C. S. Lewis, ‘A Very Poor Thomist’?
To read an article I recently wrote for the American Reformer on C. S. Lewis, visit https://americanreformer.org/2022/12/c-s-lewis-a-very-poor-thomist/.
Brett McCracken on “Cool Christianity Is (Still) a Bad Idea”
Brett McCracken on “Cool Christianity Is (Still) a Bad Idea”
A dozen years ago I read with delight Millennial Brett McCracken’s book Hipster Christianity: When Christianity and Cool Collide. I remember thinking how fascinating it was that this young self-proclaimed hipster was skittish about making his religion, his experience of Christ’s church, another “cool” consumer commodity.
McCracken’s book appeared alongside another great book by Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck entitled Why We’re Not Emergent (By Two Guys Who Should Be), published during those years when Mark Driscoll (whose ministry has recently been discussed in the podcast “The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill”), Donald Miller, and Rob Bell were growing in popularity.
My friend David Williford recently reminded me of these books, and the ideas in them, when he sent me a Gospel Coalition article McCracken wrote a couple of years ago entitled “Cool Christianity Is (Still) a Bad Idea.” In it, McCracken reflects on the book and how dated and silly much of what it described—a hipster mentality that seemed to many to be inherently disingenuous in an attempt to appear cool—is today.
But, as he says, that’s just the point. The never-ending quest for relevance—the quest for cool—will always make evangelicals look terribly dated when looking back on what they did just a few years earlier. This is very much unlike the continuity with the saints and martyrs of the Christian past the church has always pursued, which is ever-relevant because it testifies to deeper doctrines and practices that can’t be reduced to—that even defy—the passing fads of pop culture.
McCracken is not advocating a “drawing of the line” at some “golden age” in the past—1970? 1950? 1850? Instead, he encourages what all Christian leaders of all ages have always advocated until very recently: maintaining continuity with the Great Christian Tradition, not being a slave to the market—to our current cultural moment.
As McCracken says, “‘Cool Christianity’ is, if not an oxymoron, at least an exercise in futility.” This is because a “relevance-focused Christianity sows the seeds of its own obsolescence. Rather than rescuing or reviving Christianity, hipster faith shrinks it to the level of consumer commodity, as fickle and fleeting as the latest runway fashion.” Furthermore, he notes, “Chasing ‘relevance’ is exhausting and unsustainable.”
The reason this approach is not sustainable is that the enduring values of the gospel, which transcend generations and times and cultures and taste groups, militate against the “inherent transience of ‘cool’ that makes ‘cool Christianity,’ unsustainable by definition. Today’s hip, cover-boy pastor is tomorrow’s has-been. This year’s fast-growing, bustling-with-20-somethings cool church is next year’s ‘I used to go there’ old news.”
I talk to Free Will Baptist pastors everyday who are seeing slow growth in their churches that’s arising more from conversions and baptisms of unchurched people than from transfer growth. Yet they’re discouraged because they’re comparing themselves to the non-denominational mega-church and celebrity ideal.
They’re ready to throw in the towel because of the slow yet genuine growth they’re experiencing in their church of fifty or seventy-five or a hundred, as they faithfully pursue the ordinary means of grace, planting and watering with God giving the increase.
It’s just this kind of pastor who needs to read this article. Reading it could help encourage discouraged pastors to continue in the ordinary means of grace that the Spirit has blessed in communities and mission fields across the ages, and, as they zealously labor in the gospel God’s way, God will give the growth. And it will be sustainable.
Reflections on the Overturning of Roe v. Wade
This is a profound time of thankfulness as we express gratitude to God for the recent United States Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade. This is a moment for which we have prayed a long time, and I wanted to take a few minutes and record several thoughts that have been on my mind over the past few days as I’ve reflected on this historic decision.
To quote Richard Weaver, ideas have consequences. The idea that every human life has value and the idea that every human life has essential rights the Constitution guarantees, such as life, liberty, property, habeas corpus, and the due process of law, have consequences. The idea that those who are pre-born or elderly or ill or disabled, as human persons and thus divine image-bearers, have the same rights and liberties as those already born or young or healthy has consequences.
The Conservative Legal Movement
However, if ideas remain theoretical and never grow into plans, then policies that lead to human flourishing will never be developed. The maturation of the conservative legal movement is one of the best examples we have of ideas, over time, turning into plans and eventually effecting policies. A coherent, intelligent, well-conceived conservative legal movement developed after the U.S. Senate defeated President Ronald Reagan’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court Robert Bork in 1987. Had that not occurred, we would not have had conservative scholars and practitioners with the legal and jurisprudential expertise to be nominated and confirmed for the Court now.
