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May 18, 2012 by Mark Hilbelink

Don’t Go There!

A wise person once told me, “If you want to know what someone’s idols really are, find out what subjects they won’t talk about.” Then, at church this Mother’s Day Sunday morning, the pastor talked about a recent study where parenting has replaced body image as the most shame-inducing/defensiveness-producing topic amongst women.

And, if you’ve spent any time at all with Millennials, you’ll know that we have a great propensity for hiding. Hiding struggles, hiding relationships, hiding habits, etc. Perhaps its because we’ve grown up being able to hide behind internet firewalls or perhaps its because we’ve been increasingly parented by attachment (see latest issue of Time) or perhaps its just that we see things in a unique shade of postmodern gray – but whatever the reason, we have trouble with the whole truth, particularly when it is about us.

So it got me to thinking: what are some things that we as Millennials, church leaders and a denomination are scared to talk about? What are the things that cause us to rise up in defensiveness or slump down into hiding? I’d like your thoughts, but here’s some ideas to get us going:

Millennials:

  • Spiritual Disciplines: Scripture Reading, Prayer, Fasting, Giving, etc.
  • The Selfishness of the “I’ve Been Really Busy” Excuse
  • Our Fear of Commitment
  • Our Insecurity about the Future
  • Romance, Sex, Pornography, etc.
  • Alcohol & Recreational Drug Use
  • Loneliness

Church Leaders:

  • Our Fear of Sharing Our Struggles & Doubts
  • Our Fear of Losing Our Jobs or Being Replaced
  • Our Lack of Real Friendships
  • Our Feeling of Insufficiency for our Positions
  • Our Jealousy of other Churches or Church Leaders

Denomination:

  • Our Fear of Splitting
  • Our Fear of Losing Our Identity
  • Our Fear of Significant Theological Differences
  • Our Fear of the Future

The craziest thing about all these fears and all these things we keep hidden is that we are set free by the blood of Jesus and, with the help of Christian community, we don’t have to bear these burdens by ourselves. The very thing we want to do the least – lean on eachother – is what is best for us. For when we are weak, then we are strong.

What things would you add to the list?

May 16, 2012 by yalt

It’s Not About the B̶i̶k̶e̶ Praise Band.

Dirk VanEyk is the pastor of Encounter Church, a CRC church plant in Kentwood, MI. Dirk is a graduate of Calvin College and Calvin Theological Seminary. Dirk is married to Kristin, who is a high school teacher, and is the father of Lily.

“A 2007 LifeWay survey did find 7 in 10 Protestants ages 18 to 30 who went to church regularly in high school said they quit attending by age 23.” -USA Today.

That statistic should scare you. However, you might contend, the situation in the CRC is much different. You’re right, but not in the direction that you’d prefer. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the CRC is lagging behind other mainline protestant churches. Such a weighty statistic like this one deserves a little poking and prodding. For example, what happens between 18 and 23 that makes 7 in 10  young protestants quite going to church? In a word: college. The four (or more) years of college are a time when young adults leave home, mentally or physically, and begin developing new ideas, skills, and social networks. This is also the statistical time when they quit church, usually for good.

The future is uncertain at best. Yet, there are glimmers of hope on the horizon. Take Encounter Church (Kentwood, MI) for example. Encounter hosts around 200 people each week. This is roughly the same size as many CRCs across North America. This also means that Encounter, like your church, cannot afford an elaborate worship space, LED lighting systems, camera cranes, fog machines, or anything else that the mega-churches use to create an appealing space to people in their mid-20s. Still, Encounter regularly hosts up to seventy people each week from ages 18-22, or in other words: college students. In addition, 80% of the weekly attendance is under 35.

So how does Encounter defy the statistics? I’ll give you a hint- it’s not about the praise band. Encounter Church began a year-and-a-half ago with limited resources and limited people. What we had to our great advantage was that we were in no way limited in our ideas of how to reach a waning generation. Encounter’s “pastoral staff” are two people without any experience at all. Both started at Encounter immediately after graduation. We didn’t (and still don’t) know how a church is “supposed” to run so we certainly weren’t victims to the status quo. For example, we wanted to invite our peers to church. We set aside 15% of our church’s budget to outreach. This meant carnivals and Easter egg hunts for young families and t-shirts and tumblers for college students. Our pastors would go to local college campuses and give stuff away (along with an invitation to come to church, of course). We coordinated with colleges to start unpaid internships. And we did all of this without an office because we meet in a public school’s auditorium.

The takeaway from this post should not be to lobby your church council to spend more on swag to give away. Nor should it be about getting a new or better praise band. Keep in mind, I know almost nothing about pastoring an established church (see paragraph above) but my hunch is that another program or quick fix is not the solution. The solution that we found was to start a whole new church where anything is possible. Yup. I’d go do that if I were you.

May 14, 2012 by Amy Vander Vliet

Is the Church as Loving as We Think It Is?

