Category Archives: Missional Millennials
The five elements that define a Missional Millennial
Religious sensory override: our generation’s quest for unusual experience
We Californians live in a culture of religious sensory override.
We are only content with our faith when the senses that we do have (sight, sound, touch, taste, smell) are overridden by an otherworldly experience. We want to feel something. I have seen college students who were at their most passionate when the Lord was speaking to them in dreams, visions, and prophetic words, only to crash and burn during the seasons when God was not present to bless in that way. They seem to judge this disappearing act solely on whether he “reveals” himself to them, not in the usual manner, such as Scripture, community, or common prayer, but in out-of-the-ordinary manifestations that override their five senses. These types of divine encounters are wonderful when they happen, and I believe they do. But we are addicted to them.
Anthropologist, Tanya Luhrman, spent years researching this spiritual trend. In a fascinating project, entitled, When God Talks Back, she points out that “the God of this evangelical church illustrates the dominant shift in American spirituality of the last forty years, towards a more intimate, personal, and supernaturally present divine” (Random House, 12). Millennials are all over this type of relational spirituality, as seen in the darkened atmospheres of gathered worship (such as the college ministry I pastor), individualized forms of communion, Jeffrey Bethke’s famous call to trade “religion” for a person, the way we always gauge “worship” by what we experienced, and countless other forms of expression that flow from our generation’s explosive passion and love for interconnected relationships, including the divine. I think these are mostly good things, until they come at the cost of necessity.
The Bible is a necessity, the essential precondition of the Christian life.
Worshippers that feast on supernatural affections may consider the Bible too archaic. It follows that those who favor supernatural encounters in prayer and worship, will sometimes do so to the neglect of reading Scripture, finding it too dry and unromantic. This gets exacerbated by any moment of felt need; prophetic visions can offer a specific answer in real-time, which seems much more suited to our fast paced, twitter-pated generation than tediously searching a dusty Bible hoping to find something relevant.
My guess, is that the times we do open the Bible, we open it without much of a plan. This simply reflects our faithless approach to those sensory overrides we cherish so much—e.g., we don’t need to plan or think when God is speaking to us directly through a prophetic word! And we don’t plan when we open up the Bible either, because we don’t view the Scriptures with the same intensity as God. Or the Hebrew believers for that matter.
Ann Spangler and Lois Tverberg bring us into the world of the ancient rabbis, who “thought that study, and not prayer, was the highest form of worship…they pointed out that when we pray, we speak to God, but that when we study the Scriptures, God speaks to us” (Zondervan, L.417, emphasis mine). Read the rest of this entry
A visual narrative of Reality Boston’s 1st prayer tour
I just got back from a prayer tour for Reality Boston. The tour was represented by Reality’s from L.A., Stockton, San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Carpinteria, and Ventura. Below are the blog posts narrating the trip through words, videos, and imagery. Enjoy!
Boston Prayer Tour || Introduction
Boston Prayer Tour || Day 1 (Video)
Boston Prayer Tour || Tim Chaddick on prayer tours (video)
Boston Prayer Tour || Day 2 (Video)
Boston Prayer Tour || Day 3 (Video)
Breathe in the city; exhale in prayer.
Color outside the lines
I have a few memories of coloring books from childhood–remember those?–if you went to Sunday school, they were often thickly stenciled images of Jesus holding lambs or a dozen children on his lap with a blue sash and a lackluster smile. But I didn’t care what it was; my job was to color it in! And oh did I. I spent way too much time getting the shades and tones “just right,” and making sure the crayons didn’t bleed into the borders of Jesus’ head, for fear that the he might turn out looking like a Smurf. I would get frustrated when one of my friends would grab a random crayon (like Razzmatazz), and begin coloring Jesus’ face with it, only to choose a different, also unnatural color, for his hands. Grr. Of course, this was further compounded by the kid’s blatant disregard for…
Coloring outside the lines!!
Yeah, that’s right—he kept scribbling outside of the bold black lines of Jesus’ face. Imagine my horror. Sometimes I would correct said person to remind them that the proper goal of art is to color within the lines. Later, I would get a taste of my own medicine, but instead of coloring books…it would come in the form of mission…
Mission in the church is often privatized.
We sometimes fall into the error of thinking that mission happens solely at the hands of a corporate entity. The New Testament shows a church that is both scattered and gathered; at some points in the week, we gather together as the church in a visible congregation, while other times, we are the church scattered and dispersed throughout neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces.