This is an example of the maxim that “politics is downstream from culture.” As conservative religious people, we have put too many of our eggs in the basket of the “horse race,” of trying to get people elected to office. But once they’re elected, too often we just fixate on the next election. But politics is indeed downstream from culture, and the conservative legal movement is a prime example of how an intellectual and cultural shift, together with philanthropic resources and single-minded determination, has resulted in a policy shift of momentous proportions.
We must remember, though, that such a shift took thirty-five years to take effect. And the pro-life movement worked for nearly fifty years for this moment. The conservative legal movement and the pro-life movement played the long game. They persisted and did not give up. They focused on ideas and on changing the way people think. This long-game mentality is perhaps the greatest takeaway from these movements.
But thinking of the conservative legal movement brings to mind how out of sync much of the American public is with the clear, constitutional language used in the majority opinion that overturned Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. That is because the jurists that formed the Court’s majority in this case affirm the traditional notion of originalism.
Originalism holds that justices need to go back to the intent of the framers of the U.S. Constitution and its amendments to determine the meaning of those documents. It holds that the job of the federal courts is not to introduce new ideas. It is not to legislate from the bench. Jurists are not to act as ethicists or sociologists or legislators to figure out what new laws they need to enact and enforce those laws on the states.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s role is simply to determine if laws or legal actions are constitutional. The Court’s majority opinion in this case rightly held that Roe and Casey were unconstitutional and thus the question whether a woman has the right to end the life of her preborn child must be decided by each state.
The only constitutional way to guarantee, in every state, the right to receive or perform an abortion is to pass an amendment to the Constitution. Everyone on all points of the political spectrum knows that could not have happened in 1973 and could not happen now. Likewise, to make abortion-on-demand illegal in all fifty states will require an amendment to the Constitution, which is just as unlikely at this juncture as a pro-choice amendment. Sadly, however, many individuals fail to understand how the American constitutional system works.
Christian Worldview Education
This leads me to the next thing that has been on my mind the last few days: we conservative evangelicals need to place more emphasis on Christian worldview education. That emphasis will lead to greater ethical literacy, including knowing how to explain how biblical ethics lead to human flourishing while providing for religious liberty for everyone. It will also lead to greater literacy regarding our role as Christians who are also citizens.
The recent Gallup poll that shows there are fewer people who believe in God should come as no surprise to us. At the very same time that we have allowed K-12 schools to become dominated by precise progressive-secularist ideology, we have dumbed down our churches almost in inverse proportion. The past few decades are when we should have become more intent on training our children in serious theology and Christian truth and how it relates to the culture around them. Instead, we have dumbed down our religion and, to quote Neil Postman, become intent on “amusing ourselves to death.”
It should not be surprising to us that our retreat from serious thinking and preaching and teaching about God’s truth—our substituting of entertainment for worship, motivational speaking for preaching, CEO leadership for shepherding, and marketing for evangelism—has been unsustainable. It has produced fewer serious Christian believers. And studies have shown that serious Christian believers are also the ones who invite people to church or share their faith. Further, the vast majority of new believers join churches because of the influence of a friend or family member.
George Barna has shown over and over again that many evangelical churches’ recent numerical success has increased at the same time that the spiritual health of their members has plummeted. Fewer and fewer of the members of seemingly successful churches can pass a basic Christian worldview quiz, give more than a few percent of their income, attend church or pray or read Scripture more than a handful of times a month, and invite people to church and share their faith.
The upshot of all this is that we cannot expect there to be more Christians when secular progressives pour more and more money into education and training that comports with their worldview while conservative Christians put paltry resources of time, priority, and funds into education and training that comports with their worldview. Yet a strong emphasis on education and training is what we see at the heart of the long game that the conservative legal and pro-life movements have played.
Committing Ourselves to Action
Now that the Court has overturned Roe, we as Christians will need to put our money where our mouth is. We’ll need to be intentional about supporting unwed mothers, who are divine image-bearers like the children they carry in their wombs. This will require our unflagging support of crisis pregnancy centers, adoption, and foster care.
