The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 30 - How The Church Can Win Back Young People

00:00:00.000 A little while ago, when I was traveling, I don't remember what city or state I was in,

00:00:05.500 but I attended a local church before my flight.

00:00:09.400 And it's always kind of a game of Russian roulette to go to a church out of town when

00:00:13.620 you're traveling.

00:00:14.900 And I guess I lost the game this time around.

00:00:18.240 I walked into this church, and I knew immediately what I was in for, because I noticed that

00:00:23.500 the choir members, if you can call it a choir, they were all dressed in shorts and flip-flops.

00:00:30.880 And everybody was talking, not just the choir, but everybody.

00:00:34.480 Everybody was talking.

00:00:35.380 They were treating this time before church as kind of a cocktail hour, and so people were

00:00:40.340 gabbing and gossiping and carrying on.

00:00:42.900 Nobody was praying.

00:00:44.380 You look around.

00:00:45.060 There was no prayer anywhere to be found in the church.

00:00:48.600 And that's how it is in a lot of modern churches.

00:00:51.880 There's always noise.

00:00:54.800 Always.

00:00:55.280 There always has to be noise and sounds and never silence, even for a moment.

00:01:02.160 At some point in recent history, we decided that a church is a place that should always

00:01:08.240 be filled with noise, and there must never be silence in a church, when, of course, a church

00:01:13.040 is exactly the place where you should be able to go and get some silence.

00:01:17.580 There needs to be silence in church, because silence facilitates mental prayer, which is

00:01:24.880 something that should be happening in a church.

00:01:26.920 It's part of the whole reason a church exists.

00:01:29.880 Anyway, finally, church started, and the choir or the jam band for Jesus, whatever it was,

00:01:38.320 they played a song that sounded like a cross between kind of a 90s Disney soundtrack and

00:01:45.140 maybe an easy listening favorite that you would find if you scrolled through your aunt's second

00:01:50.840 generation iPod.

00:01:52.680 It wasn't contemporary.

00:01:55.040 It wasn't relevant.

00:01:57.040 It wasn't good.

00:01:59.460 But it also wasn't traditional, and that was the whole point, because tradition is yucky.

00:02:04.560 That's old.

00:02:05.320 We can't have tradition.

00:02:06.260 Anything that existed prior to 1967, we can't have any of that.

00:02:11.820 That's all bad, because it's old.

00:02:14.220 Old things are bad.

00:02:16.380 The singer was, the lead singer of this band was relatively talented, but he carried on

00:02:24.140 like a lead singer of a band, and you got this distinct impression that he was fishing

00:02:32.040 for applause, not that he was worshiping the Lord of the universe.

00:02:36.260 He wasn't, now music and church should be bringing us all into this, you know, reverent

00:02:43.680 state of awe before the sacredness, the holiness of God, right?

00:02:51.060 It should be bringing, it should be this communal experience which elevates us and brings us up

00:02:57.800 towards God.

00:02:58.580 That's what music, that's what church music is supposed to do.

00:03:01.840 It's not supposed to bring us back down to earth.

00:03:04.740 It's not supposed to remind us of the culture.

00:03:07.800 No, it's not supposed to do that.

00:03:09.440 It's not supposed to make us stand in awe of this very talented band.

00:03:14.280 It's not even, you know what, it's not even about bringing us, it's not even about like

00:03:19.500 bonding us with each other, like a campfire song or something.

00:03:23.680 It's all about togetherness and being together.

00:03:26.480 It's not actually what church music is supposed to do.

00:03:28.700 It's about bringing us all towards God.

00:03:32.140 And it certainly did not succeed in doing that at all.

00:03:35.440 And it seems like it wasn't designed to.

00:03:37.620 And a lot of church music these days is really not designed for that.

00:03:41.580 It's not trying to do that.

00:03:43.160 So the pastor, when it was time for him to deliver his sermon, he opened up with a round

00:03:51.300 of jokes, which were not funny, but at least they succeeded in being unserious, which I guess

00:03:56.920 is close enough.

00:03:57.900 And the sermon was jam-packed with youth slang and pop culture.

00:04:02.580 And he mentioned some TV shows and Netflix.

00:04:05.880 He made sports metaphors.

00:04:07.560 He didn't do anything with the metaphors.

00:04:09.820 He just kind of hung them out there so that we could be impressed that he knows about

00:04:14.100 these things.

00:04:15.600 And the reason why, now I've, this whole scene I'm depicting, I've seen things like this

00:04:20.180 a million times.

00:04:21.800 The reason why this one still sticks in my head, even a couple of years later, is because

00:04:27.900 I distinctly remember he made this reference to angry birds.

00:04:34.180 Okay.

00:04:34.640 This was a couple of years ago.

