Ecosystems are webs of interdependent life. No great sequoia can exist apart from its forest, and no forest can exist apart from its wider habitat. When the delicate balance is upset, the whole ecosystem is affected.
The church is not simply an institution with a systematic theology, but an organism with a form of life. In front of a computer, I’m in charge of what I want to learn and become — or at least I think I am. However, in the visible church I am not in front of anything. Rather, I’m in the middle of the action. I have some intimations, but I really don’t know what I will become after the church is through with me. By being assimilated to its faith and practice, I do not lose my identity. On the contrary, I find it “in Christ,” together with his body. The church is not just where disciples go; it’s the place where disciples are made.
The Kingdom Is Like a Garden
Although it is a bit of a caricature, I think that there is some truth in the generalizations I’m about to make. The tendency in Roman Catholic theology is to view the kingdom of Christ as a cosmic ladder or tower, leading from the lowest strata to the hierarchy led by the pope. Anabaptists have tended to see the kingdom more as a monastery, a community of true saints called out of the world and a worldly church. Lutheran and Reformed churches tend sometimes to see the kingdom as a school, while evangelicals (at least in the United States) lean more toward seeing it as a market.
But God sees his kingdom as a garden. The dominance of organic metaphors for God’s kingdom in Scripture is striking. Psalm 1:3 – 4 compares the heir of the covenant to “a tree planted by streams of water, that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither.” In contrast, “the wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away.” In the end, the ungodly will not stand in God’s forest (1:5 – 6).
Israel is the vine of the Lord. Prophesying the exile, Isaiah sings a lament for the vineyard. The beloved planted it, tended it, and cared for it as his own. He kept looking for its success, “but it yielded wild grapes.” Yahweh says, “And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem and men of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard. What more was there to do for my vineyard, that I have not done?” So he will break down the hedge, wall, and watchtower. “I will make it a waste . . . I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it” (Isa 5:2 – 6).
“I planted you a choice vine, wholly of pure seed,” the Lord indicts through Jeremiah. “How then have you turned degenerate and become a wild vine?” (Jer 2:21).
Instead of being an oasis of life, the church had become assimilated to the surrounding desert of idolatry. With explicit echoes of Eden after the fall, the image we meet repeatedly in the prophets is of the gardener withdrawing, turning the oasis back to a barren land of thorns and tumbleweeds. It is not an invading army of pagans that has done this. “Many shepherds have destroyed my vineyard; they have trampled down my portion; they have made my pleasant portion a desolate wilderness” (Jer 12:10).
Yet the day is coming when the owner of the vineyard will send a faithful shepherd-gardener:
I will heal their apostasy;
I will love them freely,
for my anger has turned from them.
I will be like the dew to Israel;
he shall blossom like the lily;
he shall take root like the trees of Lebanon;
his beauty shall be like the olive,
and his fragrance like Lebanon.
They shall return and dwell beneath my shadow;
they shall flourish like the grain;
they shall blossom like the vine;
their fame shall be like the wine of Lebanon.
O Ephraim, what have I to do with idols?
It is I who answer and look after you.
I am like an evergreen cypress;
from me comes your fruit. (Hos 14:4 – 8)
It is with these passages in mind, no doubt, that Jesus proclaims the Father as the gardener and himself as the vine. Already, John the Baptist announced, “Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire” (Matt 3:10).
The kingdom is like a sower who scattered seeds that fell in different soils. Some fell along the road and were eaten by birds. Others, lacking any root, “withered away” in the scorching sun. Some fell among thorns and were choked. “Other seeds fell on good soil and produced grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty” (Matt 13:1 – 9). The kingdom is like a garden where an enemy sows weeds among the wheat. You can’t tell the two apart until the harvest, so Jesus warns the disciples not to try to weed his garden until he returns (13:24 – 30).