I’ll be the first to admit – my job is pretty cool, and it’s got some great fringe benefits.  I work as a web editor for Georgetown University, so I get most federal holidays off, my hours are flexible, and I occasionally telecommute.  The best part, however, is that I get to attend many of the events sponsored by my office, the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs.  As our name implies, we focus our research and teaching on the nexus of religion and international affairs, covering a range of issues from economic and social development to religious freedom to the role of faith in the 2012 presidential campaign.

One of our recent projects focused on the millennial generation and faith, values, and the presidential election.  In cooperation with the Public Religion Research Institute, we conducted a poll of over 2,000 18-24 year olds, noting things like faith affiliation, Facebook usage, generational differences, and political preferences.  We then used the results of the Millennial Values Survey to inform a conversation between Jim Wallis, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Joshua Foer, and three college students participating as Millennial Values Fellows.  The dialogue was lively as each participant explained which findings stood out to them as particularly intriguing or surprising.

Wallis zeroed in on the finding that only 76% of Christian Millennials say Christianity “consistently shows love for other people” – and the number drops to only 41% for Millennials who are religiously unaffiliated.  As a whole, almost 60% of Millennials believe that Christianity is judgmental, anti-gay, and hypocritical.  For a faith in which the Savior declares that, after loving God, loving one’s neighbor comes in a close second, he sadly wondered by this figure was so low.  What was happening to the 24%/59% of Millennials who DIDN’T experience love at the hands of God’s people?  It saddens me to think that the faith which has sustained me, founded on the unfathomably deep loving-kindness of God for a sin-soaked world, is one which others believe is characterized primarily by spite and inconsistency.

I have been blessed by a church family that is demonstratively loving.  We rally in times of pain to support those who are sick or grieving, we celebrate joyous events like marriage and baptism together, and we work to include all ages, genders, and ethnicities in the full life of the church…but we wonder if we could do more.  Our ongoing search for a new pastor has intensified this questioning.  Are we doing enough to reach out to those in the immediate vicinity of the church building?  To those who live near us?  To those in our own congregation with hidden needs?  There are no easy answers to these questions, and until the Lord’s coming there will be no resolution, no final fulfillment of humanity’s many and profound needs.

Nonetheless, God calls us to faithful doing, to acts that demonstrate our gratitude and offer a glimpse of His faithful embrace.  Every Christian bears this personal responsibility, but we also must respond to the call to act corporately as a body of believers.  In what areas does your church show love?  Young adults, are you actively engaged in helping your local congregation show love to others?  Church leaders, have you intentionally reached out to young adults who could show God’s love in ways you haven’t considered before?

May 11, 2012 by yalt

Searching for Home in Montana

Mark Hofman (Twitter: @hofmaster352) is the Minister of Discipleship at Bethel Christian Reformed Church in Manhattan, MT. He and his wife Stephanie, along with their son Asher, call southwest Montana home.

In a Barnes and Noble café just outside downtown Bozeman, a homeless 20-something named Edward was sipping complimentary water as he pretended to pore through his old psych textbooks. The pages were bent and curled at the edges. His two black backpacks were filled with disarrayed notebook pages covered with scribbles and drawings. He sat excited by the possibility of conversation yet unsure of how to look unthreatening and unassuming.

As I was waiting for some youth group students to return from the mall before going to see the new Avengers film together, Edward came over to sit with me looking for someone to listen to his story. He had made his way to western Montana to try and start a business, build a cabin in the woods, and to get away from his family back in California. After 20 minutes or so of listening to Edward I suspected he was suffering from an acute case of paranoid schizophrenia. This was confirmed when another group that had been sitting nearby got up to leave and within moments Edward was nearly getting into a fist fight over something he’d supposedly said about the other guy’s mother.

Why Edward ended up where he was or talking to me for that matter I still don’t understand completely. He was very adamant about the evils of the church and pastors who preyed upon the helpless. And though he didn’t know he was talking to a pastor, it was obvious that Edward was facing a host of looming challenges with no illusions of finding help from religion or charity. I told him I thought there were many trustworthy people in the Gallatin Valley and gave him my phone number. I’m still waiting to see if he’ll ever give me a call.

Montana seems to be one of the few remaining places in the United States where people feel like they can escape from society into the wild. The story of Noah Pippin has recently added to the intrigue of how the 7th least populated state seems to attract nomads from around the country and the world. In my ministry I often come across two types of people – immigrants who long ago settled here to forge a new life and exiles from other parts of the country who have wandered in with similar hopes as Edward and Noah. What they all share in common is a unique sense of place and home (or lack thereof).

Rev. M. Craig Barnes wrote a book ten years ago about the meaning he found in Dante’s Divine Comedy as a confession of how we are all on pilgrimage, searching for the paradise we lost until we’re found by the One who calls us home. What Barnes suggested to an audience in 2004 was that spiritual categories such as settler, exile and nomad can be of use when looking at the experience of varying generations within the church, but ultimately we are all on the same pilgrimage and it’s better to have the whole group focused on this movement toward forgiveness. He writes, “No sin is greater than being too proud to come home once grace has made a way. If confession is the hardest part of the journey home, perhaps the most crucial is the turn out of confession into repentance. This turn begins simply with a memory of the gracious Father’s house, which is also when our true identity begins to return.” This truth equally applies to turn of the century immigrants and people born after the turn of the millennium. Our true identity is found in the same place we all come from.

