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Confessions of a Gen-X Evangelical

‘Confessions of a Gen-X Evangelical' - Rev. Peter Chapman
Keynote speaker ACC NSW AGM - Sutherland Uniting Church - 18/4/09
(A slightly edited version of the presentation)

Over the next 20 minutes or so, my aim is to give you a brief look into what it is to be a follower of Jesus from within that much-maligned group within society commonly known as Generation X. In particular I want to give you a brief insight into what has been like being a young evangelical growing up, going through the candidature process, and ministering in the Uniting Church. I want to point out a few areas where you might not have previously been aware of the generation gap being a reality within the church, and
Finally, want to put in my two bobs worth in highlighting the challenges and opportunities we in the UCA will face as we try to raise up a new generation of orthodox believer.
ABOUT ME...
I am 35 years old (making me a late Gen Xer). I grew up in the Hills District of Sydney & attended Galston Uniting Church throughout my formative years in the 80‟s & 90‟s.
It was at Galston Uniting that I met Carlie, my wife, and we were married 11 years ago tomorrow. Since getting married, we have lived out at Wellington near Dubbo, I worked in the bank and Carlie taught at the local Christian school out there, we lived in London for a year & did the whole UK working holiday thing that is a rite of passage for young Australians these days, before returning home & doing responsible things like getting a mortgage, having kids, and candidating for the ministry.
We have four kids: Bethany 6, Sebastian 5, Elijah 2 & Ethan 4 months.
I candidated in 2001-2, was at UTC from 03-05 and from 2006 until now I have been in congregational ministry at Gerringong.
And I am a self-confessed, card carrying evangelical member of the Uniting Church.
It is always good to be able to laugh at yourself, so before we get started with critiquing others, I thought I'd share this list with you that I found online which might help you to discern if you too are an evangelical...
a. If someone tells you that you are "on fire," and your first thought is not to stop, drop, and roll...you might be an evangelical.
b. If you've ever used the phrase, "I don't think God is leading me in that direction," to get out of something you didn't want to do...you might be an evangelical.
c. If your personal library contains the Left Behind series, the Prayer of Jabez, the Purpose-Driven Life and Your Best Life Now....you might be an evangelical.
d. If someone says "guitar," and you automatically think "worship"... you might be an evangelical.

e. If you say the word "just" more frequently than the word "Jesus" when you pray...you might be an evangelical.
f. If you think drinking alcohol is a sin, but you have no problem helping yourself to seconds of everything at the church potluck dinner...you might be an evangelical.
g. If you think the song "Lean on Me" is worldly when played on secular radio, but worship when played on a Christian station....you might be an evangelical.
h. If your mental picture of Jesus and the 12 disciples is based on flannel board cutouts...you might be an evangelical.
i. If you have considered adding puppeteering, pantomiming, balloon-animal-making, and approaching random strangers as skill sets for your resume...you might be an evangelical.
j. If you've ever considered changing churches based on the potential of finding better-looking members of the opposite sex ... you might be a single evangelical.
k. If your annual New Year's Eve resolution to read through the Bible in a year fails around February when you get to Leviticus....you might be an evangelical.
l. If you've lost sleep worrying about whether you have the gift of singleness...you might be an evangelical.

WE ARE COMFORTABLY COUNTER-CULTURAL...
The first thing I want to emphasise as we explore the faith journey of younger generations, is that if we have grown-up in the church, we (unlike in previous generations) have been being very much in the minority in the wider community.
I have always been one of only a few church-going Christians among my peers.
We are used to being a bit strange, a bit odd, a bit of a novelty because we went to church.
We have always been counter-cultural.
Right from the earliest days at high school, we have been used to defending our faith against everything from a bemused ignorance through to outright hostility.
We have known what it means to be strangers in a strange land.
We know what it is to be sheep among wolves as we live out our faith in Jesus.
So right from the word go, we have known we are missionaries to our own nation - it's not a new concept for us.
OUR PEERS ARE OVERWHELMINGLY UNCHURCHED...
Sometimes I think we who have been in the church for a number of years (of whatever age) allow ourselves to get a little naïve about just how irrelevant the church is to broader Australian society.
We tend to think we're more important/relevant/significant in the community than we really are.