He put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.” (13:31 – 32)
Sometimes I hear pastors shrug off their responsibility by saying that there are different kinds of churches for different kinds of people. But our Lord has not allowed us this luxury. Some rest on the laurels of their orthodoxy. “Other churches evangelize people; we teach them.” That’s like saying that others will scatter the seed, but our niche is the deep soil. Others rebuff criticisms of shallowness with D. L. Moody’s famous quip: “I like my way of doing it better than your way of not doing it.” But it is not enough to scatter the seed far and wide if it doesn’t have fertile soil in which to grow.
Luke records the parable of the barren fig tree, planted in a vineyard. When the time came, he was surprised that it had no fruit, even after three years of tending it. (Jesus is referring to his own ministry). “Cut it down,” the owner says to the vinedresser. “Why should it use up the ground?” The vinedresser answered, “Sir, let it alone this year also, until I dig around it and put on manure. Then if it should bear fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down” (Luke 13:6 – 9). Jesus is giving Israel one last chance to repent, but then comes the judgment.
The theme runs throughout the parables. “For the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard,” Jesus says (Matt 20:1). In another parable, Jesus says that the master sent his two sons to work in the vineyard. One said he wouldn’t go, but then he did; the other said he would go, but then he didn’t. “Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes go into the kingdom of God before you.” The religious leaders rejected John the Baptist’s call to repentance, while the moral outcasts embraced his message (Matt 21:28 – 32).
The next parable speaks of a master “who planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a winepress in it and built a tower” — the echoes of Isaiah 5:1 are evident. Leasing it to tenants, he traveled out of the country. Near harvest time, the tenants beat and killed the master’s servants he sent, one after another. Finally, the master sent his own son, but the tenants were even more eager to kill him so that they could have the vineyard to themselves. “Therefore, I tell you,” Jesus says, “the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing its fruits” (Matt 21:33 – 43). Getting the point, the religious leaders wanted to arrest Jesus but feared what the crowds would do (21:45 – 46).
And then, on the Temple Mount that last week, Jesus lamented over Jerusalem like Jeremiah. He cursed the fig tree: “ ‘May no fruit ever come from you again!’ And the fig tree withered at once” (Matt 21:18 – 19). It is not surprising that these parables are placed in the last week, on the Temple Mount, amid straightforward prophecies announcing the destruction of the temple and the end of the old covenant era.
Now Jesus is the temple and he is the vine.
I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in me that does not bear fruit he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. Already you are clean because of the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. (John 15:1 – 5)
United to Christ through faith, we are simultaneously united to our fellow branches. We are not the vine, but a branch inextricably connected to the tree of life.
What are some of the common threads we can draw together from Jesus’ organic analogy of his kingdom? First, it is his kingdom. Second, there is no personal relationship with Christ, the Vine, apart from his church, the branches. Third, the growth of this kingdom (and each member of it) is slow. Who would ever have imagined that a tiny mustard seed would become a massive tree with branches filling the earth? Yet it isn’t something you can measure day by day. Fourth, it takes a lot of work. The gardener is always doing something to tend the vine in view of his harvest.
How Does God’s Garden Grow?
There are no shortcuts. All the Miracle Grow in the world cannot compensate for honest toil. The soil has to be right: deep and rich enough to nourish the seed. Thornbushes have to be pulled out so that they do not choke the growing plant. One minute he is planting, the next he is watering, trimming, digging around the roots, and fertilizing. The wild environment is always trying to claim the vine.
Now imagine what would happen if the gardener, impatient with the slow progress, kept pulling up the plants, transplanting them somewhere else. Or spread the soil broadly to increase his acreage, but without sufficient depth? Or, distracted by immediate growth, ignored the pests that devour the leaves? Or, in his zeal for the vine’s purity, accidentally cut off living vines that he thought were dead? This in sharp contrast with the Master of the vineyard, who does not break off a bruised branch but nurses it back to full health (Isa 42:3 with Matt 12:20).
Alongside the organic analogy is the architectural one: the kingdom as a building. In fact, they are often combined in one mixed metaphor — and it works! The picture is a building that is alive and growing. Here’s how Paul describes it:
So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit. (Eph 2:19 – 22)
At his ascension, Christ began raining gifts down on his church and sent his Spirit to distribute them to all the saints. All share equally in the gift of Christ and his Spirit: “one Lord, one faith, one baptism,” he says. “But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift.” The gifts Paul singles out here for the purpose of his argument are prophets and apostles and now “the evangelists, the pastors and teachers,” who bring us all to maturity. Through their ministry they are “building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God . . . to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes” (Eph 4:4 – 14).
