Something to Hang On To
So I have been thinking, processing a lot of things the past few weeks. Much of my thoughts have been on a few conversations I have had with friends over the past year. And it’s kind of a touchy topic, so I’m not sure how to navigate through this without sounding arrogant or like I have the corner on the market of holiness, because I don’t.
I fully identify with Paul in all his “chief of all sinners” talk. I don’t think he was employing some sort of literary hyperbole to underline the fact that we are all sinners. Nah, Paul had hunted down Christians so he could kill them like animals, and although he knew he was justified through his faith in Christ, there were times he believed himself the worst scum on the face of the Earth. I identify with that, and I think we all do – it’s just part and parcel of the human condition. He knew this, so he wrote it down to pass on hope toward others.
In saying this, I’m noticing a pretty big issue in my generation, the end-Xers and Y-beginners, is that they are compromising, completely shutting God out of any number of areas of their lives or turning away altogether. Again, I’m not judging. I’ve been there myself, but I couldn’t escape God and don’t get it when others do. But I do understand the compulsion to compromise, to talk away relevant Biblical truth in face of insurmountable odds life sets against us. The drive to fit in, to match the status quo. I get it.
And more than just getting it, I went through several years of trying to appear normal. I wanted the respect of those in the world, didn’t care so much about the church, and God, well, I knew he’d respect me no matter what I did or said, so that was a moot point. I worried a lot about what non-believers thought about my approach to spirituality and trying to step on the toes of the church, and I started losing myself. I thought that coming across as the cool Christian who was “just like them” would appeal to non-believers and remind Christians that Jesus was the first holy rebel. But that wasn’t me.
Toward the end of this phase, and honestly I’m not sure when it really started or fully came to an end, I ran into a friend of mine from high school. He was finishing up med school out of state and on a break to visit family. He was having coffee with a mutual friend and we started doing the normally awkward give-out-the-best highlights catch-up on life. This time though, I was genuinely interested and it wasn’t so awkward as running into a girl who had rejected me or some past pity friend (is that bad?).
Near the end of the conversation I wanted to share with him how my faith had developed. In high school I had been a pretty outgoing Christian. Up until this random crossing of paths with a high school friend I had thought that my faith had been weird, out-of-place, and irrelevent to my friends at the time. Never did I stop to think that leading a campus Bible study, making my luch table pray for the food, or all the Christian t-shirts, which reflected my spiritual maturity, were in lock-step with my physical and emotional maturity!
I went on to explain to this guy that, you know, my faith is different now, not so weird or extreme like it was in high school, and had actually become quite normal. Well, he didn’t get it. My “cool” church peers who smoke, drink, and cuss like Jesus (apparently), would have understood, but this dude didn’t. In fact, he looked at me in kind of a confused way and replied, “Well, I hope you haven’t lost it – that would be sad.”
Hmm. That would be sad. I craftily weaseled my way out of what I had tried to use to impress, and the conversation ended well. I got my coffee and left. (Or maybe I stayed…all depends on if that girl I liked was still working there.)
I don’t do that anymore. What I learned that day was that in trying to be “cool” and relevant to others, and a voice of change within the church, I had forgotten who Tim is. Granted, I am unique enough to step on the toes of all church folks I know a thousand times over. And it comes down to that weird social thing we all have. Acceptance issues are so much more pronounced in the high school years, but we all want people to respect us. They don’t need to like us, but respect? Yeah, it’s everything.
When we lose ourselves in carrying a message we are not, we not only remove ourselves from being a catalyst for change in the church and in society, but risk disconnecting from the heart of God. It’s a slow process, but one that’s hard to come back from because it can become so formative. I really LIKED the fact that I thought I was being unique when I fact I was not and had settled for mediocrity over my true self.
In Romans 12 Paul writes about every part of the body of Christ being unique, with a perspective and toolset as important to the rest of the body as they are unique. The reason kids were popular in high school, not the ones who rose to the top quickly only to fall again, is because they were comfortable in their own skin. As a Christian, I’m kind of weird by nature, but that’s okay. It is something that defines me. And when I tried to change that, I was in danger of losing respect from those in whom I never realized I had it.
I hope that this exodus out of and away from the church is just another swing of yet another rebellious generation who eventually starts having babies and comes back so their children can grow up with the same values they did. But I’m pretty sure this is not the case. In fact, I am confident of this. We have focused so long on all the “do not’s” and establishing Kingdom culture in society through litigation and constitutional amendments that, as a whole, we have lost the hearts and minds of not only culture, but our own children.
In searching for acceptance many of my Christian friends and peers from over the years have exchanged the truth of God for a cultural understanding of Scripture that makes more sense on the human level. I think they’ve forgotten how much it can suck to be a Christian! ‘Cause it does! Choosing what is right over what feels right has lost “respect” in the eyes of these guys. Previous generations always came back because they were still rebelling in the context of a Christian culture, or well, a Deist culture really.
As a church, we MUST change the way we teach our young. We’re pretty cavalier about warning of the evils of sex before marriage, often brushing off the warnings against porn because we don’t know how to walk through it ourselves. We get everybody to vote on constitional amendments against gay marriage, but wouldn’t even know the first thing about helping a young boy or girl dealing with same-sex attraction issues. It is easier to yell, but so difficult to parent. Our love must be louder than our litigation!
We’ve focused so much on conforming society to our image that we’ve forgotten that we are the ones meant to be conformed to God’s image. But not all is lost, right? Only twenty percent of our youth, one-third of young adults, have posted or exchanged naked photos of themselves. And at four out of every ten teens who walk away from God in their twenties end up coming back. We’re fighting an uphill battle and losing badly.
As a church, we don’t need to set ourselves against culture. Rather, we need to focus on the hearts and minds of our own, so that we can then send them out as agents of cultural change; not to force some sort of group-think, but to help society accomplish the things closest to the heart of God: reaching the poor, restoring the sick, and reforming the lawbreaker. We can no longer afford to force change upon society, attempting to conform it to God’s standards so that we are more comfortable. Being “in the world” means that we are going to have friends who are not Christians, interact with individuals whose values are light years away from our own.
Sometimes I get the impression that we are merely of the world but not in it. We know how to fight what we have wrongly seen as a threat to our existence, too well in fact. And yet, when we find ourselves neck-deep in sin, we don’t even know how to cry out for help. We have more in common with the Eloi of H.G. Wells’s Time Machine, who had it easy for so many generations that they had forgotten how to work or fight for anything. We cannot live as if everything is simply going to be given to us. The world has changed and thus must also our methods of instilling truth in our young people and showing love and compassion to those who do not yet know the freedom Christ offers.
“Flirting Goes High-Tech With Racy Photos Shared on Cellphones, Web”
Sharon Jayson
USA Today
December 9, 2008
“Most Twenty-Somethings Put Christianity on the Shelf Following Spiritually Active Teen Years”
The Barna Group
September 11, 2006