What birth rate statistics don’t tell us are the stories of how younger and older image bearers end up inside or outside of our Churches. Sociology may help to explain the chances of a baptized infant becoming a Synodical delegate, but the spiritual reality is that there is no true predictor of who will or won’t end up signing onto a particular expression of the “one, holy, catholic and apostolic” church. We may try our best to use all of the tools at out disposal to bring them in or back, but as we look in the mirror we cannot know for sure who the CRCNA will look like in the future.

Psalm 27:8 comes to mind when I hear discussion about the current generation’s lack of interest in the church and its history: “My heart says of you, ‘Seek his face!’ your face Lord, I will seek.” This is the kind of pilgrimage that we are all on in the land of the living, looking for a way back home. Often we can find it in the rule of faith passed down to us. Often we can hear it in passionate disagreements about how to honor our past and our future. But the path is same for Edward, for Noah, for me and for you. And we pray it leads us ultimately to the God who made his home among us.

(*Edward’s real name has been changed to protect his identity)

May 8, 2012 by Mark Hilbelink

In-Fighting & Generational Bias

If you’re not a nerd in the CRC blogosphere – and who’s not these days – you may have missed all four legs of an attention-getting dispute that not only has some interesting theological/philosophical dimensions for the CRC, but also reveals part of how people born in different generations think.

While these rules aren’t hard and fast, particularly if you were born near a borderline of these years, most sociologists would put these birthdates on the generations now living in North America (along with their populations):
•GI’s (1904-1924) – 60 million
•Silents (1925-1945) – 55 million
•Boomers (1946-1979) – 76 million
•Gen X (1965-1979) – 52 million
•Millenials (1980-2000) – 78 million
•Wired (2001-Current) – ?
(Note: If you grew up in a rural area, you may need to bump the dates forward up to 10 years and if you grew up in a non-US urban center, you may need to bump them backward)

Of most interest for the Church currently are the interactions of 4 generations – the Silents & their children, the Gen X’ers – and the Boomers & their children, the Millennials. Silents & Gen-Xers tend to be more conservative with more defined lines on truth, while Boomers and Millennials tend to be more willingly liberal/accepting of various viewpoints and have blurrier lines on truth. Silents/Gen-Xers tend to overvalue history in comparison to the modern-day, while Boomers/Millennials tend to overvalue the present. Take a minute to figure out where you might land.

Now, consider these three articles, which have come out in the last few days:

Article #1, from The Banner, by Bob DeMoor (born around 1950), argues against the need for strict regulations on older creeds & confessions, instead calling us to gather around something written during the 1980′s (the Boomers’ heyday, which also produced theological juggernauts like Shine Jesus Shine & Boy George):

“We need to make the Contemporary Testimony what we sign on to instead of the historic confessions. That way we affirm our current understanding of Scriptural teaching and of creation revelation and always keep before us the necessary challenge of praying, working, and reflecting together on how our key sign-on document should be updated to keep us ever biblical and relevant.”

Article #2, from James KA Smith’s blog not only calls DeMoor out for irresponsibly questioning the relevance of the historic creeds & confessions – along with the lines they create – he plays the generation card. And like a lot of Silents/Gen-Xers, he goes with the classic, fingers-in-your-ears “if-I-can-say-it-louder-and-more-angst-ridden-than-you-can-I-must-be-right” method (incidentally, the same logic that birthed punk rock – Smith was born in 1970):

“Hey, baby boomers, I want to let you in on a little secret: you don’t own the denomination, though I know you’ve acted like you do for the past 20 years.  And I know you think that the next generation is looking to eviscerate our confessional Reformed particularity just as you’ve been trying to do.  But it’s a lot more complicated than that.  In fact, I think you should start to realize that those opposing you are not just “old codgers” who aren’t as enlightened as you, but also younger folks who have seen where this goes and are actually looking for a more ancient faith.  Some of us Gen Xers and rising Millennials are not interested in your “updated” faith: we’re looking for the thick, rich particularity of historic Reformed faith, understood as an expression of catholic Christianity.”

Article #3 is from Bryan Berghoef, on his blog (because he can’t comment on Smith’s – who, in good Gen-X logic, doesn’t allow it). Berghoef apparently is interested in “their updated faith” and disagrees with Smith, who’s just huddled Millennials into his Gen-X camp. He then goes on to demonstrate who Millennials are really aligned with – Boomers – and almost completely agrees with DeMoor’s original thesis. He alludes Smith’s arguments because, well, they don’t agree on the philosophy behind the argument – they’re just talking over eachother, as Smith was over DeMoor. Berghoef is, as you might guess, born right around 1980:

In other words, times have changed, and since we’ve refused to update the old confessions, why not re-appropriate our common statement of faith (which we already have) that articulates afresh our understanding of Scripture, God, and the world we live in? I think it’s a brilliant approach. Not everyone likes it though.  Surprise. What is a surprise is that someone in the philosophy department at Calvin College —who is a terrific thinker and writer— would be the source of the opposition.