As they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day — and neither is the church or any local expression of it. Nor is a believer. Each of us is a living stone inserted to a living building with Christ as its cornerstone. Like a tree, the building is growing up and growing out. Like branches, stones are always being added. But it takes time. And most of the things that construction workers do on an average day may seem fairly humdrum: hammering, drilling, marking, cutting, and so forth. There is a lot in between the ceremonial turning of the first shovel of dirt and the cutting of the ribbon. Not until Christ returns will the church’s ribbon be cut, unveiling the everlasting sanctuary of God.
Isn’t it striking that the Lord selected agricultural analogies? The other big ones are pretty close to that root metaphor. The church is the pasture with Christ as the good Shepherd, who provides undershepherds to guide us in our pilgrimage. Just as the soil is important for his plants, as Jesus emphasized, so is the pasture for sheep. We not only feed on doctrine, as if we were only independent minds, but on nutrients that only a particular environment can produce.
Perhaps the most dominant analogy for evangelicals over many generations now is “fire.” There are “revival fires,” God is “blazing” and “consuming” and “burning throughout the world.” In Scripture, God is “a consuming fire,” but this is intended to be disconcerting (Heb 12:29). The good news is that we have not come to Mount Sinai, with blazing fire, but to Mount Zion, with a festival of heavenly hosts celebrating the saving work of Christ (12:12 – 24).
But what about Pentecost, with flames appearing above each person? In context, the flames represent witness to Christ, not the zeal of the witnesses. We hope that witness will be passionate, but that’s not the point. The more deeply rooted we are in the Word of God, the more our witness will be authentic and imbued with personal conviction. However, the power of God unto salvation is not our passion for God, but the passion he has exhibited toward us sinners by sending his own Son to redeem us.
None of these other metaphors has the deep and broad scriptural resonance that the organic analogy enjoys; our churches and families need desperately to recover that picture in actual practice.
The Sabbath as God’s Greenbelt
Imagine living in a village where everyone walked to the parish church, returned home to family discussions of the sermon, then rested, and returned to the evening service. In the afternoon there might be a visit to the local nursing home or orphanage for works of mercy.
Of course, the reality was never uniform. Besides hypocrites, there have always been legalists who turned the festival into a funeral. Christians have always struggled to keep the day focused on the age to come that is breaking into this present evil age. Nevertheless, the very fact that those who didn’t take it seriously had to pretend that they did (or at least not cause offenses in public) shows how local culture shapes us as individuals.
The practice of worshiping on the day Jesus rose from the dead — the first day of the week — goes back to the time of the apostles (Matt 28:1; Mark 16:2; Luke 24:1; John 20:1; Acts 20:7; 1 Cor 16:2; Rev 1:10). However, practicing the Lord’s Day is extremely difficult in our society today. Few neighbors treat it as a “greenbelt” in time. Many, including Christians, look bewildered when you decline an invitation to a soccer game during morning or evening worship. In fact, many church activities on Sunday have less to do with inculcating the faith than with providing “safe” things for kids to do.
Beyond this, a growing number of churches offer a menu of services on other days for convenience. In addition to a Saturday evening service, one may elect to participate in a small group with people in our stage of life or interests.
Setting aside the ordinary callings and pastimes of the week, our calling on the Lord’s Day is to share, together with our coheirs, in the powers of the age to come. It is not by simply emptying the day with a list of rules, but by filling it with treasure hunting, that the Christian Sabbath orients us, our families, and our fellow saints to our heavenly citizenship. However, everyone around you sees it as the ideal day for a trip to the mall, sports, and other entertainments. Whatever fills our Sundays fills our hearts throughout the week. The Lord’s Day is not a prison but a palace. It is a wonderful gift to turn off the devices that interrupt our daily schedules and to push our roots down into the fertile soil that produces trees in God’s garden. It is a delight to set aside our normal associations with friends and coworkers — even non-Christian family members — in order to commiserate with fellow heirs of the kingdom concerning the news we’ve heard about the age to come.
