Why the Future Isn’t a Lost Cause

Our lodging for the conference

This week Esther and I spent several days in Montreat North Carolina at a Presbyterian small church conference. It was basically a youth camp for pastors. We stayed in what appeared to us to be a stone castle on the side of a mountain overlooking Lake Susan. Our first evening we sang hymns along with about two hundred Presbyterian leaders and pastors, and after singing hymns, we listened to a sermon given by a Ghanaian Presbyterian pastor currently holding a professorship at Columbia Seminary. His booming voice filled every corner of the conference hall. I don’t need hearing aids, and though many of the wise people around me may have been slightly hard of hearing, I doubt that a single ear in the room failed to hear the words of the sermon that night. His passionate call to gather and feed disciples was awe-inspiring.

During the following days we had the opportunity to glean insights from many lay leaders and ordained pastors. I spent some time talking with a novelist and pastor of a small membership church; he reflected on and explained the process he has endured writing nearly thirteen novels, and he said that unless it is burning inside you, unless it is trying to tear its way out of you, it probably isn’t very good. Esther and I met a Bible instructor who just so happens to have a Korean exchange student staying with his family for the year. Throughout the course of the three days, we also had the opportunity to attend three seminars. For the third seminar, we planned to attend a study on clergy health by Duke University; we entered what was a packed classroom. In fact we had to bring in extra chairs for the very back; however, once the speaker began, we realized that we had attended the wrong seminar. The rooms had been switched. We had actually attended a seminar on prayer. What followed was a beautiful and immensely edifying reflection on prayer that overflowed from the speaker’s own deeply personal spirituality. Esther and I were happy and thankful that God had drawn us “accidently” to the wrong seminar.

Inside that Montreat castle, Esther and I were surrounded by wisdom, humor, experience, and the love of Christ.

We met many other wonderful and insightful people, and in fact on our second morning the plenary speaker reflected on some of the cultural changes of the past fifty years and the consequences for church ministry. He recounted the “shift” from modernism to postmodernism – how many times have we heard people speak of such things? He was a compelling storyteller, though much of his cultural commentary was hardly innovative. However, more significant to me than his words was that everyone was so captivated by what he was saying. Why would that be so significant to me?

The institutional church is of little interest and is hardly attractive to many people my age, not least because in our eyes it has lost its credibility for more than one or two reasons. The older generations know this. It is no small piece of irony then that I am being ordained in and by the institutional church. In any case, the plenary speaker of the second morning challenged those present to rethink ministry and to learn the language of a new day. He used ample humor to ease the bullet, but even still I imagine if I were told that my ways are ineffective and need to be replaced with completely different approaches I would be a bit perturbed. But that is not the response to his words that I witnessed. Those present seemed to hang with excited anticipation on his every word.

The future of the church is not a lost cause. Why? Because many people my age (myself included) long for an authentic existence, which in my estimation involves bounds of faith everyday at least tacitly. And because the living generations that have come before us are not disinterested in us. Rather they want to connect with us, but for the most part they do not know our language; they don’t know where to start – it’s like a few weeks ago I realized that I am an old geezer when I asked one of my nephews if he was “having fun” (what sort of question is that when he is playing a video game?!).

The language and categories and liturgies of those generations before us are largely alien to us. And this is what everyone was so interested in. As the speaker of the second day described without holding back some well-placed humor, many people my age are speaking a different language. For example, we have not forgone the importance of “truth”; rather we are speaking about truth differently, with different categories as it were. Consequently, presenting “the gospel” in the same dusty, worn out ways that institutional churches have been for the past three hundred years will be less than useless and will at best be a lost cause. But. That everyone there was so transfixed by what the speaker was saying about the changing culture and the consequences for the life of the church indicates to me that the future is not a lost cause. The generations that have come before us are in fact interested, but they aren’t particularly sure what to do. And so they are doing what we would all do in their situation; they are doing what they know. But they appear ready to put their ears to the ground so to speak and hear what is coming, though in their case "what is coming" is already in their midst.

The future is not a lost cause, but both sides, younger and older will need to be open to each other. Easier said than done. We young folks look at the grey and balding heads, and we shake our heads because we naively think they are clueless. They look at us and suppose we have lost our map and compass. Collaboration will take a lot of willingness and effort on both sides. And as difficult as this may be, I was greatly encouraged when I witnessed and encountered the older generation’s interest in my generation. This interest is important because I and the rest of my generation need to be discipled. 

The older generations need to learn our language, and we need to cultivate patience. We need to cultivate patience that we might delve into the rich heritage of faith that has come before us. We younger people who suppose our advances in technology and tolerance set us above those who have come before us need to cultivate patience that we might glean from the immense treasure set before us. If we so disregard the older generations and the riches they have to offer us, it will indeed be as though pearls have been cast before swine.

The future is not a lost cause, but it will take sincere effort and patience on our part. Rather than fleeing tradition as though it is a thoroughly pernicious system of tyrannical authority, embracing it as ourselves without relinquishing any of the things that are in fact essential to us can be a path way not only toward collaboration between generations but also toward greater visible unity in the church universal, something that should be the business of every Christian.

What I saw with my eyes and heard with my ears this week at the conference was not a dead or dying church. It was a church with a future because it is a church that still rests its future with the future of Jesus. And with him there is always hope, even for generations that appear to be like oil and water.