While Berghoef has a Millennial thought process and a Gen-X delivery, pastor Dan Brown checks in with Article #4 on his blog, a true Millennial statement of “why can’t we all just get along?” Like a true Millennial (Brown was born around 1980, as well), Brown affirms and cautions everyone simultaneously:

And to all of our prophets – keep speaking – we recognize within ourselves the lethargy of the center. Our Laodicean lukewarmness. Sometimes we get complacent and forgetful. We need you to challenge us. To call us back and to bring us forward. To challenge and inspire and motivate and anger. We would be lost without you…
But to one another – remember that you are brothers and sisters too – and vital in the service of Kingdom. You are not problems or enemies. You’re just different parts of the same body and sometimes you forget that. Please forgive each other – please keep disagreeing – but don’t harbor anger in your hearts.

Now, I won’t be as trite as to boil this entire argument down to what generation we find ourselves in (they are all raising important points – see I’ve revealed my Millennial-ness), but I think, based on this argument progression and much of the Millennial research we reference quite a bit on this site, you can say a few things:

  • Boomers & Millennials are incredibly linked – especially in the tension they feel against imposed authority and the tension they do not feel when rules and previously-believed truth starts to get fuzzy.
    • These are the generations who created the consumer-based model and left the Church, in succession
    • Millennials are true centrists – middle-of-the-road walkers and have no problem accepting & validating people making completely opposite points. For them harmony/unity > orthodoxy
  • Silents & Gen-Xers are also very linked….just the opposite – they prioritize history and long for distinct restrictions on truth
    • These are the generations who championed the word-based missions movement and the emergent church’s love for ancient-future worship in successive generations

We far too often believe that we are the ones that operate without generational influence – we think that others might be, but we certainly aren’t. But the reality is the opposite – all of us fall into generational thinking. Smith brings this out in his piece most vividly – but ironically fails to recognize his own generational bias, trying to fold all generations following him into his own argument – a common mistake many of us make.

More importantly, all four of these generations have contributed to our current loss of young adults in the CRC – and in-fighting between generations won’t fix it. We need to work together for solutions – and realize our own biases in the process.

May 7, 2012 by yalt

Interview with Aaron Baart

Aaron Baart is the Dean of Chapel at Dordt College in Sioux Center, IA. A graduate of Dordt & Regent College, Aaron has also served as the Senior Pastor at Bridge of Hope Ministries in Sioux Center and a church plant in Chilliwack, BC. Together with his wife (author Nicole Baart), they also help lead One Body One Hope. Here Mark Hilbelink of YALT interviews Aaron about ministry, students & the Church.

1. You’ve pastored a church and are now a college chaplain. What are the differences for you?

The biggest difference is coordinating activities and programs.  At church I often felt like my primary role was motivating people, encouraging them to get involved, and trying to ignite a fire.  At college, I spend more time simply trying to keep up with all the ambitions and dreams the students already have and the fire God has put within them.  Here, I spend much less time trying to motivate or inspire vision and more time just trying to keep up.  It’s pretty invigorating!

2. You’re pretty young yourself for a college chaplain. What positives & challenges come from your age as a spiritual leader at a college?

The advantage of being a little younger is that hopefully I’m still pretty connected to the cultural issues that they struggle with.  For the most part, I can still relate, because it wasn’t all that long ago that I was in their shoes.  On the opposite end of the spectrum, the biggest challenge about being young is that at this stage of life I have three young boys at home.  My obligations at home keep me away from some of the night activities on campus that I would otherwise really like to be even more a part of.

3. The interaction between campus ministries as a Christian college & local churches can often be pretty ill-defined. Do you think there are students that “count” your ministries as their church and are you okay with that?

I am aware of the movement within this generation to define their spiritual life much more outside the institutional and local church than ever before.  For many, this could easily become the events, worship, and fellowship they experience on campus.  We try to combat this by making sure that none of our worship activities “take the place of” the local congregational experience.  I also try to dialogue periodically with local pastors and ask if they ever feel like we are “stepping on their toes”.  Most of the time, they are very encouraging and simply want as many growth opportunities for their college students as can be had.

4. What value do you think local churches have for Christian college students? How do you encourage them to go? How hard to you push?

We encourage them overtly (like mentioning this in Chapel) and also more indirectly through the van shuttle system we provide so they all can access rides to different churches in the area.  To me, one of the most compelling reasons why students need a local congregational experience as part of their spiritual formation is that they need to experience inter-generational community.  One of our college’s greatest assets is its residential nature (nearly 90% of our students live on campus); however, the potential deficit this creates in terms of spiritual development is that they currently live, eat, study, work, and play with people who look like them, act like them, see the world through the same generational eyes as them, and are overall at the same stage of life as them.  When it comes to spiritual growth, we need the wisdom of those who have gone before.  We need to interact with families and grandparents and different demographics.  We need to change a dirty diaper from time to time!  Diversity is one of God’s greatest shaping tools in our growth.  For that reason alone, a student’s formation will be jeopardized if they were to never leave campus to darken the door of a local church, expecting everything they need to exist on campus.