“Reduce, Reuse, Recycle”
This formula has become part of our psyche now. But there was a time when many of us considered it an onerous demand. Eventually, we changed some habits in the interest of long-term sustainability. It’s not a bad formula for God’s garden.
We need to reduce the distractions and voracious consumption. Many things that we do as “something more” aren’t bad in themselves. Yet collectively they contribute to a whirling buzz of confusion that keeps us from fixing our eyes on Christ and his kingdom and his ordinary means of grace. We never move on from the gospel to something else. J. I. Packer and Gary A. Parrett put it well: “We believe, rather, that it is imperative to think of moving on from the ‘milk’ of the Gospel to the ‘meat’ of the Gospel. For in fact the Gospel is more profound and multifaceted than our finite minds can ever grasp. We never move on from the Gospel; we move on in the Gospel.”88
We also need to reuse the resources that God has given us from the past. Forms that frame the public service — common prayer, praise, and confession — are ways of thoughtfully drawing on Scripture so that Christ’s word dwells in all of us richly. A trellis does not make a vine grow, but it does make it grow in the right direction. The Psalms train our hearts to pour out sorrowful laments as well as joyful praise, to recall God’s faithfulness in the past as well as to invoke his faithfulness for the future, to confess our sins and to profess our faith in the one who absolves us by his word of pardon. In Acts 2:42, we read that the early believers gathered not only for the apostles’ teaching, fellowship, and the breaking of the bread, but also for “the prayers.” Corporate prayers of confession, intercession, and praise would have been familiar to Jews raised in the synagogue.
We also need to recycle. This involves two moves: returning to the sources and adapting them to our time and place. Recycling should not be equivalent to simply repeating slogans and formulas. We need to exercise discernment as we evaluate older forms and practices, but we do not have to invent everything ourselves. Older forms, songs, and prayers are not better because they are old, but because they are family treasures in the attic. We need to ensure that our forms actually communicate with people in our time and place, but we do not have to change everything with each generation.
God even recycles ministers. They come and go, but the ministry is the gift that keeps on giving. Carl Trueman wisely reminds us:
The elite watchmaker Patek Philippe had a slogan at one time that was something like this: “You never really own a Patek Philippe; you merely look after it for the next generation.” Thus it is with churches, in terms of the vibrancy of their life and their orthodoxy. Those privileged enough to be involved in the appointment of their own successors, or those who can merely shape the nature of the session [local council of elders] which will oversee the search, need to make sure they make the right choices. They do not own the church; they are merely looking after her for the next generation.89
Recall my example above of a gardener who plants a tree and then in restless activity uproots and transplants it every few weeks. That tree will likely never bear fruit and will probably wither and die. Why then do we seem to think that churches need to imitate the perpetual innovation of Microsoft instead of the patient care of a good gardener?
Chasing the latest fad for spiritual growth, church growth, and cultural impact, we eventually forget both how to reach the lost and how to keep the reached. The ordinary means of grace become yesterday’s news. Like pay phones, so we are told by emergent entrepreneurs, ordinary churches may still be around here and there, but nobody uses them. In olden days believers may have gathered for “the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship . . . the breaking of the bread and the prayers,” but that was before iPads. In past generations, Christ’s fruit-bearing vines may have been tended with daily family disciplines of catechism, Bible reading, and prayer, but with my schedule? And to say that the apostolic method of church growth — in breadth as well as depth — is preaching, teaching, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and accountability to elders is likely to provoke the response: “Are you serious?”
Christ’s undershepherds and gardeners are burning out today at an alarming rate. Many of them identify unrealistic expectations as a key reason. A lot of them, no doubt, entered seminary because they wanted to serve alongside Christ in his vineyard. They wanted to scatter, water, and tend his vines. Yet even in seminary they may have encountered a bewildering array of options for niche ministries, while they had hoped to master Hebrew and Greek, church history, and various branches of biblical studies and theology. They wanted to be “a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth” (2 Tim 2:15). But they were being prepared for the many pressures they will encounter in the real churches of our day. Then they discover that this is in fact the case. They are expected to be CEO, therapist, entertainer, coach, and best friend.
