THE YOUNGER UN-CHURCHED

From Ed Stetzer comes this insightful column: The Younger Un-churched: what do they really think?


Here is my latest column from the Spring 2011 issue of Facts and Trends magazine, focusing on the younger unchurched:

Adlai Stevenson stated, "That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in another." He did not have a particularly high view of the next generation, but he does challenge us to consider the radical changes in thinking that are sometimes seen between generations.
The reality is that generations do think differently and different views emerge - and it is worth our time to consider them. As George Orwell said, "Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it and wiser than the one that comes after it."
This bothers some and challenges others. For me, my concern is not to rail against the next generation-- I want to reach them.

In the book, "Lost and Found: The Younger Unchurched and the Churches that Reach Them," I shared some of the findings from a survey conducted of 1,000 unchurched young adults about the issues of church and spirituality. The study revealed that the younger generation is more open to issues of spirituality than our conventional wisdom allows us to admit.
This generation is open to God and spirituality. When asked if they considered themselves to be spiritual, 73 percent of respondents age 20-29 answered affirmatively. They are interested in learning more about God or a higher supreme being. Eighty-two percent believe a person's spirit continues to exist in some kind of afterlife. Seventy-seven percent believe in the idea of heaven and 60 percent believe in the idea of hell. Perhaps most surprising, 66 percent even believe that Jesus died and came back to life.

The Jesus that they believe in, however, is in some ways a Jesus of their own creation. Only 57 percent believe there is only one God, the God who exists in the Bible. Fifty-eight percent believe the God of the Bible is the same as the gods or spiritual beings of other religions. Though Hinduism ascribes to a million gods, Buddhism has no god, and Christianity has one God, a majority of young adults believe that all of these gods are the same.

While there are clearly negative implications to this pluralism, there are also great opportunities for the church. Sixty-three percent said they would attend a church that presented truth in an understandable way. We need to be proactive about sharing the gospel to this demographic in clear, understandable terms. Simultaneously, we should defy the "Chicken Little syndrome" that believes the church is about to crumble under the weight of pluralism.

It's easy to look at some of the viewpoints of the younger unchurched and write them off. Rather than throwing up our hands in disgust, we need to extend a hand, exemplifying Christ and His gospel now more than ever. We need to enter into authentic relationship with a generation filled with brilliance and potential. We need to begin honest conversations with those who have honest questions.

You can read more about our research on the millennials here, and you can subscribe to Facts and Trends by emailing factsandtrends@lifeway.com.

ANDY CROUCH ON THE TEN MOST IMPORTANT CULTURAL TRENDS OF THE PAST TEN YEARS

 Note from Steve: As we begin this new \year, outward-focused churches need to do some culyutal exegesis.  Andy Crouch provides these thoughts on Q-IDEAS THAT CREATE A BETTER WORLD.

Editor's Note: Because there is no year 0, a decade runs from 01/01 - 12/10 . As we enter the second decade of the second millennium AD, Q is pausing to consider the most significant changes and cultural goods of the last ten years.  Other contributors to this series include Margaret Feinberg, Brett McCracken and Josh Jackson.
-----

Ten years is a very short time. As I reflect on the world in 2011 compared to the world in 2001, I’m less struck by how much has changed than by how much is the same. Terror, war, new technology, economic boom and bust, surprising political triumphs followed by sudden changes of fortune—yup, sounds like the 1990s, 1980s, 1970s, and 1960s to me. It’s almost axiomatic that any change big enough to shape an entire nation or society happens in long waves spanning generations, not a mere ten years.

Indeed, when I reflect on the most significant developments of the never-adequately-named 2000s (the aughts? the aughties? the naughties?), it seems that almost all of them were well under way in 1999, or even 1989. At the same time, in the last ten years some long-wave trends accelerated in notable ways. Acceleration matters. In one sense, walking, riding a horse, driving a car, and traveling by plane are simply variations on the millennia-old human theme of mobility, tracing back literally to the earliest signs of our restless race. But the difference between five miles an hour and 500 miles an hour is not just a quantitative matter of speed, but a qualitative change in the horizons of possibility.

