circuit riders to the evangelistic mission entailed extreme poverty. Since they lived on the road and only earned $64 a year, marriage was not an option. Plus, many didn’t receive their full salary. All of this led to malnutrition, disease, and premature death. Most died at a young age. This gives new meaning to why the assembled preachers began every conference by singing the Wesleyan hymn, “And Are We Yet Alive?”
History shows that God worked through the sacrificial efforts of the small army of Methodist preachers. They covered America in a loose web of circuits and corresponding preaching points. In time, that network led to the founding of an evangelical church in every city, hamlet, and outpost in America. Rapid membership growth and social transformation followed. In short, early American Methodists didn’t accommodate the culture. They changed it!
Yes, God raised up American Methodism to evangelize the land and spread the message of holiness. In fact, the work of early Methodists was so successful that it did more to shape the Christian ethos of the emerging American Republic than any other social force. Furthermore, the spiritual foundation that it helped to lay is a primary reason why America has not gone the way of Western Europe and Canada.
As United Methodists look forward to the specially called General Conference, the delegates must consider the unfinished business of the last General Conference. Before the UM Church can look forward and see with clarity where God wants it to go, it should look backward and rediscover why God raised up this church. A denomination that separates itself from its heritage and its ethos will never find spiritual vitality, social influence, or numerical success.
The future of American Methodism is in the balance. Thankfully, a new report from Harvard University gives cause for great optimism. “Recent research argues that the United States is secularizing, that this religious change is consistent with the secularization thesis, and that American religion is not exceptional,” reports sociologists Sean Bock and Landon Schnabel in Sociological Science. “But we show that rather than religion fading into irrelevance as the secularization thesis would suggest, intense religion—strong affiliation, very frequent practice, literalism, and evangelicalism—is persistent and, in fact, only moderate [secular] religion is on the decline in the United States…. The intensity of American religion is actually becoming more exceptional over time.”
In truth, God has left an open door in the American landscape. Secular and moderate religion won’t succeed. Evangelical churches have an opening to discover a secular field that is ripe unto harvest. Will United Methodism remain true to its heritage and mobilize an army of dedicated preachers to evangelize the secular masses? If the UM Church doesn’t go through the open door and reap the ripening harvest, God will give American Methodism’s torch to another church. The choice is ours.
William P. Payne is the Harlan and Wilma Hollewell Professor of Evangelism and World Missions at Ashland Theological Seminary. He is an ordained United Methodist elder in the Florida Annual Conference and the author of American Methodism: Past and Future Growth (Emeth, 2013) and Adventures in Spiritual Warfare (Wipf and Stock, 2018).
by Steve | May 15, 2018 | Magazine Articles, May/June 2018
God Outwitted Me: The Stories of My Life by Maxie Dunnam (Seedbed). Hopefully you’ve already read one of Dunnam’s many books or heard him preach. God Outwitted Me is his spiritual memoir about the events that molded and strengthened him to be the prized and beloved Christian leader and communicator that we have come to depend upon within The United Methodist Church.
God & Gangsters: 21 Tales from Gangland by Chris Ahrens. In this self-published book, Ahrens interviews nearly two dozen “shot callers, armed robbers, dealers, made men, violent racists, and murderers” who testify to discovering new life with Jesus Christ. As he writes, “Something or, rather, Someone had moved them, and because of that they chose to bow to the Throne rather than die in the Chair.” (More info: Godngangsters@gmail.com).
Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music: Larry Norman and the Perils of Christian Rock by Greg Alan Thornbury (Convergent). This is a captivating biography about one of the most intriguing, controversial, and thought-provoking Christian singer/songwriters. Norman was a complicated musical pioneer with a prophetic edge who had an enormous influence on both musicians who were anchored in their faith and those who weren’t really sure what they believed.
The Spiritual Gifts Handbook: Using Your Gifts to Build the Kingdom by Randy Clark and Mary Healy (Chosen). This is an exceedingly helpful book about the spiritual gifts spoken of in the New Testament. Erasing misconceptions, Clark (Protestant) and Healy (Catholic) provide an insightful exploration of the gifts given by the Holy Spirit to be used by Christians.
Kingfishers Catch Fire: A Conversation on the Ways of God Formed By the Words of God by Eugene Peterson (Waterbrook). The life of congruence urges us to live in sync with what we believe – to practice what we preach and to stretch ourselves between what is written in the Scriptures and how we live that out. Those familiar with Peterson’s poetic preaching will thoroughly benefit from this volume.