In the face of these pressures, pastors and elders — as well as the rest of the congregation — need to get off the treadmill and ask what really matters. What is Christ’s commission for his ambassadors? What are the qualifications and job description of church officers that we find in the writings of the apostles? If we do not reduce, reuse, and recycle, returning first of all to our biblical sources, we will discover at some point, if we haven’t already, that the present state of ministry is unsustainable for pastors and those they serve.
Personal Disciplines
In its healthier eras, church disciplines were firmly in place. In spite of persecution and milder disincentives to conversion, the ancient church pursued a pretty rigorous program of teaching and evaluation that preceded baptism and membership of adult converts. After all, Gentiles at least came from paganism.
Perhaps we do not really think that Americans are pagans. That is our first mistake. In any case, the ancient church grew and thrived throughout the Roman Empire against all odds through careful, deliberate, and formal practices of catechesis. Catechesis is simply instruction, identified especially with a common form of sound words in question-and-answer format. New Christians and children learn these summaries of the faith as older saints continually deepen their understanding through these shared statements. We grow up together, being of the same mind and heart.
These practices fell away rather sharply with the annexation of Christ to the Roman Empire under Constantine. They became more difficult to sustain in the medieval church for a host of reasons. Eventually, the gospel was taken for granted. It was simply assumed that if you were a European with a heartbeat, you were a Christian.
The Reformation sought to recover these ancient practices, although the assumptions of “Christendom” persisted. Luther wrote his Small and Large Catechisms, while the Heidelberg Catechism and the Westminster Shorter and Larger Catechisms have shaped the common faith of generations of Reformed believers on every continent. Each person was called upon to trust in Christ, to learn the faith, and to profess it publicly in the congregation. Elders took responsibility to look after the flock, to visit their homes regularly, and to rebuke, correct, instruct, and encourage. Deacons looked after their temporal needs, so that nobody was without the necessities of life.
Needless to say, this church discipline has fallen on hard times in the land that Dietrich Bonhoeffer aptly described as “Protestantism without the Reformation.” In a land that increasingly defies any external authorities, personal faith and responsibility now mean that no human being — or even council of human beings — can interfere with the individual’s personal relationship with God. The United States is the first nation in history to make personal choice the heart of its creed. In this the churches are not only the influenced but also influencers, especially as the sovereign will of the individual overruns all levies that have been formed by both classical and biblical traditions.
Among the myriad programs, books, and sermons on discipleship and disciple-making, how many give priority to the church’s role and the importance of submission to the teaching and guidance of those whom Christ has placed over us?
Even the ordinary disciplines of family devotions seem to be vanishing. For centuries, believers were raised with prayer, singing, instruction, and Bible reading with the family each morning and evening. The Reformers and their spiritual heirs not only wrote catechisms for this purpose, but books with each day’s readings, prayers, and songs. They knew that, as central as it was, the public ministry was weekly, and it needed to be supplemented and supported by daily habits.
As church and family disciplines were subordinated to private disciplines, the burden of growing in the faith was placed almost exclusively on the individual. If do-it-yourself discipleship was the order of the day not that long ago, what is striking today is the extent to which even personal disciplines seem to be receding. It seems to me that there is increasingly less interest in personal prayer and meditation on God’s Word than in any time since the Middle Ages. It suggests that when public disciplines (especially the weekly service) lose their hold on us, family and private disciplines are sure to follow.
We need to rethink our priorities here, and recovering an appreciation for the ordinary is at least one step in that direction. We grow by ordinary, daily, habitual practices. The weekly service of the Word and sacrament, along with its public confession of sin and faith, the prayers, and praise, are the fountain that flows into our homes and private rooms throughout the week. It is all of these disciplines — public, family, and private — that we need to recover. They may seem ordinary. In fact, they are! But that is precisely how God’s garden grows each day.
