Ready for some good news? Jesus has won. I don’t mean that Jesus has won over sin or the devil or any of that eschatological crap. Jesus has won the imagination of the people who have lost faith in the institutions that are supposed to know him best.
Churches are reeling from the absence of especially younger people in their pews. These are generations who have never been there in the first place, but they seem to have nothing to bring them in or keep them there. Much head-scratching and hand-wringing and actual heart-felt prayer has gone into the scrying of the mystery of their absence. It’s my own opinion that we in the church have given too much effort into attempting to discern what’s wrong with them, than with looking at ourselves and the ways we embody the Christ we try to proclaim.
I’ll name two areas where I believe the church has mis-incarnated, at least for the absent generations. The first is substitutionary atonement. It is a metaphor whose time is past. Millennials are particularly quick to sense the disconnect between the proclamation of a God of unconditional love and the God who demands a bloody sacrifice to expiate the sins of humanity (and who commits filicide in order to accomplish this plan). Substitutionary atonement simply no longer commands the moral or theological authority it has for past generations. If God is love, then the God who is Love must be more creative and compassionate than the blood-thirsty, angry God taught in Sunday school. If the Gospel is about life, and life abundantly, then it cannot be achieved through death.The cross must mean something other than an act of divine violence to exact the payment for sins of human beings, than the deification of suffering. The church’s seeming refusal to explore these other meanings is but one more sign to the absent generations that the institutional church is irredeemably irrelevant to life today.
The second is the church’s inability to accept (much less embrace) the full range of human sexuality. This, of course, has its roots in a selective fundamentalism that insists each and every word of the bible must be held authoritative and inflexible, especially the few words about sexualtiy but not so much the many words about justice and equality and compassion.
The more the church (and the United Methodist Church in particular right now) doubles down on the idea that the God of unconditional love finds homosexuality unacceptable (because the bible says so), the more it erodes any hope of having any connection with the generations who viscerally understand that love is love is love is love is love.
And while those of us in the church know that neither of these areas is by any means the only voice or school of thought in Christianity, the success of the popular and conservative Church at making it seem that way has been a large part in the abdication of the absent generations from that Church.The triumph of the popular Church at broadcasting such a monolithic message, though, has been its downfall. And the reticence and meekness of those of us who are liberal or progressive at promoting alternative theologies and understandings has contributed to the mudslide.
These generations are absent from the church because they do not find the Jesus there that the church tries to proclaim. The person of Jesus for them seems to have much more integrity than the churchiness presented on Sunday mornings. The compassion of the Jesus who heals the bleeding woman and who refuses to cast the first stone is more compelling than any diatribe about the sanctity of traditional marriage. They are attracted to the Jesus who generously feeds a crowd of strangers even as they are repelled by the judgmentalism that effectively puts bouncers at the front door of the church.The Jesus who asks for the children to be brought, the Jesus who talks of a good Samaritan, the Jesus who chose the cross instead of violent rebellion embodies a love that one can live by. Somehow Jesus has transcended the institutionalism of the Church that claims his name.
So you see, the Church has lost but Jesus has won in the imagination and hearts of the absent generations. They are compelled by Jesus’ insistence that the meek are blessed, the peacemakers are blessed, that feeding the hungry and advocating for the oppressed are more important than purity or piety, that women and foreigners and outcasts are more acceptable than the vipers of righteousness. They have no time or room for the Church in their lives, but the teachings and example of Jesus offers for them a dynamic and often life-changing context that offers meaning and hope and sometimes even community. If we are lucky (or maybe it’s grace) the Church might yet learn a thing or two about Jesus from the absent generations.
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