00:04:35.680 But even by then, this was a very dated reference.

00:04:39.820 But, and so I, I just cringing at it like, oh my gosh, but it did the job, I guess, of

00:04:47.280 letting us know that the guy speaking also uses smartphones and, or at least he used a

00:04:52.960 smartphone at some point in the last five years.

00:04:55.960 And I guess the young people in attendance were supposed to go, OMG, he totally gets us.

00:05:02.260 LOL guys.

00:05:03.520 Did you hear him talk about angry birds?

00:05:05.380 Unfortunately, what was left out of his sermon was any semblance of an insight or a challenge

00:05:13.020 or a truth or a call to action or a point.

00:05:17.520 And about halfway in, I turned to look around at my fellow congregants.

00:05:22.520 And do you know what I saw?

00:05:24.240 A lot of empty seats.

00:05:27.120 A disinterested yawn echoed through the halls.

00:05:33.040 And the people who were sitting in the pews, what few of them there were, they looked to

00:05:39.000 be on average about 87 years old.

00:05:41.000 And this was clearly everything I was witnessing from the pop culture references, the sermon,

00:05:48.520 the casual dress, the music, okay.

00:05:51.280 All of the, the irreverence, okay.

00:05:53.680 All of this was designed clearly to appeal to young people.

00:05:57.500 But I looked around and it was, it, it, it looked like a nursing home.

00:06:02.220 I didn't, I was, I was probably the youngest person there by about 50 years.

00:06:06.080 I'll tell you another quick story, a different church, this one closer to me before, beforehand

00:06:13.480 they, they, they, they, a giant projector screen dropped from the ceiling and they played

00:06:21.640 a rap video, okay.

00:06:23.960 A Christian rap video that had, had been, I guess, produced by the church youth group.

00:06:31.260 And it was painful, painful.

00:06:36.880 But I looked around and all the old folks in the church, and it was mostly old folks, 1.00

00:06:41.660 they were all smiling.

00:06:43.920 They thought it was really cute.

00:06:45.420 You could tell they were really cute.

00:06:46.640 They could see their grandchildren and they thought it was the cutest thing.

00:06:49.960 As for the younger people, we were all cringing so hard that our faces hurt.

00:06:55.020 You could tell we were all worried that our face would get stuck like this because that's

00:06:58.020 how hard we were cringing.

00:06:59.280 It's one of those cringe moments where you can't even look up.

00:07:02.260 You're just, you just want to shrink into a, you're, you're experiencing secondhand embarrassment

00:07:08.460 to a degree that is just, it's, it's causing physical anxiety in you.

00:07:13.320 One more story.

00:07:14.600 This one, not for me.

00:07:15.920 Someone wrote to me a few weeks ago to tell me about the local non-denominational church

00:07:21.660 that they just left because the pastor had embarked on this mission to win back young

00:07:27.260 people.

00:07:28.400 And this mission apparently involved introducing an electric guitar because, you know, those

00:07:34.800 young people and those electric guitars encouraging people to dress more casually at church and

00:07:40.980 giving sermons on tolerance and racism and injecting, again, pop culture references into

00:07:47.300 them as much as possible.

00:07:49.680 You get the point.

00:07:51.280 The point is that Christian leaders in America, church leaders, have set out to win back young

00:07:56.440 people, to win back the young generation.

00:07:59.580 And they certainly need to do that because the young generation is less religious, more 0.99

00:08:04.860 atheistic, more secular than any generation before in American history.

00:08:09.120 But in many cases, in most cases, probably they've set out to win back these lost sheep

00:08:15.580 by trying to be cool and relevant and irreverent.

00:08:20.620 But all this ever succeeds in doing is impressing the aging people in the pews who ruined everything 1.00

00:08:27.860 by injecting this garbage into the church in the first place. 0.90

00:08:31.520 They're the ones who first decided that the experience at church should resemble your experience 0.99

00:08:36.420 at a coffee shop or at a really bad rock concert, okay?

00:08:41.020 This is like my parents' generation. 1.00

00:08:44.520 They're the ones who came up with all this.

00:08:47.600 And so even now to this day, they're the only ones impressed by it.

00:08:53.000 The young people are not. 1.00

00:08:55.160 They love it.

00:08:56.680 Their kids do not love it.

00:08:58.900 As is clearly evident by the fact that their kids are not going to church.

00:09:03.100 And most of them have left the faith completely.

00:09:07.940 Now, you can kind of understand, right?

00:09:11.180 Because think of what a secular young person, imagine what he would think if he was looking 0.77

00:09:19.180 to give Christianity a try and the first service he ever attended was of the type I just described.

00:09:28.240 Now, when he leaves, what would he be thinking?

00:09:31.780 Now, yeah, he won't be offended, so great.

