Tag Archives: Church

Youth in church

03 Wednesday May 2017

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I’ve been doing research about youth engagement in church for a history class.  Our group is looking at the 1940’s in America among the Lutheran churches.

What’s really amazing is that we think the challenges we face in the church today are new.  LOL.  Not even close.  Now remember, the 1940’s is the decade in which the church was on the rise and close to the height of what it would be in the 1950’s – at one with the culture.

Yet, there are articles in youth magazines lamenting why there is a lack of youth leadership in church.  Sound familiar?  It should.

Here’s a few reasons the author of an article on this challenge thought this was so:

“The first reason was that the lack of interest and indifference on the part of the young people is directly due either to the lack of interest or indifference of the pastor or adult leader or to his inadequate leadership.  There are a number of pastors and adults who are out of sympathy with the whole young people’s movement. They still hold the notion that young people should be seen and not heard, and they do not encourage such participation by the young people themselves in the program and work of the congregation.  There are others who never make any attempt to lead the young people and there are others who try to do it all.”

“Then there is another group of counselors who have interest but lack knowledge.”

“Thus an organization which should be training leader through experience in leading and responsibility becomes merely a young people’s organization, managed entirely by one or more adults.  Such a method may help the young people somewhat, but it does not make leaders of them.”

Source: Luther League Review – 1943, pg. 2.

Could have been written today, couldn’t it?

But we think our problems and challenges are so very different and unique.  When will we learn?

By the way, if you substitute in other words for youth, I argue that the same thing the author writes about applies.  Substitute in discipleship.  See what you think.

We don’t always have to come up with something completely new.  Sometimes it’s best to learn from the past and then go forward.  Sometimes the “solutions” are not all that complicated. Sometimes the solutions aren’t things at all – just a way of living and interacting.  You know, living out what Jesus calls us to be and do.  It’s not a new program.  It’s a new life, a new way of living.  One that’s not really all that new.  Just one that isn’t tried very often.

What is church? part 2

27 Thursday Apr 2017

Posted by in Church, Theology

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Yesterday I took a stab at the question of What is church?  I received some great comments from that post – both in person and online.  Thank you.

Today I saw a beer ad that I think pretty much sums up what church should be like.  It’s an ad for Heineken.  Instead of explaining it, click the link, and scroll down to the video, or you can watch the video directly here:

This is a powerful ad.  And I think very honest too – which makes it powerful.

I can attest to the fact that when you get people who would normally disagree with each other (or worse) to sit down and eat together or have a drink together, something happens.  Food and drinks have a way of leveling equalizing people.  They have a way to drawing people together.  They could have nothing else in common, but the mere fact that two people eat or drink together means that they do have something in common – basic humanity and the needs of living – food and drink.

Church should be like this.  I think there is precedent for this too.  Jesus ate his way through the Gospels.  He ate with Pharisees and with tax collectors and a whole host of other people.  One of most remembered moments is the Last Supper.  Jesus knew the power of bringing people together and sharing a meal with them.

I have pastor friends who have started dinner churches and speak about the amazing things that happen at these gatherings.

When I was in Finland, I used the analogy of going to a bar to describe what the liturgy was all about.  A friend at the University didn’t understand church and what went on, so I explained it this way – we came together looking forward to spending time together in this bar.  That’s the gathering section of the liturgy.  Then we’ve been talking about God and life.  That’s the Word section.  Now we are sharing some drinks and food together.  We don’t agree about everything, yet we’re able to be here together sharing food and enjoying each other’s company.  That’s the Meal portion.  From here we’ll leave looking forward to the next time we can gather.  That’s the Sending.

What we saw in the ad was the liturgy in a very practical form.  What they experienced was God’s grace and without the words being said – forgiveness.  They saw the humanity and the frailty and the guilt in the other person and chose to look past all of that without judgement.  It that’s not what church is all about ultimately, I don’t know what is.

 

What is church?

26 Wednesday Apr 2017

Posted by in Church, Theology

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Yesterday I was a presentation on Re-Formation in the church that is occurring during the Spring Academy at Gettysburg Seminary.  It was a great presentation that a friend gave.

In it she asked the question – what is church?

In other words, how do we define it?

Is it just the bricks and mortar?  Is it the people? Is it a way of life?  A mission?

I had to think about this a bit.  I wonder if the answer will depend partly on the context.  In some cases the church is the building.  In others, it certainly is not.

In some cases it is the people, a way of life, and a mission.

But really, what is the essential essence of church?

I think it is based on relationship.  I think it is our relationship with God, with one another, with ourselves, and with the rest of creation.  But I think it starts with relationship with God and spreads out to the other three relationships.  This is what makes it unique and different.