Because of the mega-church culture birthed out of the 1980′s, we have the “gathered” element of church down, but have forgotten what it means or looks like to be scattered. The easy reaction, then, to mission, is to relegate it all to a group of professional clergy, and the building where we meat as a gathered congregation.
Some churchgoers love the idea of mission, but still expect it to happen within the walls of the church building.
We evidence this by the large number of programs we depend on throughout the week for our quota of mission and evangelism. Programs are not bad, per se, but neither are they everything, and are certainly not the full spectrum of the church’s calling as a light to the world. And yet, our initial convictions when the local church lacks activity in the community, is to start a program: small group night, single’s night, homeless ministry night, street-witnessing night, etc. Instead of taking the responsibility (as the scattered church), we place it back on an impersonal institution (which is not the church). We are elevating programs to the highest level of mission, when Jesus relegated his highest levels of mission to small communities of ordinary people.
Church programs are our coloring line!
Think about this: if the entire church body looks to the clergy to get mission done, we are drastically limiting the influence and power of available church goers. We are taking 30, or 300, or 3000–however many members worship at our church–and bottlenecking a potential grassroots movement to the small capacity of the church staff! In doing so, we stifle a movement and relegate the exciting call of following Jesus to a few “anointed” people and their programs.
We’ve got to view mission as something that is much more broad than what the church staff, or selected leaders, are capable of launching and overseeing. We need to understand mission as a personal responsibility that happens within community, during the ordinary course of our daily lives. We must not depend on clergy, but on each other in the body of Christ.
I doubt that Jesus intended to change the world through weekly programs. But he seemed to spend a lot of time with his twelve disciples, doing life together.
Will the Kingdom of God expand only through official church programs, or might it allow the imaginations of the “laity” to run wild with missional zeal?
For crying out loud, let’s color outside the lines.
The Sheltered Christian Stakeout
Gabe Lyons posted a discussion with Margaret Feinberg about the tendency for Christians to become “sheltered.” I found the following quote more true than I am comfortable with…
Christians get pretty easily offended. When we find ourselves when we are confronted with the fallen world, or things that we might not agree with, we tend to react by withdrawing or pulling away and being offended by it. And it seems that Jesus’ approach or even Paul’s approach, as we read the scriptures is that he was provoked. He was provoked to engage. He didn’t run from it, but more or less tried to get involved in the conversation and listen and better help articulate what the gospel means in the middle of a fallen world.
How do we find the balance between being in the world (John 17:15-16), and being unstained by the world? (James 1:27)
The Kony groundswell
I am not involved with Invisible Children (IC), but I must say that their ability to influence swells of Millennials toward a cause is fascinating.
Their latest video hit 62 million views in a week, and has an ambitious goal: to make a tyrant famous. You’ll just have to watch it for yourself, if you haven’t already.
If IC can mobilize Millennials like this, what the heck aren’t we doing?
Millennials: The Generation of Promise. Pt.3
Myth #1 – College will automatically get you a dream job
A while back, I pointed out how the relentless pampering of an older generation has cultured Millennials. Soon after, we mulled over the lack of opportunities to spend our inherited greatness. Now we have a group of young people who feel that they’ve wasted their potential. An environment of coddling with no opportunities is a cruel trick.
But not as cruel as the trick you play on yourself by going to college.
Higher ed is what they tell every Millennial to do after graduating high school, yet no one explains how this is going to help. As far as we know, it’s a magical band-aid.
Sooner of later, you find yourself disappointed for toiling those four years, expecting a significant job, with benefits, and a $40K annual return, yet only experiencing cold-calls and shoulder shrugs. It turns out, that college degree is not as magical as you thought.
The one thing I would tell college students before they packed their bags for school… Read the rest of this entry
J.R. Daniel Kirk on withdrawal and isolation from the world
I’m reading through a book by J.R. Daniel Kirk, called Jesus have I loved, but Paul?, which seeks to harmonize what some see as discrepancies between Jesus’ mission and Paul’s. One of them is Jesus’ love for outsiders, and Paul’s supposed judgment of them. But after Kirk corrects this faulty understanding (e.g., Matt. 18; 1 Cor. 5), he then shows how we’ve lived out a different lifestyle than the intended mission of Paul to outsiders.