Here are ten significant trends in North American culture that accelerated dramatically in the 2000s—almost always for better and for worse at the same time.

One | Connection

By far the most significant acceleration was in our technologies of connection. In June 2000, 97 million mobile phone subscribers existed in the United States; in June 2010, the number rose to 293 million. Urban and suburban Americans swim in a sea of WiFi (sitting in my living room on a quiet side street I can see 8 wireless networks)—and in the middle of Nebraska, you can get online at McDonald’s.

What did not take off in the 2000s was “virtual reality”—a world constructed entirely of disembodied bits, populated by avatars and existing only in the realm of the ideal. As the 2000s ended, the virtual-reality world Second Life was on virtual life support.

Instead, we used technology to reinforce our embodied relationships. Facebook was the highest trafficked website in 2010 (US subscribers in 2000: zero; in 2010: 116 million). Look at your Facebook friends—unless you are a celebrity, the vast majority of them are people you have met in the flesh. Same with the recents on your cell phone. Rather than replacing embodied connection, our devices supplemented and extended it, an electromagnetic nervous system to match the physical infrastructure of transport built in the twentieth century.

Two | Place

Therefore, oddly enough after a decade of wild growth in invisible telecommunications, place mattered more in 2010 than it did in 2000. Travel and transport remained basically flat throughout the decade. Total vehicle miles driven, while an impressive 3 billion miles in 2010, were only up from 2.7 billion miles in 2000, a period during which the population increased from 288 to 318 million—meaning the average American drove less in 2010 than in 2000. At 9:45 tomorrow morning there will be roughly 4,500 commercial flights in the air, just as there were on 9:45 the morning of 11 September 2001—no change despite a decade of economic and population growth. And mobility, the hallmark of twentieth-century United States culture, declined throughout the decade and reached a post-war low in 2010, with less than 10% of American households changing their address.

At the Q gathering in 2010, urbanologist Richard Florida observed that young adults meeting one another no longer ask, “What do you do?” They ask, “Where do you live?” More and more people will change careers in order to stay in a place—connected to family, friends, and local culture—than will change place to stay in a career. The 20th-century American dream was to move out and move up; the 21st-century dream seems to be to put down deeper roots. This quest for local, embodied, physical presence may well be driven by the omnipresence of the virtual and a dawning awareness of the thinness of disembodied life.

Three | Cities

Cities, the places where both connection and local presence can thrive simultaneously, had an extraordinary renaissance in the 2000s. The revival of American cities was underway already in 2000, but it reached its full flowering by 2010. Of course not every single American city flourished in the last decade, but those of us old enough to remember New York, Chicago, Atlanta, or Houston circa 1990—not to mention Portland, Columbus, or Phoenix—can only be astonished at the way economically fading and often crime-ridden city centers revived as centers of commerce and creativity.

The challenges often associated with urban life, meanwhile, began a movement to the suburbs that may well accelerate in the 2010s. The frontiers of justice, mercy, compassion, and reconciliation are now in the suburbs—places where connections are harder to sustain and local culture is thinner and less appealing than the cities. Some suburban environments will reinvent themselves, but multi-generational poverty, crime, and gangs that provide a substitute social network where others have failed are already as common in Westchester County as in the Bronx, in the San Fernando Valley as in Compton. The really radical and difficult place to raise a family by 2020 will be . . . the suburbs.

[See Tim Keller's Q talk on "Grace and the City" and Joel Kotkin's on "The Future of the Suburbs."]

Four | The End of the Majority

Everywhere in the 2000s, cultural majorities collapsed. Predominantly black neighborhoods became half Hispanic. White rural communities saw dramatic immigration from Asia and Latin America. City centers became internationalized. Mercados and Asian food markets sprung up in suburbia and in exurbia (drive down a thoroughfare well beyond the 285 beltway in Atlanta, and you will see shop signs in a dozen different languages). White Americans were still a bare majority of the population by the end of the decade, but in delivery rooms they were already only a plurality (the largest of many minorities).