When personal choice is the key concept, the status of your kids in the kingdom is not exactly clear. Sometimes there is even a fear of parents “interfering” with the child’s personal relationship with Jesus. Some of our more outspoken neighbors take it one step further, wondering whether we are abusing children by “indoctrinating” them before they can choose a religion (or no religion) for themselves.
The problem is that our children increasingly have not been given enough of the Christian faith even to apostatize from it properly. If you want to talk about brainwashing children, it is not churches that are the best examples. One marketing professor explains, “There are only two ways to increase customers. Either you switch them to your brand or you grow them from birth.” The president of a chain of children’s specialty stores says, “All of these people understand something that is very basic and logical, that if you own this child at an early age, you can own this child for years to come. Companies are saying, ‘Hey, I want to own the kid younger and younger and younger.’ ” A General Mills executive adds, “When it comes to targeting kid consumers, we at General Mills follow the Proctor & Gamble model of ‘cradle to grave.’ We believe in getting them early and having them for life.” Finally, the president of a leading ad agency declares, “Advertising at its best is making people feel that without their product, you’re a loser. Kids are very sensitive to that. . . . You open up emotional vulnerabilities, and it’s very easy to do with kids because they’re the most emotionally vulnerable.”90
We dare not imagine that our children are neutral choosers any more than we are. They are already being cultivated to take their place in the succession of contractual consumers. Are our churches and homes transplanting them to God’s garden? Are our vision statements and strategies modeled on the Great Commission, aiming at sustainable growth in both breadth and depth? Are we incorporating people into the covenant of grace, or marketing contracts for religious goods and services? It is not simply that we are selling something different from Proctor & Gamble, but that because it is the gospel from heaven, we are not selling anything at all. It is not the values of the company that should pervade our strategy sessions and fill our hearts with concern, but the eternal value of being in Christ, living in the Vine, adding branches through our witness, and growing in his garden until he returns for the harvest.
In an interesting article in The Atlantic, Larry Alex Taunton reflected on his survey of young atheists.91 He discerned a common thread in the testimonies. Many were raised in churches, most of them evangelical, but they were not really planted deeply in the faith.
One person, Phil, was just discovering things when his youth pastor was fired for not drawing in enough kids. It was all about “handholding and kumbaya,” said one “with a look of disgust.” He said, “I missed my old youth pastor. He actually knew the Bible.” These were not the acerbic faces of the New Atheism, like Richard Dawkins, but young people who seemed genuinely disappointed that they couldn’t find answers to their big questions.
A composite picture emerged. The young atheists interviewed had attended church, but said that “the mission and message of their churches were vague.” They “felt their churches offered superficial answers to life’s difficult questions.” “Serious-minded, they often concluded that church services were largely shallow, harmless, and ultimately irrelevant. As Ben, an engineering major at the University of Texas, so bluntly put it: ‘I really started to get bored with church.’ ” They also “expressed their respect for those ministers who took the Bible seriously,” who really were convinced of its truth even where it clashed with public opinion.
Giving our attention again to “best practices” in spiritual gardening, our homes and churches need to become more child-friendly without being child-centered. I share Ivy Beckwith’s concern that “by prohibiting children from the worship of their faith community we are, in effect, prohibiting them from an important piece of their spiritual development and denying them the opportunity to learn how to worship God in the tradition of their community.”92
Kenda Creasy Dean, a Methodist minister and Princeton Seminary professor of youth ministry and culture, was involved in the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR). A massive sociological project over three years (2003 – 2005), the NSYR’s conclusions were somewhat ominous. Exploring these conclusions, Dean’s Almost Christian begins, “Here is the gist of what you are about to read: American young people are fine, theoretically, with religious faith — but it does not concern them very much, and it is not durable enough to survive long after they graduate from high school. One more thing: we’re responsible.”93
Chiefly, she says, young people raised in the church often don’t feel connected to it. They do not feel connected on the theological level. In other words, they don’t know what they believe or why. They aren’t even sure what they doubt, and even if they are, they aren’t terribly convinced that the people they know could relieve those doubts. In any case, it just does not matter that much. They also do not feel connected at the social level.