We need to be real about the fact that among people my age and younger, the church is a quaint irrelevancy.
Unless they went to a private school and were forced to endure chapel each week (and that is how it is described among my mates - something to be endured), most people my age are ignorant of even the most basic tenets of the Christian faith.
Here's an example. Recently at Gerringong we started a small group for some young mums who were new to the faith. The leaders started talking about the significance of grace - only to met with a room full of blank looks - they realised then that they had go right back to square one because even the fundamental truths of Christianity are a mystery to my generation.
Another example from Gerringong is the Palm Sunday march the churches used to get together for every Palm Sunday march down the main street with a bloke on a donkey and the whole works to show church solidarity etc to the town. When I floated the idea that we might get it going again with my Anglican counterpart, he pointed out that the feedback he had got form many people was that when they saw it they had no idea what was about. They had no idea what was being re-enacted.
Many people my age and younger do not have the first clue about matters of faith.
And that's if we're lucky!
Once you get to uni you are singled out for outright hostility from both students and faculty alike.
I went to UTS in the mid 90s and the Student Association at every opportunity harassed the Christian groups there.
In the name of tolerance and diversity, we were threatened for even daring to raise the issue of homosexuality and question it as a valid lifestyle.
It is funny how intolerant you can be in the name of tolerance though - have you noticed that?
Whilst the student union were fanatic about tolerance, they took great joy in pillaring the Christian faith - in one edition of the student newspaper, Vertigo, inside the front cover was a picture of Jesus surrounded by children with a caption stating "Have you seen this man?" with the obvious insinuation being that Jesus was a paedophile.
WE HAVE OUR OWN SUB-CULTURE...
Now, I have observed that this sort of marginalisation has had an interesting affect.
What this marginalisation does is create a Christian sub-culture within the youth of today.
We all know there are numerous sub-cultures out there within in the overall Australian culture.
And there is a Christian sub-culture out there with its own music, its own events, its own wristbands, its own clothing, even its own celebrities.
This is particularly the case with the rise of the mega-church where the pastors wouldn't personally know their flock from a bar of soap. I remember waiting in line to see a movie at Castle Towers in my teenage years and some of the big names from what was then „Hills CLC‟ turned up - it was like Elvis had entered the building or something.
And the more marginalised Christianity becomes, the stronger the identity of the Christian sub-culture has become.
Now, the challenge for those of us immersed in this sub-culture is to stay focussed on Christ rather than on Christianity.
The challenge is to see through all the jargon and merchandising and make sure you are committed to following Jesus rather than simply going through the motions by following the trends of a sub-culture like evangelicalism or any other „ism‟.
WE ARE RECKLESSLY POST-DENOMINATIONAL...
The next thing I want to really affirm about young adults today is something which I think we all know in our head, but something that many of us have not fully grasped the extent to which it impacts on God's church.
That is, that my generation (and the one now following mine into adulthood - Gen Y) are overwhelmingly post-denominational.
We have never known Methodism or Congregationalism - we have grown up in the Uniting Church.
In general terms, we don't know or particularly care for the particular traditions of one denomination verses another.
And if you're like me (which most of us are) and grew up in primarily a contemporary worship format, you don't know the hymns. The CD player in the car is our hymnal.
We don't use words like 'Maundy Thursday' or 'lectionary'.
I remember innocently dropping the word 'lectionary' into a conversation with the Baptist minister in town who was my age and who responded: "What's a lectionary?"
When it comes time to choose hymns for our 9am traditional service at Gerringong I look up what others have suggested on the web, and ring my organist to confirm if they're well known or not. It is like learning another language.
I sometimes tell people that ministering to both a traditional service and a contemporary one is like ministering to two different churches. It is another world.
There is a feeling of having to straddle a great divide when it comes to knowing both the traditions of the church and being able to move within the contemporary forms of church.
When push comes to shove, most of us really don't care about the logo on the front door.
It's just a brand name, a label, disposable packaging. And it is irrelevant.
We just call ourselves „Christian‟, pure and simple.
Although, even that word has lots of unhelpful baggage these days, and I therefore avoid it when I am describing my faith to someone.
I tend to simply say I am a follower of Jesus.
The reason for this is that Jesus himself still has street-cred, but the church has all sorts of negative connotations for people.
