Teens grow tired of "cool" church, many seek something deeper

Sometimes it can feel as though numbers are everything. Especially in church.

I can recall in high school, when the different community churches competed for students to fill the seats in their "youth lounge" by promising rock music, games, prizes, an astro- jump, a skate park, free t-shirts and much, much more.

Churches prided themselves on having the coolest worship experience in town, transforming the quiet sanctuary into a concert venue. The pastor and alter were replaced by a headset and youth speaker with a trendy goatee. The hymns were replaced by electric guitars played by guys with bleached tipped spiked hair and for some reason they always wore Abercrombie jeans. Not to mention the personality cult that surrounds many worship leaders.

Jesus was just plain radical, dude.

Enter what many have called the "post-modern worship experience." A place where young people come to find faith and feel really good inside about doing it.  It usually consists of a dark venue, smoke machines, a giant cross and enormous screens straight out of a George Orwell novel.

Ah yes, 1999 was truly an awesome time to go to church. Everyone's worship experience was cooler than the next guy's, and if our parents made us go to a stuffy "old people's" church on a Sunday morning, we snuck to a hip evening worship-fest on another night of the week to engage in "real worship."

Worship from the heart, man.

But somewhere along the way, we got smart.

The youth of the Church realized that with all that hard rockin', they couldn't hear Jesus come a' knockin'.

And that's the whole point, right?

A recent TIME magazine article reports that today's youth are tired of being sold their faith. The idea that "my church's Jesus is way cooler than your church's Jesus" is like, sooo yesterday.

Kids these days are bombarded with so much emotionally driven media that they want something solid to level them out. Last I checked the Church believes that they have something to offer that is more than skin deep. The article published in TIME last week studied the behavior of youth groups and attitudes toward different approaches to evangelism.

“Believing that a message wrapped in pop-culture packaging was the way to attract teens to their flocks, pastors watered down the religious content and boosted the entertainment. But in recent years churches have begun offering their young people a style of religious instruction grounded in Bible study and teachings about the doctrines of their denomination.”

Although the phrase is tossed around, misused and far overdone, we do live in a morally relative postmodern world. Personally, I'm okay with that. I'm so tired of the war over absolutism, that I'm willing to find a common gray on a lot of issues.

But  in recent years, the Church has tried its best to dance with the postmodernists, which I see as quite the contradiction. One of the greatest reasons that people even go to church is to find solace in an absolute, to have someone tell them that it's all going to be okay. Especially the 16 year-old from a broken home who is struggling to fight against a peer group who bombards him with pressure to fit in.

Even as the "postmodern worship experience" took hold, the attendance numbers remained stagnant.

That sure got the attention of all the Baptists in the room.

According to the article, many churches are heading back to their roots and looking to the book that inspired them in the first place. (The Bible, or as the cool kids like to say, “The Word” or “The Message.” Get with it pops; only old people call it the “Bible”)

The report is as follows:

“As the exodus has increased, churches are trying to reverse the flow by focusing less on amusement and more on Scripture. When Chris Reed failed to convert a single youngster during one 12-month period soon after taking over as youth minister at Calvary in 1995, he decided to restructure his young people's program by adding both larger doses of doctrine and closer adult mentoring.”

Here in 2006, there's enough “cool” out in the real world to fill an ocean. According to the Gospels, the man who claimed to be the Son of God was really not that cool. He was the one of the most revolutionary, counter-cultural figures in all of history. He stood up against thousands of years of teaching and proclaimed that he had a better way.

The Church should continue to preach that in spite of everything the world says, they too believe that they have another way. If not, the line that separates doctrine and what is currently fashionable will be indistinguishable.

Feel free to worship as you please. I know, I know, we worship with plasma screens and smoke machines because it catches people’s attention and helps us proselytize more effectively.

And I understand why you didn’t like the worship.

But I wasn’t aware that we were worshipping you.

Comments

[Ruth Lang]

What's that you're saying about the Baptists?

Anyway, it was a great article. It's good that young people are searching for something deeper and that they are turning to the Bible (yes, I still call it "The Bible") for answers. It's God's Word, the Truth. With the Holy Spirit's help, they will respond to that Truth with faith in Christ Jesus.

[James Tippins]

I am praying that more youth workers can get this picture. I have seen this play itself out over the last 12 years in student ministry and have responded over the last 8 years to make changes that result in authentic truth.

Sadly, leadership and others are not grounded enough in the word of God to know the difference in authenticity any more.