Maybe this is too broad though.  Maybe we need more boundaries on the definition.

But I think church is also a living organism as well.  It is living in the sense that to be church means to be dynamic and open to change.  To be church means to honor traditions, but not be held hostage to past generations either.  To be church is to recognize that the core doesn’t change – just how we go about living out that core depending on the context.  Also, how we communicate that core will change with the context as well.

If I had to summarize church, I go back to what I learned from my research on the church in Finland (that I argue also applies to the church in the US) – the church is approachable, enjoyable, and relevant.

The church is approachable in that questions and doubt are welcome, where grace abounds and judgement is left at the door. So is shame.  Church lives out the idea that the curtain in the temple was torn – the separation between God and creation was ripped.  God is approachable.  That’s what being in relationship means.

The church is enjoyable.  I’m not talking about entertaining here.  In the presentation the presenter talked about worship being like a party.  It is something that people are enjoying and people want to come to.  We shouldn’t be bored out of our mind with church or worship.  Why go, why be a part of something that is boring?  Healthy relationships are enjoyable – you want to be around the person you are in a relationship with.

The church is relevant.  I’m not talking about being hip, changing things to fit the current trends, or adopting whatever slang is popular.  No, I’m talking about this – are we talking about what is going on in people’s lives?  Or are we too afraid to do that?  The church has the opportunity to talk about the struggles and challenges that people face and offer something that no one else can offer – grace, forgiveness, belonging, mercy, love.  There are plenty of people who struggle with addictions (drugs, sexual, porn, workaholism, alcohol, medical addictions, exercise, food, etc.) and yes, even people in the pews of churches around the world.  If we can’t talk about these struggles with the people who are living with them, and do it with grace and mercy (and no shame), then where are we going to talk about them?  The answer is no where.

So, what is church?  I say church is an approachable, enjoyable, and relevant relationship between people, creation, and God.

What are we ready for, church?

24 Monday Apr 2017

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It’s a simple question – what are we, as a church body, prepared for?  What are we perfectly positions for?  The past, present, the future?

Is the church, is your church, all set and ready to go for some past decade – as if the height of Christendom is going to return any time now?

Is the church, your church, ready for right now and all the challenges that it will face?  You really can’t answer yes honestly unless you had some foresight in the past.  Otherwise, you’re kidding yourself.

That leaves the future.  Is the church, your church, ready for 5, 10, 20, 50 years from now?  Pick a time frame.  Is the church, your church, prepared for the future?

You may be wondering, where is God in all of this?  I would say that God is standing at the end of time and pulling us toward where God is into a loving embrace.  How are we responding?

God calls our congregations to be different things at different times – we aren’t static as a community.  Just the mere fact that there are funerals and baptisms means the community will change over time – let alone people who come and go.

How is God calling your congregation to move into the future?  Are you looking at trends – who’s moving into the neighborhood? What developments are coming? What’s the demographics of the area? What kind of employment is there in the area?

When you start to look at the trends, your eyes open to new possibilities.  You start to see how God is calling the congregation to be Christ’s presence in the community.

We aren’t called to live in the past.  We are called to honor traditions though.  And then make new ones for the current generation.  Just as future generations will do.

We are called to live in the present, with an eye towards the future. And a rear view mirror to see the past.  The past shows us where we have been and how we got to where we are today.  The future gives us a direction we are heading.  And the present is where we always reside.

 

How to be religious

04 Tuesday Apr 2017

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It’s really simple – come up with a whole bunch of rules and make other people follow them, or else…

Maybe I should clarify something.  If people believe that a person can be spiritual but not religious, then it makes sense that a person could be religious but not spiritual.  What I defined is exactly that.  It’s going through the motions of church without any relationship to God – or rather, without a healthy relationship with God.

Does this mean we should all drop religion and just be spiritual?  No, I don’t think so.  It’s hard to do spiritual on your own.  And who says there isn’t room for spiritual in church anyway.  We can be both religious and spiritual.  The best of both worlds is the idea of worshiping God in community – a community that experiences God, where we are fed, and we are sent out from the community to our individual lives to carry out our vocations, but looking forward to coming back together again in community – all so we can be fed again and sent out again.

 

If we don’t talk about it…

03 Monday Apr 2017

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If we don’t talk about controversial topics and issues in church…then where are we going to talk about them?

On social media?  That seems to be working out well, isn’t it?

In line buying groceries? See how far that will get you.

At Thanksgiving?  LOL.  Seriously? Not if you really want to enjoy Thanksgiving.