This is what Jim McComas so eloquently reminded me of the day Roe was overturned. He is leader of our own Free Will Baptist Family Ministries, which sponsors ministries such as these, including a crisis pregnancy center known as The Hope Center, which is worthy of your financial support. We will need to pour more resources into these efforts than ever before.
We must also be intentional about continuing to speak the truth in love, standing strong on Christian teaching while tangibly demonstrating the love of Christ to people with whom we differ. Jesus was a perfect example of what it means to combine clear truth-telling and sharp rational thinking with compassion, meekness, patience, and humility. We must strive to be like Him as we combine truth and grace. We must model civility and understanding while being uncompromising on truth and virtue.
We must realize that ideas have consequences, that elections have consequences, that now is not the time to withdraw from the public square. At the same time, we must stop neglecting public life at the local and state levels, focusing only on the federal level. We must reinvest ourselves in helping our children to be Christian citizens who understand how their government works and are patriotic, without making politics and our country into an idol.
Finally, it is vital that we commit ourselves to sound Christian worldview teaching in the church, the home, and Christian educational institutions. And it is crucial that we provide financial resources for this task and for the educational institutions that provide leadership for it.
Thanks be to God for this historic ruling. May we prayerfully and faithfully move forward in our individual and corporate calling to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ and do everything we do to the glory of God.
We Need to Listen to Carl Trueman
Carl Trueman, who teaches at Grove City College and is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is an increasingly rich source of wisdom for evangelical Protestants. A recent piece I read of his in First Things is very good and can be found here. While readers of this blog will, like me, find important things on which to differ with Trueman, in this First Things article and in his other books and articles, his basic instincts are right.
His most recent book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution is one of the most important books thus far in this century. Recently that book’s arguments have been summarized in the briefer book, Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution.
Those books are on the Christian view of the broader culture, but they flow out of Trueman’s confessional Protestant view of the church and its teachings. His views on these things are seen in books like The Creedal Imperative. His podcast The Mortification of Spin is also worth listening to. He and his co-host Todd Pruitt are a lot like orthodox Presbyterian versions of us Free Will Baptists.
That very sentence is complicated—I can’t go into all the ways that I disagree with Trueman here. But Trueman is in many ways a kindred spirit despite those important denominational (and other) differences. I’ll never forget when he and I were on a panel at Southern Seminary with J. D. Greear, Josh Harris (who has since apostatized), and another minister, and we just happened to be sitting on one side of the platform and were the only ecclesially confessional people on the panel. It was funny that, even though he was the strictest Calvinist on the panel—and I was the onlyArminian!—we came down on the same side of most of the issues.
Two Observable Shifts
His writing and podcasting about the church dovetail with what I tell my students: Recently there are two observable shifts in some quadrants of evangelical Christianity:
- From theology to experience
- From tradition to culture
These shifts don’t always represent a complete disregard of theology or tradition. They represent a move away from theology and Christian tradition being the solid “place to stand” from which many evangelicals see their faith and how it connects with the world around them. Thus the shift to experience and culture as the main reference point of many evangelicals can be subtle. But Trueman clearly picks up on this phenomenon.
Trueman, like the stock-in-trade evangelical Protestantism we all inherited, strongly affirms that the New Testament vision of the church’s doctrine and its practice, as mediated by the Protestant Reformation, is normative for the church of the present and the future just as it was in the past.
Yet many evangelicals have moved from having two feet firmly planted in this broadly biblical-Reformation theology and practice that has dominated the consensus of evangelicalism up until now. They’ve moved at least one foot—and in some cases both—away from the consensus of Christian tradition to the consensus of modern popular culture in things that don’t violate the Ten Commandments. And they’ve moved away from theology to subjective experience as the primary reference point from which to evangelize and disciple non-believers in an increasingly secular age in the West. Thus they’ve whittled down their message to what it takes to be converted and to keep moral commands (the Ten Commandments).
In our case, a lot of the issues of “what do you teach in church,” “what do you do in church,” and “how do you conceive of spirituality” are obviously tied to the consensus of the Protestant tradition. Of course Trueman would be Calvinist Presbyterian and I would be Arminian Baptist. But we would both share the same basic convictions on the importance of maintaining the normativity of New Testament doctrine and practice.
So, while we would maintain our denominational distinctives, neither Trueman nor I would find ourselves in serious disagreement with the best-selling commentaries and Bible study resources and homiletical resources from the Reformation through the mid-twentieth century on the most basic principles of how to teach and practice the Christian faith in the context of the local church.