00:09:34.700 You didn't offend him.

00:09:35.500 You didn't scare him.

00:09:36.640 Good for you.

00:09:37.720 But you also didn't impact him.

00:09:40.460 You didn't move him.

00:09:42.760 You didn't energize him.

00:09:45.140 You didn't give him any kind of deeper understanding of the faith at all.

00:09:50.240 Now, he went into church preparing to encounter something deep, holy, challenging, but he probably

00:10:00.000 walked out thinking like, well, what's all the fuss about?

00:10:03.060 What's all the fuss about this Jesus stuff?

00:10:05.200 That was just like, that just looked like something I could find anywhere in the culture.

00:10:09.140 What was the point of that?

00:10:10.760 And this is the problem with Christianity in this country, not just in our church buildings, 1.00

00:10:15.500 but everywhere.

00:10:18.060 It has no edge.

00:10:19.860 It has no depth.

00:10:21.480 It has no sense of its own ancient and epic history.

00:10:25.960 There's no sacredness to it.

00:10:27.400 There's no beauty.

00:10:29.660 There's no reverence.

00:10:30.660 There's no pain.

00:10:31.760 There's no sacrifice.

00:10:33.220 All of these things that are in Christianity are not being brought out.

00:10:38.100 And this is what people go to Christianity for. 0.90

00:10:41.760 This is what they're expecting.

00:10:43.920 This is what they want when somebody walks, especially a young person who's never been 1.00

00:10:48.160 to church, and they walk into a church building.

00:10:50.500 They don't want to see a coffee shop.

00:10:52.300 They've seen a million coffee shops.

00:10:53.760 They want something totally different, but they don't find it.

00:10:58.580 The light of faith grows dimmer in this culture because Christianity has made, because 1.00

00:11:03.280 I should say, because the church, the American church, has turned Christianity into something 0.99

00:11:09.920 lame and boring. 0.92

00:11:12.800 And that is a heck of an accomplishment, really, when you think about it. 0.98

00:11:16.840 I mean, to make Christianity into something lame and boring, it's the least lame, the least 0.96

00:11:22.560 boring thing in the universe. 0.97

00:11:24.560 Yet we have managed to turn it into that.

00:11:27.440 Every branch of the faith has become infected by this.

00:11:30.220 And if we want to understand why Christianity is not winning souls, and especially not winning 0.96

00:11:39.180 the younger generation, then we just got to look here.

00:11:42.540 The strategy has been, well, if we want to win back the sheep, if we want to win back the 0.75

00:11:47.120 millennial sheep especially, then we have to make Christianity as unchristian as possible. 0.98

00:11:52.200 It has to be stripped of its truth, of its sacredness, of its sacrifice, of its morality,

00:11:57.980 of its tradition, of its history, of its hardships, of its joy, of its beauty, of everything.

00:12:05.840 And whatever's left, I mean, it's not going to engage or excite anyone, but at least it

00:12:10.600 won't scare them away.

00:12:11.600 That's the idea.

00:12:14.080 There's even, you know, you find in some cases you have these very old churches, these

00:12:21.280 very old, beautiful churches, which do exist in America.

00:12:26.920 Now, we don't have churches as old or as beautiful as what they have in Europe, but we still have

00:12:32.440 very old, very beautiful churches.

00:12:34.720 And sometimes what you'll find even is that, you know, the church will go through and they'll

00:12:42.560 take away all the beautiful—they'll make an effort.

00:12:45.680 They'll take the effort to make the church less beautiful.

00:12:50.460 They'll take down the art.

00:12:51.900 They'll take everything away, and they'll try to make it less beautiful.

00:12:55.600 They say to themselves, let's make church less beautiful.

00:12:58.160 That's—yeah, because you know what?

00:12:59.160 That's what's scaring people away is the beauty.

00:13:02.060 I mean, this goes in everything.

00:13:04.120 This is—even the way that the new churches are constructed, even the architecture, where they're

00:13:08.640 made to look bland, like office buildings or just like nondescript auditoriums, or from

00:13:14.720 the outside, it looks almost like a DMV office or something like that.

00:13:17.460 I mean, this—even the architecture of churches has changed because they want—it's almost like

00:13:22.620 they want to just blend in with the landscape.

00:13:25.640 They want to blend in with the culture as much as possible.

00:13:28.060 They don't want anyone to know that this is actually a church and that there's something

00:13:32.020 different going on here.

00:13:33.620 The problem is that the church is trying to appeal to the wrong aspect of youth.

00:13:45.640 You know, they see that young people can tend to be irreverent and frivolous and easily 0.96

00:13:51.060 distracted and in need of constant stimulation.

00:13:54.100 And so they put forward a Christianity tailored to those qualities.