Unintentionally, the net effect of youth ministry has been largely to alienate younger generations from the ordinary life and ministry of the church. Dean argues that in so radically shifting from traditional forms — such as including young people in the regular service, using a catechism to teach the basics, and reinforcing the faith at home — we have unwittingly undermined their faith.
Kate Murphy agrees. She tells the story of Jonathan. Sara, an elderly saint, had just died and Jonathan, a teenager, asked if he could take her place in the choir that Sunday. Not only did he feel connected to Sara; he felt connected to the church and shared its grief over this loss. That just doesn’t happen in youth-group ghettos. “I think I’ve done youth ministry with integrity,” Kate says. “But I may have been unintentionally disconnecting kids from the larger body of Christ. The young people at my current congregation — a church that many families would never join because ‘it doesn’t have anything for youth’ — are far more likely to remain connected to the faith and become active church members as adults, because that’s what they already are and always have been.”94 We need to rethink how we minister to our youth, how we connect them to the “cloud of witnesses.” At the curricular level, I suggest that we eschew “child-centered” educational methods in favor of “content-centered” instruction.
Having four of my own, I understand the difficulty of having children in church. Our church has a cry room, where parents can still participate in the service to some extent, but it is a chore. Yet isn’t it a chore of parenthood? Eventually the parents decide when they will move out of the cry room. It is remarkable how early children learn habits of sitting and listening. Even if they doodle and daydream for a couple of years, these habits of participation in the communion of saints are like a trellis. These habits do not guarantee that everyone will eventually respond in faith, but they do make for better hearing of that gospel through which faith takes root and grows in our hearts.
Besides the concern for parents, many Christians wonder if it is good for children to have them in the regular service. After all, they cannot understand what is going on. But imagine saying that you’re not going to have toddlers sit at the table for meals with the family because they do not understand the rituals or manners. Or keeping infants isolated in a nursery with nothing but mobiles and squeaky toys because they cannot understand the dialogue of the rest of the family around them. We know, instinctively, that it’s important for our children to acquire language and the ordinary rituals of their family environment in order to become mature. Or imagine keeping our teens from their grandparents’ funerals because they don’t understand it. We take them precisely so they will, knowing that our patience (and theirs) will be rewarded in later years and that the event will itself be an opportunity for maturity. Jesus grew in wisdom and knowledge. He learned the Psalter and the rhythms of the synagogue liturgy. When, as a young adult, he took up the Isaiah scroll to read about himself, he knew exactly where to roll it.
At the grammar stage, children are simply absorbing the language of Zion: the terms and “the pattern of the sound words” (2 Tim 1:13) that we share with the wider body of Christ through the ages. I think that we are sometimes too worried about “imposing” our faith on our children. After all, it’s a personal relationship with Jesus, and we do not want to interfere with their free will. We don’t think this way about the other things that they are learning by rote at this stage. We do not upbraid teachers for “imposing” the alphabet or multiplication table. Our moral sentiments are not offended when parents correct poor grammar. Furthermore, recall the explicit agenda expressed by marketing executives at the beginning of this chapter. Children are being catechized every day, but in what?
The ecumenical creeds and evangelical confessions are an important place to start, and if they learn these summaries in the home and in Sunday school, they will be more likely to join the rest of the body in confessing that faith publicly in the service each week. In fact, the Protestant Reformers recovered the ancient practice of instruction through a catechism. With its question-and-answer format, these catechisms teach the core of our catholic and evangelical faith.95
Then, as young people approach the logic stage in their development, they see the relations between various doctrines and can even begin to make some of their own connections. No longer simply parroting the answers that they learned by heart, they are now stepping into the story themselves and thinking through the implications. Questioning things is part and parcel of being a teenager. Instead of seeing this as a threat, we should welcome it as the path to personal profession of the faith.
It is precisely in asking questions — even giving some push-back — that we come truly to understand and to own the faith. Sadly, many parents and church leaders are in greatest danger of “imposing” their faith in these teen years in reaction against a questioning process that is mistaken for rebellion. This is not the “grammar” stage, and the church should be the safest place for inquiring minds to discover the best answers to questions they will have into adulthood.