We are all minorities now. Evangelical Christians are a minority, as are liberal Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, agnostics, and atheists. The establishment of Will Herberg’s 1955 book Protestant—Catholic—Jew is now a minority. Barack Obama is a minority, but so is Sarah Palin. Republicans are a minority—so are Democrats, and so are independents.

There may never have been a society in history that was as culturally, religiously, and politically diverse as the United States is today—except perhaps the Roman Empire. There are few models for how such a diverse community can sustain itself, and plenty of models for failure. Perhaps the most hopeful model is a community that arose at the edges of that Empire and eventually spread to its heart, among whom there was neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female.

Five | Polarity

We used the technologies of connection and the commitment to place to sort ourselves into more and more tightly homogenous subcultures, refuges both virtual and real from the heterogeneity of our society. Republicans became more Republican; Democrats became more Democratic. Salon lost ground to the Huffington Post—CNN lost ground to Fox News. A president elected on the premise of unity presided over two years of ever-sharper rhetoric of division and seemed unable to change the game. Hipsters got more extremely hip. The Reformed became truly Reformed.

It was not at all clear, as polarization accelerated, that anyone could convince any large number of Americans that they had anything crucial in common.

Six | The Self Shot

When movie directors in the 2030s are trying to convey in a single glance that their scene is set in the 2000s, they will use the self shot—the self-portrait shot from a digital camera or cell phone held by one hand extended away from the subject. We look out at our own hand, perhaps squeezing another friend into the frame, composing our face in a smile or a laugh. We are shooting ourselves.
.
The visual presentation of the self accelerated in the 2000s. Previous generations saw themselves most often in mirrors. But mirrors do not show us what others see—they show us a mirror image with right and left reversed. The difference is subtle but real, and symbolic of a deeper reality. Now most 20-year-olds have seen thousands of images of themselves as others see them. In the 2000s we learned to shape and groom our image for public consumption. Body modification—augmentation, reduction, smoothing, straightening, whitening, tanning, not to mention tattooing—became normative. The closing years of the decade gave us the word “manscaping.” Enough said.

Seven | Pornography

Underneath it all was porn. Pornography is as old as visual art, but in the 2000s it was more ubiquitous than it had been since the ancient Greeks erected herms at every crossroads. Superimposed on every image of our own bodies, and the bodies of our friends and lovers, were the idealized bodies of pornography and its close cousin, advertising and popular culture, which differ from porn only in not consummating the voyeuristic impulses they arouse.

And yet as omnipresent as porn was, it remained underground—a subject of shame even among the most secular and urbane. Our culture seemed to draw back from the brink at the same time as it plunged into the abyss. The bestselling memoir was titled Eat, Pray, Love, not, Eat, Pray, F@#k. No one really wanted the culture of porn to become a runaway train. But neither was anyone sure how to stop it.

Eight | Informality

Men untucked their shirts. Billionaires wore jeans. The most powerful CEO in America was universally known as “Steve.” Indeed, informality was now a sign of privilege—only low-status workers wore uniforms. And the ubiquity of the camera meant that everyone—including celebrities, politicians, business leaders, people who in past decades would have been insulated by privilege—was caught off guard, meaning that status now accrued to those who could be most artfully informal, rather than those who could protect themselves from view.

Most institutions, with layers of tradition and deference accumulated over years, struggled to stay relevant to an informal culture. Tie-wearing network news anchors were eclipsed by cable-channel comedians with open collars. Journalistic codes of integrity and objectivity looked simply foolish next to the raw data of The Smoking Gun and Wikileaks. Marriage, with its vows and formal attire, became for many young people a distant aspiration far on the horizon, while cohabitation became the accepted gateway to adult relationships. A crippling blow was dealt to the cultural legitimacy of the oldest institution of all, the Roman Catholic Church, not by sexual abuse per se (almost all the cases reported had happened at least a decade earlier) but by the realization of how its hierarchy had covered up the scandal. The most informal and anti-institutional demographic cohort in a century, Generation X, moved uneasily and unsteadily into adulthood—symbolized neatly by its most celebrated religious movement, the emerging church, refusing to institutionalize at all and naming the leader of its most prominent organization a “coordinator.”