00:14:01.600 But that's not the aspect of youth that the church should be trying to reach out to, okay?

00:14:10.640 Because young people are also by nature radical, idealistic, hungry for change, hungry for a

00:14:20.040 challenge, revolutionary.

00:14:23.160 Most of the great revolutionaries throughout history have been young people.

00:14:26.600 That's no coincidence.

00:14:28.120 Revolutions are led by the young in every case.

00:14:32.700 You know, revolutions are never led by 50-year-olds.

00:14:35.600 It's always by the young. 0.99

00:14:37.500 So it should be no trouble at all to get young people excited about Christianity.

00:14:43.740 They want something radical.

00:14:45.420 They want something revolutionary.

00:14:46.540 Well, Christianity is exactly that. 0.97

00:14:49.740 They want change.

00:14:51.580 Christianity can give them exactly that.

00:14:54.140 They want higher ideals to aspire to.

00:14:56.960 Christianity has exactly that. 0.88

00:14:59.440 They want excitement.

00:15:00.680 Christianity is the most exciting thing in the universe.

00:15:03.800 I mean, think about it.

00:15:04.460 As Christians, we are fighting a war against the devil himself.

00:15:09.560 We are advancing against the darkest forces of the universe.

00:15:13.380 And we're marching with God on our side.

00:15:16.680 And all the while, all around us, on a dimension that's invisible to our mortal eyes, there are

00:15:21.880 angels and demons and supernatural forces, both good and evil.

00:15:25.540 And they're fighting and they're working to defend and destroy us.

00:15:28.540 And this is all happening all around us.

00:15:30.060 The stakes are infinite.

00:15:31.580 Our souls hang in the balance.

00:15:33.120 We're standing on a battlefield right now as we speak.

00:15:35.860 We are soldiers.

00:15:39.220 The Psalms say, praise be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war.

00:15:44.240 That's what it says in Scripture.

00:15:46.680 Trains my hands for war.

00:15:49.380 This is the feeling and the attitude that our leaders and our churches should be stirring in us.

00:15:53.900 This is the truth of this life and of the faith.

00:15:59.320 It's a ferocious, formidable, terrifying, joyful, beautiful, fantastic, amazing, wonderful truth.

00:16:09.040 It's the truth that the Scripture spends over a thousand pages trying to explain.

00:16:13.340 And it's the truth that should be shouted from the rooftops of every single church in America.

00:16:17.320 That's how you stop the decline of Christianity in America.

00:16:20.080 That's how you attract young people, by just simply telling them the truth.

00:16:26.000 That's all.

00:16:27.520 Move them.

00:16:28.880 Make them feel something.

00:16:30.500 Make them feel anger and fear and longing and sadness and happiness and hope and determination.

00:16:36.320 All of these things.

00:16:37.460 Give them something to aspire to.

00:16:39.480 They want to change.

00:16:41.140 So give them a reason to change.

00:16:43.220 Give them a way to change.

00:16:46.040 That's how you attract the young people.

00:16:47.760 So this should be, you know, the conversation that we should be having in America is, you know,

00:16:56.560 how do we keep the older people still invested in Christianity?

00:17:00.580 How do we keep them?

00:17:02.220 It should be no problem to get the young people on board.

00:17:05.020 This Christianity is something that naturally appeals to them 0.98

00:17:08.240 because of its militant, warring, radical nature.

00:17:15.200 And as I said last week, because in it, in the faith, and in Christ, you find identity.

00:17:26.000 And that is the thing, most of all, that young people are looking for.

00:17:31.080 Identity, purpose, challenge, sacrifice.

00:17:34.140 We've got this idea that sacrifice is a dirty word.

00:17:38.440 Nobody wants to do it.

00:17:39.920 No, that's not exactly right.

00:17:41.860 People are looking for a reason to sacrifice.

00:17:45.540 Now, it's not an easy thing to do, but that's the kind of message they want.

00:17:50.060 And when a young person, a secular young person, goes to a church, that's what they're looking to hear.

00:17:55.620 They're looking to hear a challenging message of sacrifice and battle, and that's what they want.

00:18:04.700 It doesn't mean they're going to immediately, you know, convert, but that's what they're interested in hearing.

00:18:11.660 That's the aspect of youth.

00:18:14.900 That is the thing in youthful nature that we should be reaching out to and appealing to.

00:18:23.200 And it should be pretty easy to do.

00:18:26.600 That's how you win back the young people, with the truth. 0.91

00:18:30.420 And it is an incredible truth, isn't it?

00:18:33.480 All right.

00:18:34.080 Thanks for listening, everybody.

00:18:35.560 Godspeed.

00:18:35.960 Godspeed.

The Matt Walsh Show - May 15, 2018

Ep. 30 - How The Church Can Win Back Young People

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