Church and Culture
But I also sense in Trueman that he sees these shifts in some quarters of evangelicalism as affecting their views on culture and society as well. One sees that in this most recent First Things article. These moves in the church—from a privileging of theology toward a privileging of experience, and from a privileging of Christian tradition toward a privileging of contemporary culture—are bleeding over into how Christians approach culture.
Trueman talks a lot in this article about Friederich Schleiermacher, one of the poster boys of Protestant Liberalism. One of his most famous books was On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. Liberalism started out finding ways to make Christianity more palatable to “polite society” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At first these ways did not seem to threaten the “core” of the faith—how to be converted or obey the Ten Commandments. But eventually Christians like Schleiermacher grew so accustomed to accommodating Christianity to the tastes of its “cultured despisers” that that accommodation starting subtly bleeding over into areas that did violate conversion and the Ten Commandments.
Trueman thinks this is happening again. Evangelicals have gotten into the habit of accommodating Christian faith and practice to popular culture to make it more attractional. Now in bigger questions like race, sex, and gender, they’re trying to find ways to frame their Christian commitments in a way that is more acceptable to modern culture. He gives one example of framing the correct Christian opposition to racism in terms of contemporary critical theory, which rests on foundations in postmodernity that are poles apart from Christian theology.
So the “core” of Christian faith is becoming smaller and smaller as evangelicals hungry for cultural approval do everything in their power to adjust their Christian faith to make it more attractive to what Paul calls “the natural man” (1 Corinthians 2:14). But Trueman agrees that this seems like a poor strategy for spreading a countercultural gospel that operates on a completely different set of rules from secular culture. Attractional Christianity—trying to make the Christian religion seem appealing to secular culture—is doomed from the start because, as Paul says, “the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.”
I think we need to listen to Trueman. We’re not going to agree with everything he says, but his basic instincts, informed as they are by the Bible and the Reformation, give evangelicals much-needed wisdom in an increasingly bewildering age.
The Ordinary Means of Grace
I often use the old General/Free Will Baptist phrase “ordinary means of grace” to describe the cherished methods of ministry the Spirit wants the church to use to bring a people to himself and fit them for His eternal kingdom. So I was elated when the recent 9Marks Journal was on the topic “The Ordinary Means of Grace—Or, Don’t Do Weird Stuff.”
The language of the ordinary means of grace is another way of saying that the methods God uses to build His church are those of the apostles, which are given by precept and example in Scripture, which is sufficient (enough, all we need) for the church’s doctrine (its theology, what it teaches) and practice (its methods, what it does).
General/Free Will Baptist Uses of the Term
Free Will Baptists in America, in the north and south, as well as their ancestors in England, who were called General Baptists, used the phrase “ordinary means of grace” over and over again. (It was used in the “practices” section of our Treatise, for example, until it was revised in the 1970s).
Again, it is another way of stating two other doctrines: the sufficiency of Scripture (the Bible gives us what the Spirit wants us to have to do church) and apostolicity (the doctrine and practice of the holy apostles is normative for the continuing church).
I discuss this doctrine, which appears in the second sentence of the Treatise (which says Scripture is “a sufficient and infallible rule and guide to salvation and all Christian worship and service”) in my booklet Free Will Baptists and the Sufficiency of Scripture. Randall House has published Rob Rienow’s defense of the sufficiency of Scripture in his book Reclaiming the Sufficiency of Scripture [1].
Early Puritans and Baptists
The language of the ordinary means of grace became famous when it appeared in the Westminster Shorter Catechism (WSC). Though this catechism was a Calvinist Puritan catechism, the answer to question 88 on the ordinary means of grace would have been answered similarly by any Puritan in the seventeenth century on either side of the Atlantic—whether they were Calvinist or Arminian or Paedobaptist or Baptist. Here it is:
Q: What are the outward means whereby Christ communicateth to us the benefits of redemption?
A: The outward and ordinary means whereby Christ communicateth to us the benefits of redemption are, his ordinances, especially the Word, sacraments, and prayer; all of which are made effectual to the elect for salvation.
Now of course, Baptists would define “sacraments” differently than the writers of the WSC did. But other than this, they all—again, whether Arminian or Calvinist—agreed wholeheartedly with this statement.
