About once every month or so, I call up a friend, and she talks me down from the ledge. I explain to her how I think God has called me change lives and transform the world, and how I am in the prime of my life, and how I must be insane to believe that I am best utilizing my God-given gifts by working in and through the Church. “Wouldn’t I be more effective with a non-profit or in some way that doesn’t have all the baggage of the institution?” I go on for a bit, and my friend listens and talks me down. She reminds me that despite all of its flaws (and all of our flaws), God can still use it and us to change lives and transform the world. But still, I cycle in and out of disillusionment.
I opened Sarah Cunningham’s Dear Church: Letters from a Disillusioned Generation knowing that I’d be seeing her at the Unleashed conference in a couple weeks. But as I read through her 14 letters to the organized, institutionalized Church, her words hit home. She introduced the Church to Gen-Xers (“comfortable with competing schools of thought,” “want instant gratification,” and “idealistic to a fault”—how does she know me so well?!?). She wrote of her struggle in and with and against the Church (“Odds are, you once stood in our idealistic Skechers and believed, like my generation, that the church could change the world. And, on many occasions, you struggled and still struggle—just as we do—against the idea that it cannot.”). And I must admit that I have flirted with all of her suggested responses to the disillusionment we feel:
1. Say bon voyage to your local congregation and set out in search of a new one,
2. Velcro yourself back to the local congregation you came from and press on even
harder,
3. Start some type of alternative Christian community with your wild and crazy like-minded friends, or
4. Give up on community altogether and roam around the world like a raving lunatic who is so compulsively opinionated that he can’t find a single person who agrees with his position in life.
And so I hover between options 2 and 3 trying to change lives, change the world, and—God willing—change the Church. And every now and then, I need a friend to convince me that it can happen.
But how about you? Where on the spectrum from encouraged to disillusioned do you stand? What would you include in a letter to the Church? And what do you think is the best response for young adults who feel alienated and disillusioned by the Church they see?
Posts
Ryan -
ReplyDeleteWell said! Ran across this article last week about "why institutions matter" from Duke Divinity School Dean, L. Gregory Jones http://faithandleadership.com/content/why-institutions-matter. Not sure where I am with this today (it's a status qou kind of day as opposed to a revoution kind of day) but Jones gives a helpful perspective.
Eric - thanks for the post. I appreciate the article you posted by Greg Jones--he is one of the people really seeking to reshape and reform the institutional church. Greg Jones is the dean at Duke Div School--where I went to seminary. I remember arrive at Duke with a strong dislike of "The Church". Under his and others guidance and wisdom and seeing how they were truly trying to be God's Church in the world, I found a renewed hope and love for the Church.
ReplyDeleteAnyways, here's a quote that really hit me as I read through Jones' article:
"Unfortunately, many American Christians have drunk too deeply from the well of romantic individualism and have eaten persistently at the trough of anti-institutionalism. Karl Menninger’s question of a generation ago, “What Ever Became of Sin?” is as relevant today. Not that sin has disappeared and we have become virtuous. Rather, we Christians have lost our own vocabulary and become seduced into thinking we can discover our best selves through introspection and self-help manuals. We have pretended that authentic Christianity can occur solely between an individual and God, or, for evangelicals, an individual and Jesus. Even those Christians who want to overcome individualism turn to community as an alternative. Yet communities and their practices cannot exist for long without institutions, so those romantic quests are caught in the same impasse."
I'm firmly "stuck" - and intentionally velcroed back into my local congregation. Although I do feel the pull for an alternative community of support and discipline.
ReplyDeleteAs I thought about what it meant to be in ministry and in relationship with the church, i kept coming up with the image of being planted and rooted in a community. The roots spread outward and run deep into history and tradition and the ethos of a local setting, but there is also this urge to grow and change and become a vital part of the ecosystem the surrounds me.
I just finished reading "A New Kind of Christian" by Brian McLaren a week or so ago. (I'd only had it for 2 years or so before making it past the introduction...) Brian comes from a more theologically-conservative background, but the flow of conversations recounted in the book speak to a lot of the same struggles that we face as young adults in ministry in the UMC too.
ReplyDeleteI can definitely relate to your fight with disillusionment. There are days when I'd rather throw up my hands and start afresh somewhere else. But I do believe that the church has the potential to change the world... and even itself! :) Our faith is grounded in the idea that God can bring life out of death. Surely the church is not the exception to this rule!