Purify Your Bride

This post begins with a quote and link to a London Times story that you need to read. Seems the Church of England is trying to find ways to tap into the spiritual interests of England’s church-abandoning younger generations. After extensive research, the conclusions were not at all the expected.

There was little interest in God at all. There was little interest in heaven, spiritual matters, or even life after death. What was meaningful to the young people interviewed was life, family, love, work, relationships and the enjoyment of this world. They were comfortably, happily attuned to this world. Spiritual tattoos aside, they had little thought of much beyond what their senses or experiences presented to them.

In other words, Augustine’s famous “God-shaped void” didn’t make its expected appearance in anything near the numbers expected. Those with interest in some aspect of non-Christian, alternative spiritualities were often simply engaging in the enjoyment and exploration of culture, social groups, symbolism, trends and/or their own this-worldly curiosity and preferences.

Several months ago, I told many of my friends that when I turned off the “Christian stream of consciousness” in my head and just listened to the young people I work with, it was quite obvious that most of them had no interest in God at all. I mean no interest in God at all apart from practical, pragmatic results in very “this worldly” matters. Of course, the problem is that I’m simply not taking this into account in much that I do. “Now turn in your Bibles to Obadiah, and let’s pick up where we left off last week in our series on “Major Moments In The Minor Prophets.”

He seems to quite rightly point out that Pascal’s God-shaped vacuum does not really show up in sociology studies and typical Sunday school classes. So what gives? I am not that surprised that the “God shaped vacuum” didn’t show up in the London Times study. It is not a hunger people, especially young people, are normally conscious of. An inner emptiness might bug them once in a while but are they going to mention that on a survey? I doubt it.

What makes people aware of their vacuum is encountering a person who is Christ-like. Young people can tell when they are being processed through a church program and when they are encountering self-sacrificial love. True saints will unsettle people because they make people aware at how pathetic their lives are. The sad part is it is often the most religious people who won’t admit that and instead turn on the saint.

So my question not would be whether young people are hungry for God but whether anybody in the church has enough God to whet their appetite. Are we more focused on making dead programs work or do we dare to truly love the kids starting with the ones society says are the most unlovable?

Evangelism is hard. There are no shortcuts. Most church programs are designed to keep working even when nobody involved believes. People teach. People send their kids. Kids respond and say the right things. It can all happen year after year but be completely dead. Sure there is a chance someone will connect with such a program but it is hard.

What we need is the grace to be saints at least for a while to touch a few. That is why prayer is so important. But praying for the grace to love does not absolve us of the need to actually love. It strengthens us to do it but we still must do it.