Where?

I can tell you this much – our children are talking about controversial issues with their friends and at school.  No, probably not in a formal educational setting, but more in passing.

How are we equipping them to talk about such things like sex, drugs, addictions, money, etc?

The church should be a place where these conversations can happen, without shame, without scapegoating, without guilt.  Rather, with love.

This works there. Let’s do that. We’ll get the same results…(Not!)

30 Thursday Mar 2017

Posted by in Church, Politics, Theology

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There’s a popular idea out there that shows up every couple of months.  It’s the idea that you can take a policy that works in one location and plant it down in another with the same results.

I see this in memes and in political discussions very often.  Pick a topic.  Maybe its something about how one country has a higher standard of living, so clearly if we take their minimum wage and workers benefits package and implement them here, then we’ll also get a higher standard of living.  Or maybe it’s something like seeing how one state has low taxes and is doing well so we just adopt the same tax level and we’ll get the same results.

The problem with this is that these “solutions” are far to simplistic.  They make for a nice meme or tweet, but they make bad policy.  That’s because there is no consideration for why a policy might work in a specific context – the people, the culture, the history, etc.  There are many moving parts.  Policy, on its own, is generally not the main ingredient in why something works.  It’s the people who make something work – the way it is implemented, the trust between people and institutions to implement the basic idea, the context, the cultural understandings, etc.

Sometimes taking a policy from one location to another works, but I’m willing to go out on a limb here and say that this is mostly not the case.  Often the policy ends up with different results because of the many variables that relate to it.  You can’t just insert one policy in a mixture of variables and expect the same result where ever it is tried.

This is true for the church too.  For too long we take this same idea and do it in church. We think that if the church is doing something right in one location, it must be because of some policy that the church is doing – so we should pluck out the policy and bring it over to a church that is struggling.  Bam!  Instant positive results!  Except Not.  That’s not how life works.

Something that is working at one church may very well make a positive impact on another church. Then again, you might get the opposite result.

Context matters.  The people in a location, in a church, matters.  And lest we forget, what God is up to in a church really matters.  Instead of trying to find a magic solution in other churches, we should be looking at how God is active in our own context, what God is calling us to do and be in the context first.  When we try to be some other church, then we are bound to fail.  Instead, let’s be the church we are called to be, where we are.  You might be surprised with the result.

Youth, the church, and LGBT

28 Tuesday Mar 2017

Posted by in Church, Health, Society, Theology

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This past Sunday I had the opportunity to be a part of two conversations about the church and LGBT.  One was for a confirmation class – the topic was selected by the students and led by the pastor.  The other conversation was part of a youth group gathering and I facilitated the conversation.

Let me address a few things regarding these conversations –

“Church” – we didn’t try to speak for all churches here – just the ELCA.  There are far too many churches and denominations – we would have never covered them all.  And plus this was an ELCA setting, so it just made sense.  However, we did try to address what we’ll call the “traditional” thinking was versus a more “contemporary” thinking concerning LGBT.

Specific texts – in the confirmation class, specific texts from the Old and New Testament were brought us that have traditionally been seen as against homosexuality.  Again, here we talked about the verses openly and explored understandings in context, culture, and the way we look at the text through interpretive lenses – this last point is extremely important.  So is how we define terminology.

My overall impression is that these were healthy conversations.  The youth were genuinely interested in what the church had to say – they wanted to know what their church taught.

In the second conversation we had a wide ranging conversation where I asked the students how they might handle preaching some of these passages if they had to.  Again, honest discussion identifying concerns in the congregation if they did address these texts versus skipping them.  We had conversation about how sexuality is viewed in school and  I asked them what ways the church could be beneficial to them in relation to sexuality.  The overall answer was that open forums like this were very helpful – a chance to talk in a space where there would be no judgement, where questions could be raised, and people would be respected.

During one of the conversations, a student stated something to the effect that they were glad they could talk about this here.  The point being, if we can’t talk about touchy subjects in church, where are we going to talk about them?  I think this is true for sex, sexuality, money, identity, and so many other things that get to the heart of who we are.  Ultimately, the reason we should talk about such things in church is because these aren’t just issues – they are people, they are a part of people, they impact people.  And church is about how God is active and touching the lives of all people.  These conversations start off uncomfortable – they always do.  But why should we let comfort dictate what we talk about?  When it comes down to it – the Gospel is uncomfortable – it forces us to see the mess in our lives and in the world.  And then it talks about how God is active and changing our lives and the world.  If that isn’t uncomfortable, I don’t know what is.

I hope your church makes space for these uncomfortable conversations.  They need to be happening.