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The nice god and young adults
From the pastor The Stumbling Runner, an indictment of young adults who treat the church as a place to get their needs met:
"Why is that young adults make the worst church members? Is it because they want another set of activities for their kids? Is it because they want to turn the sacred organism called the Church into some ecclesiastical version of the YMCA? ...And maybe I'm foolish and naive, but I actually believe that [the church] is intended to be the center of God's redemptive work in the world. So pardon me if I'm not more concerned about planning another lock-in for Junior and his buddies...We would be better off if we just said what we really expect church to be. I think the young adults would say, "Look, just keep my kids entertained. Give them something to do. Don't hassle us about having our lives restructured by the gospel. Because that's not what we want. We want activities and programs and pop religion that can make us feel better about ourselves. Keep our children off crack... keep them off our backs... and keep their $90 designer skirts down. But don't talk too much about denying self... don't dwell on caring for the poor... don't depress us with Psalms of lament... and please don't talk about carrying any crosses."
I shared this with a pastor friend and he though that the words were cruel.
He's not a Young Adult. I wonder if that matters.
I am gonna blog this quote...I'll prop ya.
AngloBaptist
I don't think you can expect young adults in the contemporary West to be
conscious of the hereafter on a daily basis. Our society is designed to
shield them from thinking about it and sell the illusion of perpetual
youth, vitality, and pleasure (because the secular world thinks these are
the only things worth having).
A hundred years ago they would have been unable to escape the reality of death. When people still lived in and among their extended families, they or someone in frequent contact with them was bound to be touched by it -- not only the old among them, but children dead from whooping cough, adults kicked by livestock, crushed by machines, or coughing up lungs with consumption. And when death entered the household, the living not only had to pause and say rites over the dead, but often personally to dig the grave and cover it with dirt afterward.
Until you recover the awareness of mortality among the young, you can't expect them to have anything other than consumerist religion. All that churchy stuff about the state of your soul is for old people to fret over until the day when we can use stem cells from ground-up embryos to make us live forever.
craig