Ordinary Means and “Ordinances”
In fact, one of the particular reasons I like this statement is that it defines ordinances broadly, as I do in my book The Washing of the Saints’ Feet, simply as things God ordains [2]. Though some of us have thrown around the word, Baptists have not articulated a theology of the sacraments, though they have talked about ordinances, but most Calvinist Baptists eventually came to see only baptism and the Lord’s Supper as ordinances.
However, this is an unfortunate case of the evolution of language. “Ordinance” originally was used by everyone in the Puritan sense seen in the WSC, which said that all the ordinances of God were His outward and ordinary means of grace—especially the reading and preaching of the Word, private and public prayer, and the sacraments.
This is why Free Will Baptist forefathers like Thomas Helwys and Thomas Grantham, as well as American Free Will Baptists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—talked about doing only the things God “ordained” or “appointed” in the New Testament.
Renewal through Retrieving the Practice of the Apostles
This is the way of the apostles and their earliest followers after the New Testament era. Retrieving their approach to ministry will bring renewal to the evangelical church, large swaths of which have become addicted to the means and methods of modern secular industries (e.g., marketing, CEO leadership, entertainment).
Sometimes people are confused about this. Only a few people actually claim, “We shouldn’t adhere to the apostolic pattern. That’s not relevant for today.” Very few people veer this far from the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture. Instead, many say “But the apostles didn’t have what we have today. If they had had all the methods and techniques we have at our disposal, they would have used them!”
But the fact is that the apostles had the same things at their disposal, but they didn’t use them. They had all the riches of the multi-sensory, entertainment-dominated culture of the Greco-Roman urban centers at their disposal. On a given Sunday, a Christian would walk past the theaters and concert halls and coliseums and games where rich, lavish entertainment was on offer—as well as many street entertainers. The best painting and sculpture was at their disposal.
They had at their disposal the highly efficient organizational methods of the Roman imperial government. They were surrounded by the methods of a highly complex marketplace. Their “competition” in the Greco-Roman mystery religions relied on spine-tingling techniques to draw in crowds in urban centers.
Yet these early Christians relied on the ordinary means of grace. Their churches were simple and counter-cultural, based on the ordinary, unadorned teaching of doctrine in their songs, reading, and preaching, accompanied by compassion for the poor and hurting and an unmistakable, authentic ideal of koinonia and community.
Commending 9Marks
In short, as the 9Marks Journal says, they “didn’t do weird stuff.” I encourage my readers to go read this 9Marks Journal.
We’re not going to agree with everything 9Marks says. But what 9Marks shows us—and Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington D.C. and its pastor, Mark Dever, and the hundreds of churches that have been planted and revitalized as a result of this ministry—is that it’s possible to have vibrant, growing congregations that minister to diverse age groups and ethnicities in urban, suburban, small-town, and rural demographics that are firmly rooted in the ordinary means of grace, in the sufficiency of Scripture, and in the means and methods of the apostles.
[1] J. Matthew Pinson, Free Will Baptists and the Sufficiency of Scripture (Antioch, TN: Historical Commission, National Association of Free Will Baptists, 2014). It can be ordered here. Rob Rienow, Reclaiming the Sufficiency of Scripture (Nashville: Randall House, 2012). It can be ordered here.
[2] J. Matthew Pinson, The Washing of the Saints’ Feet (Nashville: Randall House, 2006). It can be ordered here
Younger Pastors, Denominationalism, and Our Persistent Misunderstanding of Young People
Recently Lifeway Research conducted a study on pastors’ views on the value of Protestant denominations and the future of denominations. This study is discussed in an article from Lifeway entitled “Pastors Value Denominations Now, Not as Sure About the Future.”
8 in 10 Pastors Think Denominationalism is Vital
The study, which surveyed pastors in Protestant denominations, had three main findings: First, about 8 in 10 think it’s “vital” to be connected with a denomination. Second, about the same number said their congregation thinks it’s “vital” to be part of denomination. Third, almost two-thirds of pastors surveyed said they believe the value of being part of a denomination will “diminish” in the next decade.
These findings may or may not surprise Free Will Baptist pastors. But there’s another finding in the study that I think will surprise the vast majority of Baby Boomer and Gen-X Free Will Baptist pastors, but which isn’t surprising to me because my work revolves around young adult Free Will Baptists who are preparing for ministry every day of my life.
Young Pastors Are More Apt to Say Denominationalism Is Vital
The finding I think many will find surprising is this:
Younger pastors are more apt to say denominational identity is “vital to them personally,” and least likely to say that the importance of denominational identity will decrease in the future.