Nine | Liquidity

Wealth was ever more disconnected from real assets. Countries that pumped one particular liquid from the ground acquired vast resources of sovereign wealth that went looking for high returns. The most storied and prominent financial firm, Goldman Sachs, ended its century-long system of limited partnership and become a publicly traded company. Hedge funds made billions by trading not shares, but shares of bets on the future price of shares (and derivatives far more exotic). Your mortgage, once the most boring and staid of financial instruments, was sliced and diced into tranches of risk.

Money sloshed around the globe like quicksilver (the title of Neal Stephenson’s epic 2003 novel about the earliest moments of modernity). It sloshed beyond the borders of nations, of national regulators and politicians, quickly breaching the levees of international financial standards like Basel 1 (replaced by Basel 2, soon to be replaced by the soon-to-be-swamped Basel 3). Anyone unwilling to swim in the sea of liquidity drowned (or, as one Wall Street executive said, as long as the music was playing you had to keep dancing). As money sloshed, prices of oil, food, housing, and labor spiked, then collapsed, then threatened to spike again. Those who could trade on volatility often made untold fortunes; those actually needing to buy and sell real goods often suffered.

Ten | Complexity

There was a bull market in oversimplification, and no shortage of attempts to find someone to blame or, more hopefully, some way to make a difference. At the close of the decade some Christians were especially excited about the potential for cultural elites to change the world—just at the moment when elites everywhere were waking up to how little they could do to change anything at all. If there ever had been reliable levers of power—the Federal Funds Rate, Fashion Week, the New York Times bestseller list, the Nobel Peace Prize—they no longer carried much leverage in a world of countless connections, devolved into countless particular locations and conurbations, filled with fractious and fissiparous minorities, and ceaseless self-preoccupied informality. It was not a good time, to say the least, to be a central planner.

Yet all this complexity also contained the seed of certain kinds of promise. The human brain, after all, is also complex, interconnected, embodied, improvisational, constantly being rewired—simply put, the most complex system known in our universe. The culture of North America in the 2000s took several not inconsiderable steps toward having those same qualities. Not without risks, not without loss, and with every expectation of grave difficulty ahead. And yet in the most surprising places what was emerging could be called intelligence. Of course, intelligence needs to be married to wisdom—and in surveying the history of that most elusive of all cultural goods, we can only conclude that the 2000s left us neither worse nor better off than human beings have ever been.

-----
In your opinion, did Andy miss something? What would be on your list?

KEY QUESTIONS FOR OUR TIMES

In 2000 Bill Easum articulated these key questions for churches seeking to be missional, outward-focused, evangelistic at the commencement of the 21st century. Here are OUTWARD FOCUSED CHURCH we would be interested in your answers. We'll be sure they get forwarded to Bill.

In 2000 I prepared a presentation for the Society for Church Growth in which I asked what I considered at the time to be some of the key questions of our time.  In looking back over these questions I find they are still the key questions with which Western Christianity is wrestling. You be the Judge if they are.

• What is it about my relationship with Jesus my neighbor and the world can’t live without experiencing?
• How do I share my faith without coming off like a bigot?
• What will Christianity look like when it truly understands that North America is a mission field?
• What is the difference in being missional and doing evangelism?
• What is the difference in a being pastor and being a cross-cultural missionary?
• What does it mean to live in a world where one’s spirituality is more important than one’s credentials?
• Can we imagine doing evangelism that is not carried out within the context of conquest?
• How do leaders lead without control?
• What will authority look like in an out-of-control, anti-institutional, non-religious world?
• What will Christianity look like when it’s no longer defined by books?
•  How do we transition from handing out data that informs to offering an experience that transforms?
• How will we help people grow their spirituality instead of just learning more about the Bible?  
• What will Christianity look like when the church is missional and not institutional?
• How will we “be” the church instead of “go” to church?