This sentence stands out, in particular,
Too often modern church concerns for purity entail a withdrawal from the world around us, creating an isolated community that stands in perpetual judgment of the world. (Kirk, p. 109)
Think of the rhythms and spaces that intersect your life outside of your Christian community. How do we take on the life Jesus and Paul lived while on mission among outsiders, without being judgmental of the world we live in? What does this look like with your athletic team? With your co-workers? With your agnostic friends? With the sexually promiscuous couple you met in class? With the binge drinkers next door?
Millennials: The Promised Generation, part 2 – Redeeming Lost Talent
At the end of January, I asked what you would do if you were given so much promise and deprived of so much opportunity. All Millennials are. You are the promising generation, and you know it; decades of pampering and care has gone into a Millennial generation’s upbringing, and now you have come of age.
Unfortunately, there’s no where left for you to be awesome.
The first post was a wake up call. I know you all like it more when I write inspiring posts about Millennials—after all, I am one, and at a DOB of 1981, I barely made it!—but I can’t help noticing a bad trend emerging from those of us who are called to speak into the lives of Millennials.
Millennials are so high up on a pedestal, that we forgot what it was like to fall on the ground.
The world isn’t always fair. There are not always opportunities open for us to waltz into, and this has caused many to feel ripped off. It’s true for college leaders, as well. We love that you are the promised generation! We have also placed so much hope in you, that we are sometimes quick to disregard the entire picture, that circumstances do not always turn out ideal, and in ignoring reality, we sometimes explain away a basic understanding that life is unromantic. You are given great gifts, talents, and education, only to find that life has given you the shaft.
But God has plenty of opportunity for you in his mission.
While you may not get a high-paying job with benefits right out of college, your calling in life will always concern being on God’s mission to make disciples of the nations and your city. I want to propose a biblical worldview of calling.
You have not been seasoned for this moment to make much of yourself and career, but to put God’s eternal purposes on display. God is out to renew creation, from the material nature of the environment, to structures, cultures, and societies. And of course, he is in the process of renewing and restoring a broken group of humanity for his own glory. Approach life differently.
Use your gifts to make much of others and align your calling with the mission of Jesus.
That’s redemption. It means your life is not wasted. It means God is not ignoring you. It means there is a plan. And it means you are in the middle of it, albeit, one larger than yourself. This is what Peter was referring to when saying that “As each one has received a special gift, use it in serving one another as good stewards of the manifold grace of God” ( 1 Peter 4:10-11). Even if you’re stuck in a dead-end job; the glorious mission of God is always available to you in the form of servanthood, for in the serving of others, you loosen the fragrance of Jesus.
It’s less glamorous, but then again, when has “glamorous” ever changed the world?
We were made for more.
Related articles
- Millennials: The Promising Generation (christopherlazo.com)
Millennials: The Promising Generation
Millennials want to make a difference because they are pampered and sheltered.
When generational experts, Neil Howe and William Strauss, wrote their defining book on Millennials, they highlighted our generation’s pros and cons, namely, that we had a desire to achieve greatness, and our parent’s generation was the driving force behind this.
We are the result of a domino effect.
Some mothers will recall the tragic crime in September 1982, when “a cyanide-tainted Tylenol triggered an October wave of parental panic over trick-or-treating” (Howe and Strauss, 43). On its heels was a “national hysteria over the sexual abuse of toddlers,” an immediate distaste for classic 80′s horror flicks victimizing children, replaced with a flood of sitcoms portraying kids as the heroes. While parents filtered the family television, American school teachers experienced a newfound pressure to raise better kids in the classroom. And the trend continued.
Our generation is almost entirely conditioned for greatness
By the time we reached grade school, we had already adopted a skip in our step (or perhaps a leap in our step). And why not? We were being preened to take over the world by an earlier generation that wanted to leave a better legacy. We evolved from the latchkey kids of our ancestors to kids inheriting all the keys on the latch.
Millennials are unlike any generation that has gone before. And because of this, there is an overwhelming pressure to succeed. Unfortunately, the opportunities available to an aspiring millennial are underwhelming enough to damper the passion of the most resolute college grad. Our parents didn’t just leave us with a different outlook on life, they left us with a different life. Look no farther than a broken economy, steep living prices, and a job famine. It’s as if someone taught us how to fish in the middle of the Sahara. The world’s greatest generation, pampered with hopeful expectations, and sheltered from the grim truth of everything our parents never wanted us to experience. How do we handle this? Can we take advantage of the momentum we’ve been given?
