Why I still believe in the sermon
I still believe in the sermon. I know it isn’t necessarily cool or clever these days to think that. In an age when young people and young adults are leaving the church in huge numbers, a lot of people, especially youth workers, have suggested that the old method of preaching is outdated and needs replacing. But I still believe that preaching, when it’s done well, is an art form.
6 Reasons why young people are leaving the church
David Kinnaman (author of unChristian) and the Barna Group have just released their latest research, this time interviewing American young people who left the Church after the age of 15. Here are the six main reasons they found for young people / young adults leaving the church:
- Churches appear to be overprotective
- Their experience of Christianity was shallow
- Churches appear to be against science
- They’ve made mistakes and feel judged in church because of them
- Churches are afraid of the beliefs of other faiths
- Church is unfriendly to those who doubt
Kinnaman unpacks his findings in his new book - You Lost Me: Why Young Christians are Leaving Church and Rethinking Church.
How do these findings resonate with your experience as a young adult?
How can we grow church in a way that works for young adults?
An evangelical is someone who is transformed by the person and work of Jesus Christ, finds the Bible to be authoritative for life and doctrine and practice, and actively works to make the world better.
Kurt Fredrickson - Fuller Theological Seminary
Fredrickson’s is a definition of ‘evangelical’ that I can get excited about.
Check his post out about why the term evangelical has been hijacked by a group of judgemental people with their own agendas, and why we need to recover a much richer understanding of what it means.
Why faith-based youth work offers a solution to the London Riots
Youthwork Magazine editor, Martin Saunders, wrote this piece in the Guardian looking at the London Riots from the perspective of a Christian youth worker:
Faith-based youth work has something special, something inherently different to offer them, because it offers something distinctive: transformation. And we in the faith community must not be ashamed of where that transformation comes from: an engagement with young people’s yearning sense of spirituality – something which promises rewards even greater than financial gain.
Moralistic Therapeutic Deism…
What the hell is it?
It’s a way of understanding who god is:
- Moralistic - the need to do good things and not bad ones.
- Therapeutic - the need to feel good about ourselves.
- Deism - A ‘deity’/god who is ‘far away’ and doesn’t actively intervene into reality.
Some Moralistic Therapeutic Deist beliefs might look like this:
- “A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth.”
- “God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.”
- “The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.”
- “God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.”
- “Good people go to heaven when they die.”
There’s a worry that this actually sums up the beliefs of a lot of people who describe themselves as Christians pretty well.
What does the god you follow look like?
Does he look like the ideas above, or does he look more like this:
- A God who saves, forgives and liberates us from the power of sin and death?
- Unsettles and challenges as much as patting us on the back?
- Is active and at work in our lives and in his world?
The work that Frontline Community Church do in Liverpool has gained so much attention that the Guardian produced this film exploring their approach, and asking questions about how faith groups can fill in the gaps left by recent and forthcoming government cuts.
I especially love what the church leader says when he is interviewed, and the testimony from those who the church has helped. This is why we do what we do in Newport, and it’s great to see other Christian communities with the same approach who God is leading to do similar things.
HT: Dave
Experimental Youth Work in Hull
Thanks to Jonny for pointing out this video, showing some of the incredible work at Hull Youth for Christ, supported by Church Urban Fund. Over the last couple of years, I’ve increasingly become aware of CUF and how amazing they are - unfortunately though they only fund projects in England, not here in Wales.
I have friends who have visited Hull YFC and been very impressed with their work and the way the team there live their lives in such an open way to the community around them. I loved seeing pictures of the breakfast club they run - a great, really simple idea.
Those of you involved in youth work, or even just wanting to live for Jesus in your community - how could you change the lives of young people in your area by supporting their whole families?
Found this clip from King of the Hill really interesting.
Is the problem that Jesus was too packaged-up with youth cultural baggage, or that the Dad wasn’t willing to accept a kind of Christianity because the culture around it was too alien to him?
What do you think? Was there a need for less contextualisation/inculturation or more tolerance of a different culture?
Thanks Rethinking Youth Ministry for the clip.
As a postscript: Does the church lose young people when they grow up because they grow out of the cultural fads that we’ve wrapped Jesus up in in trying to reach them, or because we fail to fully contextualise the gospel in a way that makes sense for their own culture?