 So how are you dealing with these questions? Or are you?
Bill Easum
www.churchconsultations.com
easum@aol.com

WHAT INFLUENCES MILLENIALS?

From Ed Stetzer of Lifeway Research comes these perspectives on the Millenials and what influences them.


Through that study we gain some insight into how this generation perceives influences in their lives. For example, when looking for information or advice about two-thirds of American "Millennials" prefer to talk with a variety of people who have personal experience rather than one individual considered to be an "expert."

According to the study it turns out that the greatest influences in the lives of Millennials are parents, friends and extended family. "The vast majority (88 percent) say their parent or parents remain a positive influence on their lives, including 51 percent who call them a strongly positive influence."

65 percent of Millennials identify themselves as Christian, 14 percent as atheist or agnostic, 14 percent list no religious preference, and 8 percent claim other religions. Professing Christians, consistent church attenders, and those committed to some form of religion are more likely than others to say their parents are still a strong and positive influence.

• Thirty-eight percent of Millennials say their religious beliefs have no influence on their lives.
• Thirty-two percent indicate their beliefs have a strongly positive influence.
• Fifty percent say a church or house of worship has no influence on their lives. Twenty-two percent indicate a church has a strongly positive influence.
• 18 percent of all Millennials indicate they get a lot of guidance or advice from sacred texts such as the Bible, Torah or Koran, while another 24 percent get some. The most common answer (37 percent) is none at all.

Read more ....

ALAN HIRSCH ON DISCIPLESHIP

Alan Hirsch has some important thoughts about the dynamics of discipleship and the absolute necessity of churches in engaging in disciple-making.  I couldn't have said it better myself.

TEACHING ABOUT HELL

In a recent article in OUTREACH MAGAZINE, Dan Kimball shares some excellent insights about teaching/preaching about Hell to emerging generations. In it he writes:

"You’d think that in today’s culture it would be counterintuitive to regularly talk about hell to emerging generations. People both inside and outside the Church are extremely sensitive to associating God or a religion with something as horrifying as hell. While it’s quite comfortable to teach about Jesus having a heart for the marginalized, studying what He said about hell can be intimidating and very uncomfortable. However, in almost 20 years of serving with emerging generations, I’ve found that they are very interested.

Why Should We Talk About Hell?
When you stop to think about it, references and allusions to hell run throughout our culture. Think about the Far Side cartoons with the red devil and pitchfork or how hell is used in our everyday language. It’s even in many rock songs (think AC/DC's "Highway to Hell"). Jesus also talked about hell and used graphic metaphors for the reality of it. When we ignore the fact that He talked about it, we allow pop culture to define it. Or it gets defined by aggressive street preachers carrying signs with “HELL” written in flaming letters and yelling offensive comments to passersby. Talking about hell gives people an understanding of what the Bible actually does or doesn’t say about something they are very much aware of already. We cannot let pop culture define hell as something cartoon- or fable-like and harmless. Or let it get defined and dismissed as something that only fundamentalist street preachers talk (yell) about in a fire-and-brimstone way."

You can read the full article at KIMBALL.

EXEGETING THE CULTURE - MISCELLANEOUS OBSERVATIONS

Cathy Lynn Grossman writes Faith and Reason, a column for USA Today. Recently she shared some observations from Mark Driscoll that you might find interesting.

"Many Millennials are religiously adrift -- vaguely Christian in belief and barely Christian in practice, a new survey finds. So it's no surprise that those one in six or seven who are active and committed to faith might be feeling a little isolated.

Rebecca McKinsey, a 19-year-old journalism student at Ohio University, is active in an evangelical fellowship on her campus in Athens and in a local church.

Inside those settings, there's love, joy and reinforcement. "We're pretty passionate Christians in my church family," she says. But outside, she often feels alone among her peers."

Read more at USATODAY

WHO ARE THE DE-CHURCHED?