5. If you could give a piece of advice to local churches that surround Dordt to help them minister better or enfold your students, what would you say?

One word: food.  And I mean that seriously.  To share a place at a local family’s table and break bread with them is a great experience for students.  Without even being able to articulate it, I think students are starved for the family setting, for the dinner table setting, for the home-cooked food, and the conversation that comes with it.  I’ve had great interactions with students when they stayed late to chat at our house after babysitting, when they came to do laundry and watch Sunday afternoon football, when they’ve baked cookies in the kitchen, or simply came for supper.

6. How do you think your ministry would be different if you worked for a public institution? Have you learned some lessons from campus ministers at public universities you’ve used at Dordt?

I think my ministry would be vastly different.  At Dordt, Christ is mentioned in every class and openly glorified in every activity.  A spiritual life here is not an added appendage to a solid curriculum; rather, it’s interwoven not only through the content of the classes, but in the student activities, the housing set ups, and the meal plans.  As a Campus Ministry department I know that I am only one person or one program amidst many others all pulling in the same direction, under one unified vision.  As a result, I don’t have to fight what is going on in the classroom as something undermining their faith.  Instead, I am working with colleagues to tear down the walls between the sacred and the secular, helping students to see that all of life is lived before the face of God and so all of life is worship.

7. How well do you think most students connect with local churches after graduation? Is there a chance some of them just “drop out” at that point?

I know there are some students who do “drop out” of regular local church involvement after graduation.  Some of them come back.  Some don’t.  There’s some great books out there on the subject right now (see David Kinnaman’s You Lost Me) but I don’t have any hard data to offer regarding our grads.

8. How do you connect the academic and spiritual sides of the Dordt campus? Do you think students get the connection?

I hope that there aren’t academic and spiritual sides to Dordt’s campus.  I hope that our very deliberate single campus mind-set makes us distinct in the academic realm.  What we are seeking to do is to make sure that this very divide never occurs.  We strongly believe we can offer a top-notch academic education, on par with some of the best schools in the country, all the while forming and shaping transformational disciples both in and out of the classroom.  I think students really get this.  Our CORE curriculum walks them on a journey through the course of 4 years to not only understand, but to celebrate Christ’s lordship over every dominion of this world.  From what we see in their understanding when they first come here to what we hear them declare when they leave, I know that they get it.  They really get it.  And that’s huge encouragement for all of us who are praying and fighting for the next generation of disciples.

May 3, 2012 by Mark Hilbelink

Too Educated for Our Own Good?

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle
than for a very educated person to enter the Kingdom of God.”

I grew up in a good Dutch/German CRC family – my grandparents graduated high school, my parents got their bachelor’s degrees and my wife, brother & I got Master’s degrees. The natural progression for our kids, therefore, would be to get their PhD’s. It’s something built into our immigrant cultural tradition – we long for our children to do better than ourselves and sacrifice so they can do so and we believe education is the chief way for them to accomplish that end.

But there’s a couple developing problems:

  1. Degrees Aren’t the Waterproof Investment It Used to Be: This is a shared problem – between our culture/government’s inability to secure a prosperous & growing economy, higher education’s (Christian higher ed not excluded) constant lust for bigger buildings & better programs that results in unrealistically-ballooned tuition costs and our own generation’s trait of extended adolescence and refusal to embrace adulthood or work ethic.
    1. So, when young adults from broke, broken families, come and ask me as a pastor where they should go to school, its hard to recommend Calvin, which is now $35k+ annually, especially if they want to come back to our urban community and live missionally.
  2. It Seems to Be that the More Educated We Become, the Less United We Are: I had the privelege of working for three years in a denomination that had far less academic prowess than our own, had a much lower average salary amongst parishioners and required far less education for their pastors. It was shocking to me how unified they were despite differing theological perspectives and how much more diverse they were racially and socio-economically. Could it be that one of the reasons we’re arguing about our need for the Belhar Confession and racial reconciliation is our idolatry of academia? Could that be the same reason there is so much denominational splitting in our tradition, even to this very day?
  3. It Seems to Be that the More Educated We Become, the Less Missional Relationships We Have: Think about it – within the RCA & CRC, perhaps the two biggest voices are James KA Smith & Kevin De Young. Both live in college towns and interact primarily with academics. Both are voices against any sort of compromise in the liturgical heft of our worship gatherings, which tends to be a key determinant of what sort of people become woven into the life of the Christian community. Both engage young adults, but a very particular piece of the young adult pie. Both ride the line between delightfully deep and just a tad curmudgeonly. They demonstrate what’s glorious and what’s difficult about being a CRC or RCA young adult in today’s world: we’ve got the Bible & theology broken down to a science, but we have to go on mission trips to find the kind of people Jesus actually created His community with.