So my advice is to stick to naming Jesus as your God/guru/teacher/healer/guide/light and steer clear of church labels until you have a chance to explain further.
But getting back to the post-denominational nature of my generation, we have to realise it's a church supermarket out there - and there are hundreds of brands to choose from.
And there's not a huge amount of brand loyalty - if you move to another suburb or town and you find a home at the same flavour church as before, well that's well and good, but rarely will young people let it be a deal-breaker if the community of faith they find they're at home at does not have the same badge on the front as their last church.
And in some ways I think that's just as well for the Uniting Church that denominationalism is all but dead among the youth of today - if they were concerned about it they wouldn't often darken our doors.
Sometimes I think it is people's willingness to overlook the denominational stuff that's keeping us in the game, because if they did care, they certainly wouldn't darken the doors of the much-maligned Uniting Church (but more about that later).
WE ARE SHAMEFULLY CONSUMERIST IN OUR APPROACH TO CHURCH...
But I think that this random post-denominationalism approach to church has fed one of the greatest challenges that we face in reaching young adults today. I believe that among young adults today there is a tendency to reduce church to the same level as our mobile phone contract or our internet contract.
I have observed that, even among committed evangelical Christians, church is often seen as just another service provider that offers a product to be consumed at the discretion of the consumer. Churches are having to compete not only amongst themselves for precious market share, but with other organisations offering other services that people might want to consume to make them feel whole/well/happy/content.
Church is there to meet my needs, on my terms, when and how I want it.
"I'll have a helping of that, plenty of that, I'll come to that every once in a while to that, but don't want any of that, and if you come suggesting I upsize my church commitment to include that, I will take my business elsewhere."
We have sadly imported the consumer mindset to church. Church is all about me. Getting what I want out of it. Sadly, there is a lack of commitment to come to church with a mindset of what can I give, rather than what can I get.
Another important consequence of Generation-X's post-denominational nature is that because we don't particularly care for denominations, we are not going to spend our precious time and energy in propping them up.
We are not going to prop-up dying institutions.
We don't go in for committee meetings.
We don't care for quorums or constitutions.
This of course isn't just an issue for the church, but for any membership based organisation - they are all struggling - just ask the scouts, the unions, the clubs etc.
Any membership-based institution struggles to appeal to my generation - we don't join groups or clubs like previous generations did.
Getting young adults or young mum & dads even to take out formal membership is a challenge, let alone getting them to serve on church council.
And I can't imagine even my most committed young mums & dads going to presbytery or Synod - it is completely beyond the scope of most people my age in church.
(And to be honest with you, I'm not going to ask them to - if I twisted their arm they would probably go just as a favour to me - but they would be totally demoralised by our church meetings - in some respects, I see it as my job to protect my young families from the inefficient, irrelevant, dysfunctional, labyrinthine Uniting Church structures. I'm not going to burn up my young adults‟ time and energy by press-ganging them into roles within the Uniting Church machinery).
This is part, I believe, of the increasing Pentecostal influence on the church - people don't expect and don't particularly want to have a say in running the church - that's what the pastor does, and we come along if we like it - if not, sadly they'll just go elsewhere.
I'm at a point now where I see the way for we evangelicals to reform our church is to let the structures of our church fall in a heap (as they are currently in the process of doing) and rebuilding afresh from the ruins.
WE ARE OVERWHELMINGLY EVANGELICAL...
Now, if all this is leaving you feeling a little pessimistic about the future, I've got some good news for you.
My generation of believer - if they're still in the church - if, despite the culture around them they are still a committed follower of Christ, than chances are they will be evangelical.
Those of us, who no longer submit to the pattern of this world and have been transformed by the renewing of the mind, are overwhelmingly evangelical in our theology.
In fact I would be so bold as to suggest that evangelicalism is so dominant within the church among Christians my age that many are not even aware of an alternative.
I dropped the word „evangelical‟ into a sentence when I was talking with my Christian brother-in-law. He said: "What does that mean?" He's a committed Christian, grown up in a Uniting Church, been a Salvo for few years & currently attends a Baptist church, he's been overseas on mission, but has never really come into contact with the liberalism that is eating away at our church like a cancer.