This article appears on Christianity Today's blogsite from its column OUT OF UR. To read more go to: http://www.outofur.com/archives/2010/03/who_are_the_dec.html

Who Are the De-Churched? (Part 1)

Some are leaving the church because they've received a false gospel. Others are leaving because they've found the real one.

by Skye Jethani

In days gone by, missional efforts were focused on presenting and demonstrating the love of Christ to non-Christians. But in the 1980s a new term was coined to describe the growing number of North Americans without any significant church background. They were called the unchurched. Untold numbers of books were written about them. Ministry conferences discussed them. Church leaders orchestrated worship services to attract them.

The shift from “evangelizing non-Christians” to “reaching the unchurched” was perceived as benign at the time, but it represented an important shift in our understanding of mission. The church was no longer just a means by which Christ’s mission would advance in the world, it was also the end of that mission. The goal wasn’t simply to introduce the unchurched to Christ, but—as the term reveals—to engage them in a relationship with the institutional church. This paved the way for the ubiquitous (but flawed) belief today that “mission” is synonymous with “church growth.” (Another post for another day.)

Well, another new term is on the rise and gaining attention among evangelicals in North America. Those without a past relationship to the church are called unchurched, but there are many with significant past church involvement who are exiting. They are the de-churched

Jethani describes them:

As I’ve traveled and encountered de-churched Christians, including some friends, I’ve found they tend to fall into three categories. (These are generalizations, as all categories are, but they may prove helpful.)

1. The Relationally De-Churched

These Christians have come to recognize that human beings are the vessels of God’s Spirit and not organizations. They may have first engaged the institutional church because they longed for meaningful relationships with other followers of Christ. They may have joined a small group or found a tight network of friends through whom they lived out the “one another” commands in Scripture.

But over time it dawned on them—This small group is really my church. These are the people I am living out the gospel with. Why do we need the big institution? Ironically, a number of house churches have started as megachurch-spawned small groups—a trend even documented by Time magazine back in 2006 and currently seen in the “Organic Church” movement.

Ultimately the relationally de-churched leave the institution because the programs proved less effective at fostering faith and love than relationships with actual people. And the authenticity they crave and experience in their small group eclipses the relative shallowness of the wider church. Let’s face it—authenticity becomes more difficult the larger a group becomes. But it’s worth noting that these folks haven’t abandoned the church theologically, they’ve just redefined it apart from the 501c3 organization we culturally identity as a “church.”

2. The Missionally De-Churched

“If the church were doing the work God appointed it to do, there would be no parachurch organizations.” Have you heard that one before? It’s a popular defense I heard many times while serving with a campus ministry in college—and there is some truth to it despite the self-righteous cheekiness.

If the relationally de-churched abandon the institutional church because they desire authenticity, the missionally de-churched leave because they are die-hard activists. They are driven to see the world impacted by the gospel whether via evangelism, compassion, justice, or other facet of God’s restorative work. They may become frustrated that the institutional church spends enormous amounts of energy and resources maintaining itself rather than advancing the mission.

I’ve had a few friends deeply involved in such parachurch groups confess that “even though we don’t take communion or baptize, in every other regard the ministry functions as my church.”

3. The Transformationally De-Churched

Last spring we published an issue of Leadership Journal which included an article by John Burke, pastor of Gateway Church in Austin. Gateway is comprised of many recovering addicts, and as a result the church has incorporated a lot of recovery group values into its community—rigorous honesty, acceptance, dependency on God, and grace. But Gateway is an exception. Many churches give these values lip-service, but few are able to instill them into the culture.

In that same issue of Leadership, Matt Russell wrote about the year he spent interviewing de-churched people in his community. He wrote:

Most people left church not because they had a deep theological problem with something like the virgin birth or the resurrection of Christ. They left because people in the church have the tendency to be small and mean and couldn’t deal honestly with their own sins or the sin of others. As one man put it, “People in the church were more invested in the process of being right than in the process of being honest.”

