Five minutes in and I'm bored again...

I was going to post about Easter before this, but then I got inspired.

This is probably the last time I can go on this specific rant.  This is an issue that has been personally close to my heart for many years now but as I grow older, and as I move towards a more official life in the church, my opinion will lose the particular impact it has now, when I am a young layperson.  And I've said many things about it, but I've had conversations and discoveries lately that have sharpened my beliefs on this.

The issue is: how to get young people in churches.

Growing up in the church, I heard a lot of conversation around this subject, that was generally focused around traditional vs. contemporary worship services, with a thought that "young people" like contemporary worship styles over traditional.  Now, I acknowledge that I am a little more into traditional worship services than most people I know.  I actually like MORE traditional worship styles than those I grew up with, because I think they are beautiful, mysterious, and deeply theatrical.  But my main problem with the "young people want contemporary music" argument was that… no one was asking us.  These were assumptions made by people several decades older than us.

Recently in the Sunday Forum at my church, we had a discussion about the future of the Book of Common Prayer.  While no poll had been made about whether people were interested in a new edition of the Book of Common Prayer, there had recently been a poll concerning whether the people of the Episcopal church wanted a new hymnal to replace the Hymnal 1982.  The result of the poll was negative, people did NOT want a new hymnal, and when the person leading our discussion asked us which group we thought was the most resistant to a new hymnal, the room generally responded with, "The oldest group."  Sitting there, I shook my head, and thought, "The youngest."  

Much to the surprise of the others in the room, the group who wanted a new hymnal the least was the group 29 and younger.

There is an assumption out there that young people are captivated by the familiar, or, more accurately, are turned off by anything that feels "old", "traditional" or "orthodox".  I can see why that assumption is made… our generation is more socially liberal and often shuns conventional ways of life, moving to cities instead of suburbs, taking longer to settle down.  But I believe that is a dangerous assumption--or at least, a dangerous focus--because it puts all the emphasis on the external clothing of the church instead of the inner life.

In our discussion about the Book of Common Prayer and the Hymnal 1982 the leader pointed out that those born in the 50's, etc, were raised in a very strict, regimented society and the overall struggle of growing up was breaking free of those restrictive, conservative, prescribed lifestyles and were more likely to want to overthrow the reign of the Hymnal 1982. I spoke as the youngest person in the room (and possibly the only person under 30).  I cannot speak for my whole generation, but speaking for myself and the people I know, those of us who end up at the church tend to be looking for something stable, something that has history.  We are living in a time where everything is shifting around us.  We were coming of age in the biggest economic crash since the Great Depression.  The employment landscape is completely different than it was for the generations before us--we tend to work multiple part-time jobs, or worse, internships, because we somehow cannot get full-time jobs with benefits even with our impressive degrees.  We are in major debt for student loans.  Nothing is certain, everything is changing, and we want SOMETHING in our lives to ground us.  And so some of us turn to church, to a tradition that stretches back thousands of years and offers a different story of how to live life than the one we grew up with.  For a generation who has been overstimulated for most of our lives with the emergency of technology, it's a story about a way to live simply.  For a generation that struggles with relationships and how community life has shifted in a world of Facebook, it's a story that celebrates connection.  For a generation living in a globalized world where we are being exposed to more and more people completely different from us, it is a story that shows us how to treat the Other with love and compassion.  For a generation struggling with the idea of the American Dream, which is essentially seen as unachievable, it's a story that reminds us that material possessions and climbing up the ladder of success is not the most meaningful way to live life.

We go to church looking for this story, and ways to live this story in our lives, and often we find people arguing over whether guitars have a place in worship.  And THAT'S when we leave.  Because the other thing is, a lot of us feel like we've been lied to.  There've been so many editorials about this, some of which resonate with me and some of which make my generation sound like a bunch of brats, but no one can deny that it's an issue.  The "study hard in school --> go to a good college --> get a good job --> raise a family, buy a house --> retire" narrative that we were told is not working out for us so far.  We don't trust that there will be Social Security for us.  We are bitter and angry and want desperately for something to be genuine.  And so when we go to churches looking for God, looking for a new way to interact with this world, and find people who are not interested in that, and are instead arguing about something that ultimately doesn't matter as far as the mission of the church goes, we say, "Oh, another hypocritical place," and leave.

The church shouldn't exist for itself.  The church doesn't exist to be an institution.  The church is here to be the hands and feet and body of Christ in the world.  So when we talk about revitalizing the church, even when we talk about revitalizing worship, that work we have been given to do has to be the focus.  How can worship prepare us?  How can worship deepen and challenge our relationship with God so that we can more truly live as disciples of Christ?  How can we use the resources and gifts of our church community to engage ourselves and those around us as a community of love in the world?  And YES, in there there might be some questions about guitars, but then you can examine the vocational relationship of the church and its community, instead of saying, "Well, we need to increase the numbers."  Because ultimately, it's not about getting people in the doors.  It's about getting the people who are in the doors, out, and into the world in Christ's service.  Feeding the hungry, reaching out to the outcasts, showing our love for God in the way that Christ asked us to: by tending His sheep.  To love one another has Christ loved us--without judgement and with compassion.  And man, if we young people saw churches doing that, we'd come in droves.  

We want our lives to have meaning--we've been criticized for not wanting to do work we find to be "beneath us", but ultimately that attitude means that we want to spend our time doing work that we feel matters.  We volunteer, we do service work, often outside of the church.  We yearn for a deeper spirituality that we find in yoga classes more than in church.  So please, please, PLEASE, stop assuming that we are so shallow that something like the presence of a praise band will make or break our decision to come to church, because as long as those kinds of conversations are at the forefront of our church experience, we will continue to write off church as not being the place to truly re-examine our lives.  We aren't looking for entertainment, we're looking for God.  We will take our questions and our spirituality and our interest in living more purposefully elsewhere. And I, personally, am saddened when I watch churches try to solve important problems by asking unimportant questions.

Or, as I summarized in an Unvirtuous Abbey-style prayer: "For those who seek to revitalize the church by reconsidering worship styles instead of by reconsidering how we follow the Gospel, O Lord, we pray."