At our highest-up levels, from our loudest, most influential voices, we pride ourselves on being something like the NPR or the Whole Foods of the Christian spectrum – we know some people can’t access what we’re putting out there and that’s not only okay, its implicitly intended. Besides that, we tend to get very anti- in our approaches to things – increasingly, it seems, over time. Maybe that’s the natural progression of things, maybe we’ve simply ridden the academia train down tracks we didn’t realize it was on or maybe, just maybe we’re the kind of people Paul’s talking about in I Corinthians 1:18-25:

“For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written:

   “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;
   the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”

 Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.”

And again, in I Corinthians 3:18-23:

“Do not deceive yourselves. If any of you think you are wise by the standards of this age, you should become “fools” so that you may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight. As it is written: “He catches the wise in their craftiness”, and again, “The Lord knows that the thoughts of the wise are futile.”So then, no more boasting about human leaders! All things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephasor the world or life or death or the present or the future—all are yours, and you are of Christ, and Christ is of God.”

But look one more time at the statement I began this with: just like Jesus’ original statement, it doesn’t exclude eternal life or even being outwardly religious (ie, attending worship services, etc.). Interestingly enough, the stats seem to back that up, as well. In fact, what education does seem to get people, according to this study, is a more liberal view of how wide the gate/road actually is. And, in our tradition, it seems to make us just a little more uptight about who believes what and how pointedly we say it. If there is one consistent theme in Jesus ministry, probably more frequent than any other, it is the reconciliation of the marginalized and the failure of the religious leaders to translate Scripture’s theory into getting their hands dirty with that. There’s a reason He chose lesser-educated, blue-collar people to be His 12 disciples and the most critical leaders the Church has ever had – they would actually do it – not just talk about it, blog about it, sing about it, liturgize about it and lament about it.

Which really leads to the real problem: if overly-educated people tend to either get very pointed about their opinions to the point where their devotion to God is mostly wrapped up on orthodoxy (right belief) or theological liberalism – both of which I think we can readily identify as major sects within the young adults who are still in the CRC, then the real losers are the less-educated – the poor, the untrained, the marginalized. Think about it: there are very few churches where a group of college professors and a group of homeless people worship together and lead the church together. Unfortunately, the stats back that up, as well: less educated people are the real segment of people leaving the church while we argue about anything we can think of besides the lost (eternally & temporally). If Jesus came back here, to North America, He’d find churches of college-types and churches of low-income-types and I think I know which one He would go to.

So the real question is: how do we value education, even theological education, without pricing ourselves out of the very people group Jesus gravitated to?

April 30, 2012 by Mark Hilbelink

Why Mentoring Works

The longer I work with leaders of all ages, but specifically Millenials, I’m more convinced each day that mentoring is one of the best, if not THE best way to accomplish true growth – vocational growth, emotional growth, spiritual growth, etc. On my young staff, we deeply encourage, near the point of requirement, all staff members to be in both mentored and mentoring relationships, in addition to their missional community membership. That seems like a lot – and truthfully, it is – up to 6 or so hours a week. But that high price has garnered accelerated growth and exponential impact. As a pastor, I think mentoring is the most significant thing I do for the Kingdom. So here’s some reasons I think mentoring works, from personal and communal experience:

  • It grates against our tendencies.
    • Our human tendency is to rebel – to cling to our rights and to our privacy. Mentorship grates against selfishness in mentors and self-protectionism in mentorees.
  • It teaches us loads about ourselves.
    • Obviously, mentorees learn a lot from the mentoring process, but open-minded mentors often learn as much about themselves from reflection on mentoring as they do from being mentored.
  • It humbles us and holds us accountable.
    • Having someone else know our “stuff” and our weaknesses puts us in touch with our own depravity – accountability is the ladder out of that pit.
  • It forces discipline/regularity into our lives.
    • For many Milennials, doing anything weekly at a pre-determined time on a weekly or bi-weekly schedule is subversively formative. Sadly, this is true of many people in our churches – so insist on it, for their good.
  • It helps us process life.
    • Discipline and intentionality take three important steps – planning, executing & reflecting. Most people vastly neglect the reflection stage, to their own detriment – this forces it.
  • It turns mountains into molehills.
    • Failures, flare-ups and tragedies will come – but when these happen within the bounds of authentic Christian community, their potential long-term harmful impact is exponentially reduced.
  • Its the easiest and the hardest thing to do in ministry.
    • Meeting someone for coffee once a week is so simple, yet my guess is that 90%+ of our people (and probably 75%+ of our pastors) are not doing it. Why? Because it requires time & energy, because we know it will be necessarily frustrating, because we have limited capacity for relational depth with others, because we buck discipline and vulnerability in our sinful natures.
  • Its one of the most effective mechanisms for delivering truth.
    • As followers of Christ, we should be about truth – the truth of God’s word and the truth-telling that comes from authentic Christian community. Even non-Christians quote John 8:32, “Then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free”. We are often guilty of believing in, but not practicing truth-telling to avoid friction in relationships. All that really does is delay inevitabilities and hurts people you lead.