NO VALUE IN THE SOCIAL MEDIA? THINK AGAIN

Kem Meyer is on the staff of 80 year old Granger Community Church in Granger, Indiana. This church has a powerful reputation for innovation in its outward focus. In response to people who believe the church does need to bother with the social media, Kem wrote this in his blog:
"In an effort to tangibly demonstrate to my church the magnitude of the people around us who don’t have any connection to church, I developed a billboard campaign that shows a head shot image of an expressionless middle aged man along with the

"THE QUESTION: Nobody is ever going to search for our church Twitter account so they can follow it. Why would they? And since only a few of our people even know what Twitter is, our church membership certainly isn’t going to follow it. So why then should I spend any time at all working on it?

In an effort to tangibly demonstrate to my church the magnitude of the people around us who don’t have any connection to church, I developed a billboard campaign that shows a head shot image of an expressionless middle aged man along with the simple question:
simple question:

Where can I find hope?

Below the question, this appears: Text GOD to 25827.

This single billboard, located at the second busiest intersection in the city, went up on Jan. 27, 2010. As of noon today there have been 1,214 specific cell numbers gathered from this effort that are not registered within our own database already. This tells me that nearly 25 new people a day, who are nameless to us, are taking the time to stop and send a text message to find out the answer to that question. This billboard is less than a mile from our church.

No effort in the history of this 80 year old church has garnered that number of potential candidates for salvation.

MY ANSWER TO THE QUESTION: There is a lost and suffering society all around us without hope. A high percentage of them actually use Twitter and Facebook. Since I know they don’t have an interest following our church, I’m going to follow them instead. Using the search tools, I’m going to purposely follow anyone and everyone who posts anything on Twitter within 10 miles of our zip code. I’m going to do this with the prayer that some of them will in turn follow us. And even further that some of the people who follow the people we follow will want to follow us (confusing I know…draw a picture if you need to).

In all honesty, much of what is posted on the twitter accounts I’m now following is very objectionable. I want to lead old school believers to an understanding that not only is it okay for the church to do this, we’re supposed to. What I know to be true is the best way to fill your own cup is to fill someone else’s. Since I know these people are not going to come to me, I’m going to go to them."

For more of this post go to:http://kemmeyer.typepad.com/less_clutter_noise/2010/03/there-is-no-ministry-value-in-twitter-one-church-responds.html

YOUNGER ADULTS ARE LOOKING FOR OUTREACH

Heather Berkshire is a United Methodist pastor in Indiana. She is one of my ministerial children. Some day, with her permission, I will share the story of her personal redemption on call. She recently sent this article. Here are some highlights from this article by Joey Butler in the United Methodist reported, initially quoting Jamie Dunham of Nashville TN:

"For many years, Mr. Dunham says the dialogue has been about “what type of music was played in the worship service and what type of clothes you wore. The real discussion is what place does church have in our culture and community. This younger generation is looking for things that allow them to get outside the church to do things.

“The churches that I think have the healthiest approach today put emphasis on the actions that show they are people trying to solve problems in the community rather than trying to insulate themselves,” Mr. Dunham says.

Morley Winograd and Michael Hais, co-authors of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, and the Future of American Politics, call Generation Y “the most civic-minded since the generation of the 1930s and 1940s. . . . This is a generation of activist doers.”

The more opportunities Millennials have to get their hands dirty, the better. Churches need to look into their communities and see what needs are there—perhaps a pancake breakfast for the homeless, a Habitat build or a community cleanup.

When designing ministries, remember young people in entry-level jobs and paying college loans often don’t have as much money to contribute as older members."

I encourage you to go to this link and read the full article:



http://www.umportal.org/main/article.asp?id=6485

And God Created Football - Books & Culture

A fair amount of recent scholarship argues that American football—and perhaps American sports in general—has become a religion. What's interesting is that the very people who have a vested interest in this issue seem uninterested, or at least unconvinced. A recent article in Books and Culture by Mark Galli has some interesting thought about the past time that seems to have such a powerful draw on our culture and which Christians sometimes see as a rival to be excoriated instead of understood. For the full article, I would encourage you to read: And God Created Football - Books & Culture

Two quotes from the article, I believe help us learn about reaching out to our communities and still maintaining our integrity and witness as the Body of Christ.