They know that out there somewhere in other churches there are people who have watered down the gospel or deviated off the narrow path, but I'm pleased to say that orthodox evangelicalism is still so dominant that many of them have never really had to confront anything else.
Liberal, pluralist, humanist spirituality is everywhere - so if you're a young-adult Christian, you have made a decision to reject that ethos and to embrace Jesus as the way the truth and the life. If you want self-affirming liberalism, you can get it anywhere today. Why would we want it in our church? If you are chasing a vague spiritualism you don't go church to get it. The church is on a hiding to nothing by trying to present itself as a place where people can pursue this sort of spirituality.
Appealing to the liberal, humanist spirituality market might attract some curious interest in the short term, but it won't stick - it won't change lives like the saving grace that Jesus alone offers. The reality is that church is the last place people will want to go for liberal, airy-fairy spirituality.
If the church wants to connect with young adults in the 21st century, it needs to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ, pure and simple. The reality at universities is that any liberal presence is dwarfed by the evangelical student unions.
What will appeal to my generation in the long run, what will stand the test of time, is to present this timeless truth.
The Pentecostals know it, the Sydney Anglicans know it, the Baptists know it, and look at them go.
They know what they believe and they offer certainty & hope & life in Jesus' name.
...and their seminaries are packed to the rafters.
Which brings me to my next point...
WE ARE SHUNNING THE UNITING CHURCH...
Unfortunately, although my generation of disciples are overwhelmingly evangelical, they are not sticking around in the Uniting Church.
Two of my mates who I grew up with at Galston graduated from Moore last year and are now in ministry in the Anglican Church.
They made a conscious decision several years ago that they could not remain in the Uniting Church given how far it has become adrift from its theological moorings.
Others of my peers from Galston are in lay leadership roles in Baptist and Pentecostal churches.
My generation, via either a conscious decision to leave or simply via finding a faith home elsewhere are shunning the Uniting Church.
With each Assembly a fresh haemorrhaging of our people occurs.
And it's the young families that seem to have let their feet do the talking.
Why, they ask, should we put up with this rubbish when there are other Biblically-based, Christ-centred, Spirit-filled churches down the road?
When I was discerning my call and sharing it with friends and family, one of them came right out and told me straight up: "Whatever you do, don't stay with the Uniting Church." The problem we face is that the Uniting Church's reputation as a ‘liberal' church, (though we know it's not really the case among most members of our church), it does tend to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
We are attracting like moths to a flame every disenchanted Anglican and Pentecostal with an axe to grind.
UTC bears witness to this.
In defence of UTC, I must say that I am thankful for my time there in that it helped me to know what I believed and why, and that all the staff there (despite an undoubted liberal bias) are well meaning and hard working.
But when you hear candidates saying thing like "Hillsong has a conference???", you start to worry.
When the culture of your theological college leans so heavily towards a theological, social and political liberalism, it will undoubtedly deter the younger generation of leader (who as we have heard is fairly evangelical). It will have an impact on who chooses to attend and consequently who is in leadership in the church.
Luckily there is a whole world of conservative thought that can be drawn on via the internet. (Series of satirical and thought-provoking posters shown from http://www.spurgeon.org/~phil/posters.htm

WHERE TO FROM HERE...
So, where to from here for my generation of believer?
Well perhaps, just perhaps, the wheel has started to turn full circle?
Has the church bottomed out in terms of its presence in society and maybe starting to gain ground once again?
For my children's sake I hope so.
I see glimpses of it every now and again in popular culture.
A couple of good examples come from the positive impact our Polynesian brothers and sisters are having on Australian society.
There are some high profile believers, for example, on the rugby league field these days and in popular culture like Australian Idol who are very positive role models for the youth of today.
And what about the ACC - what can we do to help our church reach my generation?
Well, I think the first thing is to note is that we are not going to go looking for the ACC or any other body that represents denominationalism and attend meetings like this.
I think the best thing we could do is visit churches individually.
One of the hallmarks of our post-modern age is an emphasis on the local and a distrust of hierarchy. We need to go to them rather than expecting them to come to us.
If we can say to a congregation: "Can we come and visit you to let you know who we are and what we're passionate about?" then I think we'll have a much better chance of recruiting the young believers (as well as the older ones) to our cause as we seek to reform our church.