You really don’t need a manual for this one – invite 2 people out for coffee this week and broach the topic. Here’s some easy DO’s & DON’T's we’ve had to learn the hard way (and are still learning):

  • DON’T wait til you’ve got it all together.
  • DO try to mentor down, age-wise. (up can be done, but its complicated)
  • DON’T do cross-gender mentoring.
  • DO pick someone who’s already connected with you (in small group, missional community, ministry, staff, etc.)
  • DON’T mix life/spiritual mentoring with on-the-job vocational mentoring (especially if you are a direct supervisor)
  • DO define the relationship at the outset (goals, schedule, term)
  • DON’T over-react to positives or negatives (everything is information)
  • DO hold to high standards on timeliness & attendance (especially with Millennials)
  • DON’T wait til you are older (there is always someone you can speak truth to)
  • DO meet in a neutral location (mentoring might be why God gave us Starbucks)
  • DON’T use mentoring as evangelism
  • DO listen much more than you talk (hard for us pastors)
  • DON’T wait for someone to ask you (as a mentor or a mentoree)

What questions do you have about starting a mentoring relationships? Start it this week – you won’t regret it.

April 26, 2012 by yalt

A Strange Sort of Attraction

Eric Dirksen is the pastor and church planter of Christ Church of Davis, a CRC church plant in Davis, CA. He is married to Shelly and together they have 3 children.

In many ways I feel like one of the least qualified people to write anything about young adults and the CRC.  That may have something to do with the fact that a fairly common question I get from young adults at our church is, “What exactly is the CRC anyway?”  Still, we are starting a CRC church in a university community where no Reformed voice exists, and our church is being found by young adults – a few undergrads, graduate students, and recent graduates are starting to consider Christ Church, “their” church.  And while we often feel like we don’t know what we are doing, I’ll humbly submit a few reflections on our context:

Many of the young adults that are finding our church are being introduced to a Reformed perspective for the first time, and many are wondering how they haven’t found it sooner.  I hear from more than a few graduate students that they often feel they have to choose between their faith and the seriousness with which they take their research and academics.  In other words, they don’t feel equipped to deal with life on campus as a person of faith.  Often they feel the church has abandoned them because of their dedication to “science” and they feel the campus is hostile to their faith.  They feel squeezed on both sides.  Others have simply never experienced a Christianity that might actually insist that their work here matters and so have never bothered to investigate it in the first place.  So when these folks encounter a worldview and framework that insists on the inherent goodness of creation often they are shocked and delighted.  Many have never been part of a church before (or encountered a Christianity before) that encouraged them to, excuse the cliche, engage God’s world.  For some, the notion that faith is a launching pad into the world and not an escape from it is revolutionary.  If anything, I’m occasionally met with skepticism as if I’m coming up with Reformed thinking on my own.  While tempting to take credit, it’s a delight to point to an entire history of thought that runs deep.  It seems to me the CRC is well situated to engage and encourage an entire generation of people who operate under the assumption that they couldn’t possibly be thoughtful and be a Christian at the same time.

Secondly, many of the young adults that call our church home are looking for something different when it comes to worship.  We do a traditional, liturgical worship service but often in ways many have never experienced.  Our worship could be defined as “liturgy by explanation” in the sense that we expect people to be in our services who either have never been to church before or who have never experienced ancient forms of worship before.  For this reason, liturgy has been helpful for young adults (and others) because it gives them a language with which to step into faith, often for the first time.  For some young adults, our old worship is a new breath of fresh air.  Over and over, when we hadn’t even started our church yet, I heard from all sorts of people and more than a few young adults, “If you are a church, don’t try to sucker me in or be something you aren’t, just be a church.”  And for many people, young adults included, they like that our worship feels like, well, like worship.  For many of the young adults that consider Christ Church their home, our worship is a connection to something older, deeper, and larger than they are – something rooted and historic, and they love it.

Third, I’m finding young adults looking for community beyond their own age group.  Some of our young adults are intentionally shunning larger churches with larger programs in favor of our smaller, more local, less-programmatic church.  We don’t really have anything “for” young adults.  But what often happens is they are invited to participate fully in the life of our church – they come to old school potlucks and meet all sorts of different people, they participate in the service Sundays and pick up trash around town, serve meals in homeless shelters and other community oriented projects we have, they hang out and eat snacks after worship, and they are often invited into the homes of others in our church.  Recently, a man who celebrated his 60th birthday had 3 undergraduate students over for dinner.  No program there, just a community of faith.

And finally, the young adults that are part of our church resonate deeply with our insistence that everything we do as a church is rooted in the call to follow Christ into mission.  We strive to be a church for our city, not simply a church in it.  We love where we live and we want it to flourish.  We have a lot to learn from our community and therefore humbly expect to be taught important lessons.  And we insist that we are strangely liberated to live, love, and serve our community precisely because of the gospel story of grace.