"Miracle and Rees quote anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who believed that religion acts to "establish powerful, persuasive, and long lasting moods and motivations" by "formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing those conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the morals and motivations seems uniquely realistic." They conclude, and Hamilton seems to concur, that "Sport has done this for American culture in a way that traditional religion could not."

Galli concludes: "Some Christians do practice civil religion, and for some, football has become an idol. Such is the nature of the human heart, that desperately wicked thing (Jer. 17:9). But one reason many Christians are not concerned about football as religion is that what seems to make it a religion to some scholars is precisely the thing that makes it another sign of God's presence in the world, a sign that comes in the most mundane ways—through ritual, physical sacrifice, a sense of brotherhood, shared joy and despair over little things (like if our team wins or loses).

This is the reason Christians participate freely and fully in all of life. For we, of all people, have eyes to see and ears to hear God's elusive presence, to discern his handiwork and love everywhere. The clearest revelation of God's love comes to us in the preaching of the Word and the sharing of the sacrament, but it is precisely because we've learned to make out the outlines of the God-man Jesus with repeated participation at these specifically religious events that we can spot him in a glass of fine wine, in the startling lines of a skyscraper, in conversation with friends, in a timely block or a well-executed screen play.

SOCIAL MEDIA - WHY YOU NEED TO USE IT

This video is from the web site of Glenn Smith, a church planting consultant from Houston TX, who works with my denominational group, the Churches of God, General Conference. I have seen on it on at least one another blog and played at a recent leadership retreat for clergy types.

Effective ministry in 2010 requires effective communication tools. Tools that allow you to "listen" and then connect. The social media is the 2010 form of "Go ye into all the world ..."

Do you have a website? Do you blog? What are you doing to connect with the unchurched? This video which can be found on You Tube says why.

THE MISSION FIELD OUTSIDE YOUR FRONT DOOR

Inward focused churches do have an outward focus-missions. Traditionally this is thinking in terms of world or overseas missions. Support is built into these churches' budgets for places like Haiti and India. In some sense this is a proper value because it helps remind such churches that there is more to ministry than maintaining the building,being sure there are regular worship times, and pastoral visits to their own sick and needy.

Unfortunately these churches may have little relationship and little impact on the immediate neighborhood around them. They put up a sign "come one, come all" but often act in ways that would make such a visit a temporary one.

These churches also tend to think of their nation (even if they are fearful of their own immediate neighborhood) as a Christian nation. At best they see their society as only a few steps off God's mark. Now only a good piece of political activism or a dose of religion in the schools will set that right and they can go about living comfortable lives until our Lord returns.

What they fail to realize is that our own country is not essentially a political version of the Kingdom of God. It is a mission field--where Christianity is a counter-cultural entity. Only about 14-15% of Americans in 2009 could be found in a Christian church on a Sunday morning. People go about their business of living with little reference to a biblical faith. Organized Christianity is often viewed with suspicion--as if Christianity would undermine the larger pluralistic and relativistic values of the prevailing culture.

Those who recognize this tend to focus on something they perceive has been lost, circling their emotional wagons and digging in lest any more be lost to an immoral surrounding society.

What such a reality provokes (and it is reality for most communities)in outward-focused and missional churches is the admission that the mission field begins at the front door. On a mission field in a foreign land, the missionaries put their best efforts of changing hearts of non-Christians one-by-one by reconciling them to God through Jesus Christ. They engage in practical ministry towards the physical needs of their target community through things like medical care, quality eduction, irrigation projects and clean drinking water. These are done to bear witness to the target community that the God they represent is concerned about the needs of the whole person and to develop a level of trust for the deeper need of helping people find Jesus Christ.

The mission field in America now starts at the front door--and outward focused churches take their cue from their mentors in cross-cultural missions.