Ep. 30 - How The Church Can Win Back Young People
Episode Stats
Words per minute
154.3493
Harmful content
Toxicity
8
sentences flagged
Hate speech
20
sentences flagged
Summary
In this episode, we take a look at church music and what it means to be a Christian in the 21st century, and why it's not as good as it used to be. Plus, a sermon about angry birds.
Transcript
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A little while ago, when I was traveling, I don't remember what city or state I was in,
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but I attended a local church before my flight.
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And it's always kind of a game of Russian roulette to go to a church out of town when
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I walked into this church, and I knew immediately what I was in for, because I noticed that
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the choir members, if you can call it a choir, they were all dressed in shorts and flip-flops.
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And everybody was talking, not just the choir, but everybody.
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They were treating this time before church as kind of a cocktail hour, and so people were
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There was no prayer anywhere to be found in the church.
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And that's how it is in a lot of modern churches.
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There always has to be noise and sounds and never silence, even for a moment.
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At some point in recent history, we decided that a church is a place that should always
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be filled with noise, and there must never be silence in a church, when, of course, a church
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is exactly the place where you should be able to go and get some silence.
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There needs to be silence in church, because silence facilitates mental prayer, which is
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something that should be happening in a church.
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Anyway, finally, church started, and the choir or the jam band for Jesus, whatever it was,
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they played a song that sounded like a cross between kind of a 90s Disney soundtrack and
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maybe an easy listening favorite that you would find if you scrolled through your aunt's second
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But it also wasn't traditional, and that was the whole point, because tradition is yucky.
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Anything that existed prior to 1967, we can't have any of that.
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The singer was, the lead singer of this band was relatively talented, but he carried on
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like a lead singer of a band, and you got this distinct impression that he was fishing
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for applause, not that he was worshiping the Lord of the universe.
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He wasn't, now music and church should be bringing us all into this, you know, reverent
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state of awe before the sacredness, the holiness of God, right?
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It should be bringing, it should be this communal experience which elevates us and brings us up
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That's what music, that's what church music is supposed to do.
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It's not supposed to bring us back down to earth.
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It's not supposed to make us stand in awe of this very talented band.
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It's not even, you know what, it's not even about bringing us, it's not even about like
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bonding us with each other, like a campfire song or something.
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It's all about togetherness and being together.
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It's not actually what church music is supposed to do.
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And it certainly did not succeed in doing that at all.
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And a lot of church music these days is really not designed for that.
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So the pastor, when it was time for him to deliver his sermon, he opened up with a round
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of jokes, which were not funny, but at least they succeeded in being unserious, which I guess
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And the sermon was jam-packed with youth slang and pop culture.
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He just kind of hung them out there so that we could be impressed that he knows about
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And the reason why, now I've, this whole scene I'm depicting, I've seen things like this
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The reason why this one still sticks in my head, even a couple of years later, is because
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I distinctly remember he made this reference to angry birds.
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But even by then, this was a very dated reference.
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But, and so I, I just cringing at it like, oh my gosh, but it did the job, I guess, of
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letting us know that the guy speaking also uses smartphones and, or at least he used a
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smartphone at some point in the last five years.
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And I guess the young people in attendance were supposed to go, OMG, he totally gets us.
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Unfortunately, what was left out of his sermon was any semblance of an insight or a challenge
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And about halfway in, I turned to look around at my fellow congregants.
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And the people who were sitting in the pews, what few of them there were, they looked to
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And this was clearly everything I was witnessing from the pop culture references, the sermon,
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All of this was designed clearly to appeal to young people.
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But I looked around and it was, it, it, it looked like a nursing home.
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I didn't, I was, I was probably the youngest person there by about 50 years.
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I'll tell you another quick story, a different church, this one closer to me before, beforehand
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they, they, they, they, a giant projector screen dropped from the ceiling and they played
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A Christian rap video that had, had been, I guess, produced by the church youth group.
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But I looked around and all the old folks in the church, and it was mostly old folks,
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They could see their grandchildren and they thought it was the cutest thing.
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As for the younger people, we were all cringing so hard that our faces hurt.
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You could tell we were all worried that our face would get stuck like this because that's
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It's one of those cringe moments where you can't even look up.
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You're just, you just want to shrink into a, you're, you're experiencing secondhand embarrassment
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to a degree that is just, it's, it's causing physical anxiety in you.
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Someone wrote to me a few weeks ago to tell me about the local non-denominational church
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that they just left because the pastor had embarked on this mission to win back young
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And this mission apparently involved introducing an electric guitar because, you know, those
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young people and those electric guitars encouraging people to dress more casually at church and
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giving sermons on tolerance and racism and injecting, again, pop culture references into
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The point is that Christian leaders in America, church leaders, have set out to win back young
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And they certainly need to do that because the young generation is less religious, more
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atheistic, more secular than any generation before in American history.
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But in many cases, in most cases, probably they've set out to win back these lost sheep
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by trying to be cool and relevant and irreverent.
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But all this ever succeeds in doing is impressing the aging people in the pews who ruined everything
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by injecting this garbage into the church in the first place.