Now, as they pack off for college, this catechetical formation will hopefully have played a large part in their own faith. It will also help them to be “prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect” (1 Pet 3:15).
But it’s not only a matter of the right content and method of instruction. We also grow more and more in our union with Christ and his body through intentional and structured social practices ordained by Christ. Recall the ordinary weekly ministry in Acts 2: “So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls. And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (2:41 – 42).
What place does my baptism have even now in daily life? What does this tell me about who my closest relatives are? Even more than husband and wife, we are brother and sister in Christ. Even more than children in a natural family, we are coheirs and adopted children together with the Father, in the Son, by the Spirit. Am I the beneficiary of and submissive “to the teaching and the fellowship” of Christ’s undershepherds? What is being given to me, done for me and to me, in the Lord’s Supper, as I am drawn out of my self-enclosed cocoon to cling to Christ in faith and to my brothers and sisters in love?
How do “the prayers” shape my own participation in Christ and his body, so that even when I pray in private or with my family, I am still doing so with Christ and his church? Some of the prayers are sung as well. Do these songs make “the word of Christ dwell in you richly” (Col 3:16)? Are youth group trips planned in sync with the wider church activities, or do they regularly draw the young people away from the church, even on occasion the ordinary public service on the Lord’s Day?
Wherever possible, the pastor should lead the profession or confirmation classes. This helps to connect them once more to the wider body. I find it intriguing that despite their busy schedules, Luther, Bucer, Calvin, Knox, and other Reformers taught the catechism every week to the youth. It makes a profound impression on a young person to be taken so seriously by the minister of the whole flock. The fact that the same minister who directs them through their questioning at this stage is also leading the whole congregation in worship each week has a quiet but powerful integrity. If our young people leave for college without having been grounded in the truth and wrestling honestly with their doubts, we shouldn’t be surprised that they sleep in on Sunday in college. As it is, I fear that we are sending many young people into a battle unarmed.
Is there still a place for ministry to youth? Absolutely — in fact, that is the point of the preceding argument. But is there a place for youth ministries and youth ministers? There are some terrific examples of youth ministries that focus on integration rather than segregation.96 I think it is helpful to think of youth ministry as parachurch. Ideally, such ministries fulfill their calling of coming alongside (para) the church, to lead people into the church. Depending on various factors, this may be done best by calling a youth minister or by designating an elder to oversee the coordination of various events.
For instance, what if there were at least as many trips to nursing homes and other care facilities as to theme parks? And more discussions focused on the actual content of the faith than on the important but often overdone talks on dating, relationships, and self-esteem? I’m not convinced that there is a single answer here, and I’m not opposed to targeted ministry to young people. The question is whether we are contributing to or detracting from the church’s mission to build up each member into one body, in connection with its living Head.
With the gospel, even this world takes on a different light. We begin to see more colors, to taste more flavors, to enjoy this life in ways that before seemed impossible.
Yet it is especially in Christ’s body that the new world — the real world — comes alive to us. Observing the health, wealth, and happiness of the wicked, Asaph confesses, “My feet almost stumbled” (Ps 73:2). But then he entered the sanctuary and everything began to fall into place (73:16 – 28). Similarly, every time we hear God’s Word, witness a baptism, receive the Supper, and join in common confession, prayer, and praise, the familiar world of the work week seems like a passing shadow. Its siren songs become faint as we hear the strains of a stirring symphony approaching. We begin to taste morsels of the wedding feast that is being prepared. Even through these ordinary means, something extraordinary has arrived, is arriving, will arrive. But we wait for it patiently.
Exercise
1. Discuss the agricultural and organic imagery Scripture gives us for the kingdom of Christ. How does this differ from other ways we think about it?
2. How does God’s garden grow? Can you see this in concrete ways in your own life, family and church? What are some of the ways we tend to undermine this view of growth in Christ?
3. What are your personal disciplines like? Why are they important?
4. Evaluate some of the major ways that children are nurtured in the faith at church. Are these methods healthy/unhealthy? Why?