The 19 Questions To Kindle a Wesleyan Spirit by Carolyn Moore (Abingdon). Like Moore’s preaching, her writing is powerful, relatable, convicting, and energized by the flames of Pentecost. She leads readers through Wesley’s historic questions for ordination with both frankness and grace. For lay and clergy alike, the questions probe and challenge.
by Steve | May 15, 2018 | Magazine Articles, May/June 2018
TMS Global’s GreenLight programs offer young adults a 4-6 week mentor-led experience that guides them as they try to discover God’s leading in their lives. This team (pre-med mission-minded students) spent time serving alongside medical personnel in Ghana. For more information about GreenLight, contact jwheaton@tms-global.org.
By Sarah Parham –
We have all read the reports, the gloomy news that young people are leaving the church in masses. A Fuller Youth Institute study shows that roughly 50 percent of young people who grow up in the church leave the church behind, along with the piles of caps and gowns and high school sports trophies. No one needs a news feed to tell us this. It’s visible in the pews we sit in. It can cause us to lose hope.
But after more than a decade in college ministry, I can say with confidence that many Christian young people I know who are exiting the church are actually in pursuit of the kingdom. They are looking for a church that isn’t contained in four walls. They are looking for something more expansive, more missional. They are seeking a church to go to on Sunday that would be with them Monday through Saturday as well—touching the things they touch, loving the people they love. And this gives me hope!
But how might these young people stay connected to church? How can we, as church members, be an ally in helping them discern how God might use them in His mission in the world?
Don’t have the answers. Young people’s experience of the world is different than any other generation. They cannot stay uninformed of issues and tragedies in faraway places. The problems of other nations are being tweeted and broadcast in their pockets every day. Terrorism isn’t something that happens on foreign soil, but in New York City. Young people want to know what Jesus says about these things.
It can be rather intimidating. Their questions can be hard ones: “Is Jesus serious about taking care of the poor? He talked about that a lot. What is the church doing to help?” We might be tempted to squelch such questions because we don’t have the answers.
But that’s just it. We often don’t have the answers. And that’s not even the point. In my experience working with college-age youth, I noticed that when they asked hard questions, so often they weren’t trying to figure me out or to pin me or the church to the wall. They were trying to figure themselves out. They were trying to understand where their place was in this big, beautiful, and very messy world.
So how can we respond to their questions in a way that satisfies the questions beneath the questions?
Listen to the heart. The transition young people go through is so subtle, adults can miss it. Of course, young children ask why about everything. At some point, though, the why starts to be asked for a new reason. The question goes from “Mommy, why is that man asking for money?” to, years later, “Why is he sleeping outside when I go home to a nice bed?” In other words, as a person grows into adulthood, the question shifts from “Why is the world this way?” to “Why am I in the world this way?” When we miss the twist in the question, we miss the opportunity to speak into the lives of young people about that most precious thing: calling.
So at this junction, keep engaging. Listen to what Jesus is doing in this person. What breaks her heart? What inspires him to do more? What are his talents? What are the things that make her come alive — or the things that keep her up at night? What are the things that make him question?
It gets tricky when we hear hard questions over and over again. But be encouraged. So often, when God is moving in people to do something — like calling them to missions, for example — His call may be experienced as a holy unrest. In other words, there begins a stirring in the spirit that things aren’t the way they should be.
So when young people come to us with their questions, what if we return the questions back to them by asking, “What do you think God is saying in these questions? What if the answer lies in you?” By our questions, we might help them see that the things they notice that are not right could be the very things God is calling them towards. As we do this, we might actually help them discover their place in the mission of Jesus.
And, says the Fuller Youth Institute, we might also help them stay connected to the church. The Institute released a study on the phenomenon of young people leaving the church post high school. They found that there is one X-factor for keeping young people engaged in the church. Listening. When young people have a non-related adult who knows them well and is actively engaged in their lives, the chances of their keeping the faith and staying engaged in a church/campus group throughout college and beyond increases dramatically.
Set them free. If church people ask me what they can do to attract young people, the first thing I ask is what their missions program is like. I often get quizzical stares. Some proceed to tell me about their church’s youth program, or how much money they give to missions. But that’s not the heart of my question.
The reason I ask about a church’s missions program is because young people don’t want to sit on the sidelines and observe. They want to get involved with something meaningful. They want to be involved in missions and outreach. And their doing this might actually mean that they will leave our churches to go elsewhere, even to some other part of the world.
So instead of losing our young people, let’s launch them. Let’s listen to their questions. Let’s help them discern how God desires to use them in the world. Let’s resource them, and then let’s set them free to join Jesus in His mission. This, after all, is the ultimate goal of a missional church.
Sarah Parham is TMS Global’s director of mobilization and candidacy. She holds a Masters of Divinity degree from Asbury Theological Seminary. This article was reprinted from the Fall 2017 issue of Unfinished, the publication of TMS Global. Used by permission.