The older the pastor in the survey, the less likely that pastor was to affirm the importance of denominations. For example, 24% of pastors over 65 disagreed that denominations were personally vital to their congregations, while only 16% of those ages 18 to 34 disagreed. Similar responses came back regarding what younger and older pastors thought about how important denominational identity will be in the future.
(Another finding I found interesting—and relevant to Welch, since we just started our M.Div. program and are planning to put our M.A. program in theology and ministry online—is that pastors with master’s degrees were the ones in the survey who in greatest numbers (81%) said their congregations valued their participation in their denomination most highly. 72% of those with bachelor’s degrees affirmed this, and 68% without a college degree affirmed it.)
Data Piling Up about Young People and the Church
These findings add to the myriads of data piling up that upend our presumptions concerning younger people and that the only way they’ll come to or stay in church, or faith in Christ, is if we appeal to the consumer sensibilities of youth culture in our worship and church programming. As all the sociological research shows—from more popular sources like LifeWay, Barna, and Answers in Genesis, to more scholarly sources like Pew, the Fuller Youth Study, and sociologists such as Christian Smith, Melissa Lundquist Denton, and others—Millennials and Gen-Zers are more open to tradition, doctrine, depth and substance in preaching and teaching and singing, intergenerational mentorship, and the list goes on.
Rainer, Ham, Kinnaman on Why Young People are Leaving the Church
This research, seen for example in Thom Rainer’s Essential Church, Ken Ham’s Already Gone, and David Kinnaman’s You Lost Me, shows that young people are leaving all sorts of churches at the same rates—large and small, urban and rural, contemporary and traditional, charismatic and liturgical.
As with the more general surveys of adults by people like Barna and Rainer, these studies of younger people show that the reason they’re leaving the church has little to do with stylistic factors and everything to do with the lack of solid teaching, the lack of intergenerationality and mentoring across the generations, the lack of love and community, and what they see as hypocrisy in the church. Church style is way down the list and is usually not listed as a factor at all.
Again, these studies are also undergirded by more academic sociological studies by scholars such as Christian Smith and Melissa Lundquist Denton, whose results support David Kinnaman’s conclusion that
“After countless interviews and conversations, I am convinced that historic and traditional practices, and orthodox and wisdom-laden ways of believing, are what the next generation really needs.”
—David Kinnaman, CEO, Barna Group
Millennial Preferences in Church Architecture
This is even confirmed by Millennial preferences in church architecture. A few years ago, the Barna Group conducted a study for one of the largest church architectural firms in the country, which wanted to know what style of church architecture Millennials preferred. When shown pictures of the “stage” or “platform” as well as the outside of traditional and modern church buildings, two-thirds of Millennials preferred traditional structures over modern ones.
This is not to argue, of course, for a “sanctified” architecture. It simply shows that many of our assumptions about what “the young folks” will actually prefer have been overturned by the Millennial generation, and similar preliminary reports are coming out of the even more secularized Generation Z.
Fuller Youth Institute, Growing Young
These same sorts of considerations continue to be borne out by the research. For example, the Fuller Youth Institute’s latest study, Growing Young: 6 Essential Strategies to Help Young People Discover and Love Your Church, lists the top ten qualities churches don’t need to “grow young”:
- A certain size (young people don’t care whether a church is large or small)
- A trendy location or region
- An exact age (young people don’t care whether a church is old or newly planted)
- A popular denomination . . . or lack of denomination (young people aren’t negative on denominations)
- An off-the-charts cool quotient (“For young people today, relational warmth is the new cool.”)
- A big modern building
- A big budget
- A “contemporary” worship service
- A watered-down teaching style
- A hyper-entertaining ministry program (“We don’t have to compete. . . . Slick is no guarantee of success.”)
Don’t Underestimate Our Younger Ministers
Count on it: The reformation of Protestant faith and practice in the Free Will Baptist Church is not going to come from my generation. It’s going to come from the Millennials (those born between 1981 and 1996) and, even more, Generation Z (those born between 1997 and 2012).*
They tend to be more interested in doctrine and theology, depth in teaching and preaching, transcendence not trendiness in church life, and authenticity and intergenerationality in relationships and community. In short, to use Kinnaman’s words, they’re more interested than you might think in “historic and traditional practices, and orthodox and wisdom-laden ways of believing.”
Don’t underestimate them; don’t write them off; and don’t think you’ve got them figured out.
*Obviously, there is debate about these exact years.