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They're the ones who first decided that the experience at church should resemble your experience
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at a coffee shop or at a really bad rock concert, okay?
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And so even now to this day, they're the only ones impressed by it.
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As is clearly evident by the fact that their kids are not going to church.
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And most of them have left the faith completely.
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Because think of what a secular young person, imagine what he would think if he was looking
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to give Christianity a try and the first service he ever attended was of the type I just described.
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Now, when he leaves, what would he be thinking?
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You didn't give him any kind of deeper understanding of the faith at all.
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Now, he went into church preparing to encounter something deep, holy, challenging, but he probably
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walked out thinking like, well, what's all the fuss about?
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That was just like, that just looked like something I could find anywhere in the culture.
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And this is the problem with Christianity in this country, not just in our church buildings,
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It has no sense of its own ancient and epic history.
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All of these things that are in Christianity are not being brought out.
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And this is what people go to Christianity for.
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This is what they want when somebody walks, especially a young person who's never been
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to church, and they walk into a church building.
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They want something totally different, but they don't find it.
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The light of faith grows dimmer in this culture because Christianity has made, because
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I should say, because the church, the American church, has turned Christianity into something
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And that is a heck of an accomplishment, really, when you think about it.
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I mean, to make Christianity into something lame and boring, it's the least lame, the least
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Every branch of the faith has become infected by this.
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And if we want to understand why Christianity is not winning souls, and especially not winning
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the younger generation, then we just got to look here.
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The strategy has been, well, if we want to win back the sheep, if we want to win back the
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millennial sheep especially, then we have to make Christianity as unchristian as possible.
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It has to be stripped of its truth, of its sacredness, of its sacrifice, of its morality,
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of its tradition, of its history, of its hardships, of its joy, of its beauty, of everything.
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And whatever's left, I mean, it's not going to engage or excite anyone, but at least it
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There's even, you know, you find in some cases you have these very old churches, these
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very old, beautiful churches, which do exist in America.
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Now, we don't have churches as old or as beautiful as what they have in Europe, but we still have
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And sometimes what you'll find even is that, you know, the church will go through and they'll
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take away all the beautiful—they'll make an effort.
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They'll take the effort to make the church less beautiful.
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They'll take everything away, and they'll try to make it less beautiful.
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They say to themselves, let's make church less beautiful.
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That's what's scaring people away is the beauty.
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This is—even the way that the new churches are constructed, even the architecture, where they're
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made to look bland, like office buildings or just like nondescript auditoriums, or from
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the outside, it looks almost like a DMV office or something like that.
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I mean, this—even the architecture of churches has changed because they want—it's almost like
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They want to blend in with the culture as much as possible.
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They don't want anyone to know that this is actually a church and that there's something
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The problem is that the church is trying to appeal to the wrong aspect of youth.
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You know, they see that young people can tend to be irreverent and frivolous and easily
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distracted and in need of constant stimulation.
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And so they put forward a Christianity tailored to those qualities.
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But that's not the aspect of youth that the church should be trying to reach out to, okay?
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Because young people are also by nature radical, idealistic, hungry for change, hungry for a
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Most of the great revolutionaries throughout history have been young people.
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Revolutions are led by the young in every case.
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You know, revolutions are never led by 50-year-olds.
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So it should be no trouble at all to get young people excited about Christianity.
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Christianity is the most exciting thing in the universe.
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As Christians, we are fighting a war against the devil himself.
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We are advancing against the darkest forces of the universe.
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And all the while, all around us, on a dimension that's invisible to our mortal eyes, there are
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angels and demons and supernatural forces, both good and evil.
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And they're fighting and they're working to defend and destroy us.
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We're standing on a battlefield right now as we speak.
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The Psalms say, praise be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war.
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This is the feeling and the attitude that our leaders and our churches should be stirring in us.
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This is the truth of this life and of the faith.
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It's a ferocious, formidable, terrifying, joyful, beautiful, fantastic, amazing, wonderful truth.
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It's the truth that the Scripture spends over a thousand pages trying to explain.
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And it's the truth that should be shouted from the rooftops of every single church in America.
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That's how you stop the decline of Christianity in America.
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That's how you attract young people, by just simply telling them the truth.
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Make them feel anger and fear and longing and sadness and happiness and hope and determination.
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So this should be, you know, the conversation that we should be having in America is, you know,
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how do we keep the older people still invested in Christianity?
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It should be no problem to get the young people on board.
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This Christianity is something that naturally appeals to them
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because of its militant, warring, radical nature.
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And as I said last week, because in it, in the faith, and in Christ, you find identity.
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And that is the thing, most of all, that young people are looking for.
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We've got this idea that sacrifice is a dirty word.
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Now, it's not an easy thing to do, but that's the kind of message they want.
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And when a young person, a secular young person, goes to a church, that's what they're looking to hear.
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They're looking to hear a challenging message of sacrifice and battle, and that's what they want.
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It doesn't mean they're going to immediately, you know, convert, but that's what they're interested in hearing.
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That is the thing in youthful nature that we should be reaching out to and appealing to.
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That's how you win back the young people, with the truth.
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