To be sure, I’m not offering tips on how to attract or retain young adults.  Our church is new and small and some young adults have tried us out and decided it wasn’t for them.  Yet, I can’t help but be encouraged by the sort of young adult I meet regularly these days.  Whether skeptical or a Christian, I meet all sorts of young adults who are interested in the idea that a church that seeks to simply announce and embody the gospel might just be a place they can worship and serve.

April 24, 2012 by Mark Hilbelink

An Obituary for Youth Ministry

As many other angst-ridden teen Christians do, I went to a Christian college to become a Youth Pastor. And I was one – for three years. And we grew the youth group, and we went to conventions and it was fun. But now, as many people are pointing out, Youth Ministry, as we know it, is dying out. Many of my former youth ministry classmates are without jobs or have changed careers. Now I, as a Lead Pastor, have helped to remove the “Youth Director” position from our staff and end our “Youth Group” program. Many other churches are doing the same. So here is, tongue-and-cheek, an obituary for what the Church knew for just under 30 years, as “Youth Ministry”.

AN OBITUARY FOR YOUTH MINISTRY

Born in the mid-1980′s but not appearing in the CRC until the mid-1990′s, Youth Ministry was a concept that had its ups and downs over the course of its short, but painfully loud existence in the Christian Church.

Youth Ministry was at its best when it was part of the overall discipleship strategy for a local church – something that was planned for, thoughtfully executed and carefully evaluated each step in the intergenerational discipleship process from birth to death.

Youth Ministry, unfortunately, also had its dark, ugly sides. Studies regularly showed that students who attended youth groups drank, did drugs and had extra-marital sex at almost exactly the same rate as those who didn’t. Churches hired and fired youth pastors at an alarming rate. Youth Ministries often created an “us” vs. “them” mentality that worked for youth group camaraderie but also taught teens to loathe the institutional church.

Surviving Youth Ministry are some unfortunate civilian casualties – many of its own creation:

  • YOUTH PASTORS: An odd vocational group that included seminary dropouts, extended adolescents, counter-culturalists, frustrated idealists and (of course) people who genuinely cared about teenagers. Amongst that group, literally 2% had administration as a spiritual gift and none showed up on time. Many had fauxhawks and many also ended up filling the positions of worship leader/bus driver/janitor. Often a convenient lightening rod for every sort of conflict, Youth Pastors carried an impressive 1.5 year average before being fired and moving on to 1.5 years at another church.
  • YOUTH WORKER CONVENTIONS: The place where youth pastors would gather to take a second swing at their teenage years, as well as picking up some knowledge of Moral Therapeutic Deism on the side.
  • YOUTH GROUP NAMES: Usually blatant in their efforts to show their separation from “big people church”, picking a name was usually as simple as associating it with a number (the 875 Generation, Club 56), an animal group (the Flock, the Herd) or, at its best, some semblance of arson (Ignite!, Firestarters, The Reactor Core, Fusion).
  • YOUTH ROOM: The one room where you could be a teenager forever, if no one ever forced you to leave. Essentials of the youth room included pizza-filled old couches, a fuseball table with no handles, a net-less ping pong table, a 46-inch TV, one-generation-old video game consoles, band posters from Audio Adrenaline and the worst wall art you’ve ever seen. With the death of Youth Ministry, the EPA is being asked to clean up many Youth Rooms.
  • YOUTH SERVICE: Because everyone has the right to their own guitar amp….. and you don’t understand the young people’s music! Somehow, this became a great dumping ground for poorly-written worship music that could be accompanied by hand motions and/or induce hugs.
  • YOUTH MISSION TRIPS: Usually involved more paint on the painters than the houses, many speeding tickets for chaperones in large 15-passenger vans and more AXE body spray than you can shake a stick at. International versions also often included expenditures of thousands of dollars for minimal work and/or consumption of alcohol (because its legal there). The deeper, hidden purpose of these trips was actually to give opportunities for church kids to find significant others and acquire gobs of t-shirts with Sharpie signatures.
  • UNCHURCHED YOUNG ADULTS: The real casualties of Youth Ministry’s effect are the thousands, if not millions, of students who are no longer Christians or no longer part of a local church – due to a bad experience or due to the fact that, now un-age-segmented, they need to share preferences in a local church – a skill we never taught them.

Youth Ministry created a joyous solution to the problem every church everywhere faces at some point: “I know these kids love Jesus, but they are loud, they smell bad, they’re hormonally-challenged and they want to sing different songs.”

So now, Local Church, we have a decision to make – will we take advantage of the death of Youth Ministry and actually do birth-to-death discipleship the way we’re called to scripturally – through relationship – or will we just go on our merry way, waiting for a broken world and the broken generations yet to come to acquiesce to our tastes?

At the re:kindle Conference this summer, Mark will debate the subject “Is Youth Ministry Killing the Church?” with Youth Ministry guru & professor Dr. Syd Hielema. You can still sign up!

This film, not officially endorsed by YALT, points out many of the real issues presented here in longer format: