We’re all adolescents now,” writes Thomas Bergler. “When are we going to grow up?”17 Bergler explains that churches and parachurch organizations first began to provide youth-oriented programs — mainly to help at-risk kids in the cities (e.g., the YMCA). Then the “teenager” was invented as a unique demographic in society. As a result, the youth group was created, offering adolescent-friendly versions of church. “In the second stage, a new adulthood emerged that looked a lot like the old adolescence. Fewer and fewer people outgrew the adolescent Christian spiritualities they had learned in youth groups; instead, churches began to cater to them.” Eventually, churches became them.18
It is nothing new when young people want churches to pander to them. What is new is the extent to which churches have obliged. In previous generations, elders — both officers and simply older and wiser members — wouldn’t let that happen. They took young people under their wing and taught them by word and example what it meant to begin to accept the privileges and responsibilities of membership in Christ’s body. The youth were not a market to exploit, but lambs to feed and guard. Churches saw young people neither as the measure of their success nor as “the church of tomorrow,” but as an integral part of the church today.
For the first time in the history of the church, it has become possible to go from the nursery to children’s church to Sunday school to the youth group and college ministry without ever actually having experienced church membership. Shocking surveys abound reporting that many of our children are dropping out of church by their college years. But maybe it shouldn’t be so shocking if they were never actually involved in church to begin with.
Increasingly I meet young pastors who never, or rarely, experienced the ordinary means of grace in the weekly service. Some were never baptized, much less instructed in a common catechism in preparation for making profession and coming to Holy Communion. Unfortunately, the people I have in mind were not adult converts, but belonged to a Christian family and attended countless Christian events and ministries sponsored by the church. The whole plan of gradual maturity in Christ’s body was set aside for perpetual adolescence. Their whole world was a youth culture. Many were raised more by their peers than by their parents and pastors. And today many are themselves both.
So it’s not surprising perhaps that, like the culture generally, many churches deemed most “alive” and “cutting-edge” reflect a near obsession with youth. My mentor, James Montgomery Boice, used to say that instead of the more biblical pattern of children growing toward maturity, churches were turning adults into children. Positively, this youthful orientation provided energy and zeal, but it also changed our spiritual ecology.
Young Is Restless
With good reason — and ageless experience — we associate childhood with a spirit of restless exploration, wonder, and distraction. These characteristics may create frustration at times, but we do not normally associate them with vice. Fascinated by the newness of everything, their attention shifts back and forth, up and down. We greet crawling and then walking with short-lived joy, as the dear ones pull every pot out of the cupboard and wander away from us at the supermarket. They have not yet learned how to anticipate danger or to discern the important from the trivial; everything is interesting! Thus, they can be more easily exploited and even abused.
Children are trusting. But if they stay that way, they’re gullible.
As children, we did not take time to chew properly, much less to meditate deeply on truth. We ask, “Are we there yet?” twenty minutes after leaving our driveway. We do not expect infants to take care of others, to consider others as more important than themselves. We do not scold five-year-olds for failing to find work. It’s the brief and shining moment in life when the spotlight was on us and our needs, without any expectation that it should be otherwise.
As we mature, expectations change. But, like learning to ride a bike, it’s basically trial and error. The most exasperating aspect of taking my children fishing is that they won’t leave the line in the water long enough to attract a living thing. Yes, this sort of impatience is childish — which is perfectly normal in a child. Carried into adulthood, though, it is aggravating.
Growing Up
We’re called to enter the kingdom like children (Matt 18:3; Luke 18:16), but not to remain locked in the perpetual restlessness of childhood and adolescence. Eventually we learn to make commitments, develop roots, and invest our lives in long-term relationships instead of constantly searching for the newest, greatest, and latest. Through their ministry, pastors-teachers are “building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, 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 4:12 – 14, italics added). Stop being “carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability,” Peter similarly warns. “But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Pet 3:17 – 18).
Ours is not the first generation in which young people thought they knew more than their elders. Giving free reign to our desires, ambitions, and tongues is our corruption of the good — that youthful zeal, curiosity, and passion for action that we should carry with us throughout life. As young children, we basically take the world described by our parents and other authority figures for granted. Later, we begin to question things (it’s called being a “teenager”). This is as it should be. Adolescence is a great time to explore what we believe and why we believe it, to “own” our faith for ourselves. This assumes, of course, that the grammar has been given to us so that we can actually ask good questions and make informed judgments. A church that stops asking (and allowing) questions betrays its own tenuous grasp of God’s truth.
So there are terrific characteristics of young adulthood that should have an important place in the life of the church. At the same time, as I point out in other chapters, we turn virtues into vices. Suspicion of authority, overconfidence, restless and rootless drifting, and anxiety over making commitments have always been weaknesses that we need the whole body to help us grow out of.
Paul tells the church of Corinth that one of the marks of a child is a certain level of restlessness that leads to a lack of depth — a shallow and self-centered spirituality. At Corinth, instead of building each other up, gifted personalities took the stage, asserting themselves above others. It was more like American Idol than the body of Christ:
But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not ready, for you are still of the flesh. For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way? For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not being merely human?
What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. (1 Cor 3:1 – 5)
God’s church isn’t a stage where we perform our solos. It is God’s garden. It is a building that God is constructing in his Son, by his Word and Spirit (1 Cor 3:6 – 9). Against their chaotic worship, he exhorts, “Brothers, do not be children in your thinking” (1 Cor 14:20).
As we grow up, we begin to assume responsibilities — for ourselves and for others. Finding our lives hidden with God in Christ, we are no longer the center of our universe. We press on toward completion in Christ. “Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect,” Paul recognizes, “but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.”
Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. Only let us hold true to what we have attained. (Phil 3:12 – 16)
What is true here for individuals is true also for churches over time. Press on. Don’t rest on the laurels of past grace. By all means, test and examine what you have learned. “Only let us hold true to what we have attained.” If we’re continually starting over from scratch, we’ll remain infants. The saving knowledge of Christ is that goal toward which we strive. “Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil, struggling with all his energy that he powerfully works within me” (Col 1:28 – 29).
The writer to the Hebrews also encourages us to grow up, to stop behaving like children. Just as he launches into his mind-blowing instruction on Christ’s fulfillment of the Melchizedek priesthood, he interrupts himself:
About this we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk in unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil. (Heb 5:11 – 14)
To be young is to be restless. Yet as we mature, we learn God’s Word and — importantly, as noted above — “powers of discernment trained by constant practice.” Growth involves leaving behind this restless spirit, learning disciplines that lead to maturity in the faith. If we fail to mature, apostasy is a real danger (Heb 6:1 – 12).
Even in secular societies across time there has been a consensus that wisdom comes with age and experience. This is not to idolize the elderly. After all, “the fathers” in Scripture is a phrase that frequently refers to the wilderness generation that failed to believe God’s promise. By contrast, Paul encourages Timothy, “Let no one despise you for your youth, but set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity” (1 Tim 4:12). In other words, he is to show by his conduct and speech that he is mature, regardless of his age. He has been well-catechized by his mother and grandmother, the apostle reminds him. More than all of this, Paul reminds him of his public ordination to the office. Timothy’s authority comes not from his personal charisma, youthful charm, or self-promotion. Rather, it comes from “the gift you have, which was given to you by prophecy when the council of elders laid their hands on you” (4:14). Therefore, Paul says, “until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching” (4:13).
In his instructions to Titus for life in the church, Paul mentions “self-control” four times within the space of twelve verses (Titus 2:1 – 12). “Likewise, urge the younger men to be self-controlled” (2:6). Inclined to self-indulgence, young men especially need to be accountable to pastors and elders. Tragically, self-control is increasingly relinquished among older adults in our shock-jock society. The social pressure imposed by elders to curb enthusiastic outbursts and to reflect before expressing themselves once had considerable cache. The church can become again one place at least where this maturity is encouraged by good examples.
Titus is not a private person asserting his leadership, but holds a public office in the church. Therefore, he is not to be bullied into passivity: “Declare these things; exhort and rebuke with all authority. Let no one disregard you” (Titus 2:15). After all, he is exercising his office, as Christ’s representative, not fulfilling his personal agenda. While warning against “shameful gain” and “domineering over those in your charge,” Peter nevertheless exhorts elders to assume their vital role. “Likewise, you who are younger, be subject to the elders. Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for ‘God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble’ ” (1 Pet 5:2 – 5).
God’s Generations and Ours
It is staggering to contemplate that the transcendent, majestic, sovereign Creator of the cosmos so identifies with a certain people, with a particular history, that he can actually identify himself as “the God of Israel,” “the God of the covenant.” “I will be a God to you and to your children after you,” he promises; “to a thousand generations,” we hear repeatedly in Scripture. Peter reaffirmed this covenantal outlook in his Pentecost sermon: “For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself” (Acts 2:39).
God’s call comes to us as individuals, but also as families, and it goes out to those who do not yet belong to God’s covenant people. The emphasis of his call is on passing on what has been seen and heard: the mighty acts of God in history. The older and wiser members teach and guide the younger.
Israel’s calendar of feasts marked these mighty acts and brought the young up to speed on what God has accomplished. Take Passover, for example. “And when your children say to you, ‘What do you mean by this service?’ you shall say, ‘It is the sacrifice of the LORD’s Passover, for he passed over the houses of the people of Israel in Egypt, when he struck the Egyptians but spared our houses” (Ex 12:26 – 27). Christianity is an inherently intergenerational faith because God is faithful from generation to generation, keeping his covenant in spite of his people’s unfaithfulness. Instead of inventing beliefs and rites that were judged more relevant to a specific generation, they brought that generation into the atmosphere of the covenant.
God’s covenant of grace now unites not only the generations but people “from every tribe and language and people and nation” around the throne of the Lamb (Rev 5:9). It does not follow the consumer cues of this passing age, dividing people according to generations, ethnicity, gender, class, or political parties. In Christ, these walls are broken down. He is now our real location, the marker of our ultimate identity (Gal 3:28).
United to one body with one Head, it is our differences from each other that give each part of the body what it needs. The younger need the older. Wealthier believers need the gifts of poorer members. Rather than feed a comfortable narcissism, we need to be enriched by the insights, fellowship, and correction of brothers and sisters from ethnic, political, and economic backgrounds different from our own. The church isn’t a circle of friends, but the family of God. The covenant of grace connects generations, rooting them in that worshiping community with the “cloud of witnesses” in heaven as well as here and now (Heb 12:1).
Yet today the market has become the new Pharaoh who defies God’s order to let his people go so that they may worship him in the desert at his mountain. “Divide and conquer” is the logic of this new lord. By separating the generations into niche markets, the powers and principalities of this present evil age pick at the covenantal fabric of God’s new society. Satan works tirelessly to create gaps between generations in the church — gaps that the fathers and mothers cannot reach across to pass the baton. Someone wisely said, “The church is always one generation from apostasy.”
Continuity is the covenantal approach to generations; novelty is the decree of our age. Each generation is bombarded with advertisements, ideals, dreams, and expectations that appeal to our collective narcissism. We are special, unique, destined for greatness. Ours is the truly revolutionary generation. For those of us reared on “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile,” it’s going to be difficult to sing the Song of Moses: “The LORD is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation; this is my God, and I will praise him, my father’s God, and I will exalt him” (Ex 15:2, italics added).
In what he calls “a short but self-important history of the Baby Boomer Generation,” Joe Queenan, writer for the New York Times and GQ, makes sport of his generation’s “absolute inability to accept the ordinary.”19
Because Baby Boomers are obsessed with living in the moment, they insist that every experience be a watershed, every meal extraordinary, every friendship epochal, every concert superb, every sunset meta-celestial. Life isn’t like that. . . . Sunsets are sunsets. By turning spectacularly humdrum occurrences into formal rites, Baby Boomers have transmuted even the most banal activities into “events” requiring reflection, planning, research, underwriting and staggering masses of data. This has essentially ruined everything for everybody else because nothing can ever again be exactly what it was in the first place: something whose very charm is a direct result of its being accessible, near at hand, ordinary.20
Today we feel the pressure to have our weddings look like the cover of a bridal magazine or movie set. Our marriages have to be made in heaven, even though we’re very much on earth. Our presentations at work have to dazzle. Our kids have to make the dean’s list and get into the best graduate school. Academic research can’t just contribute to knowledge in a field; nothing short of “brilliant” and “groundbreaking” will satisfy if you want a good job. When we do stop and smell the roses, it has to be an unforgettable package at an amazing resort. It’s not enough to enjoy recreation at the public park, but extreme sports are what really interest us.
By the way, I am not moralizing about these things to be critical of others. In fact, I find myself drawn to these same adrenaline rushes and enticing getaways. My point is that we, as modern Christians, living under the alluring lights of a Las Vegas culture, find it difficult to enjoy more familiar, routine, and common pleasures. Part of the problem is that we want to prove something to ourselves and to others. Even in our down time, we are anxious to set ourselves apart from the rest.
Consider how participation in sports has changed in recent years. Professional sports has become big business, part of the entertainment industry. And now it seems like every year its values trickle down to younger and younger segments of the population. Organized (but not professional) sports used to build character. That was their point. What’s new today is not greater drive and measures of excellence, but different goals that require different means and form different patterns. Where playing for the team was the point, now it’s just an occasion for us (or our children) to stand out. Extracurricular activities have increasingly become a staging area for virtuoso performers who attract the crowds and fetch staggering salaries. A game can no longer just be a game; it has to be a spectacle. And, tragically, the same can be said of many churches.
The Hedonist Paradox
Behind selfish ambition and this exuberant cult of the immediate-experience-in-the-moment lurks a haunting nihilism. We came from nowhere and are going to nowhere, but somewhere in the middle of it all we have to make a big splash. Every moment must be charged with excitement. “If the dead are not raised,” Paul famously concluded by quoting a line from a Greek comedy, “ ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die’ ” (1 Cor 15:32). The technical term for this is narcissism.
Even if we pray like Augustine, we often live like the atheistic philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. His catechism reads:
What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself.
What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness.
What is happiness? The feeling that power increases — that a resistance is overcome.21
In other words, winning is everything today. The point isn’t even what we win, but that we win. The goal slips from view — or rather, shifts from someone or something else to ourselves. The problem is that nobody can make us that happy, or even as happy as we think we deserve.
Moralists decry our age as hedonist. But is that giving ourselves too much credit? At least hedonism has the merit of loving life. The hedonist does not love the God who gives life or acknowledge any accountability to his revealed will; yet he or she at least may fancy the gifts without acknowledging the Giver. Augustine would call this “inordinate desires”: longings for that which is good, but by being ranked above God they become idolatrous. For all of their faults, hedonists love life — at least life as they know it apart from God.
Generally speaking, our age displays the opposite tendency. Ironically, in some ways it’s more akin to Stoicism. We may know Stoicism as a “stiff upper-lip” approach to life. It evokes the image of the sage sitting in Buddha-like contemplation, immune to the constant flux — and pleasures — of the external world. Stoics emphasized duty and discipline, over against hedonistic drives. However, at the heart of Stoicism is the notion of autonomy: perfect bliss in one’s own completeness. The ideal Stoic master has transcended dependence on others. No external need compels, no external threat disturbs the tranquility of his or her self-enclosed existence.
Now, consider iconic characters like James Bond. They find their happiness entirely in themselves. Their serial promiscuity seems to be driven not by need, not even by desire, but merely by arbitrary whim or a transaction calculated to serve their professional aims. One of the delightful features of characters like Jason Bourne is that their tough exterior melts and their dependence on others for their happiness reveals itself. Unlike some of his other characters, Tom Cruise in Jerry McGuire is able to tell his girlfriend, “You complete me.” He is able to enter into a new phase of the relationship precisely because he is willing to acknowledge his vulnerability: his need to be loved as well as to love. The barrier comes down and invites the other in — all the way into the soul.
But the Stoic tramp is not a lover. There isn’t even a sense of adolescent passion, falling in and out of love too easily. Unlike the old-fashioned hedonist, this person’s problem is not that he loves too much, but that he doesn’t love — or hasn’t tried not to love — at all. Friedrich Nietzsche — “the man of azure isolation,” as Karl Barth called him — is the sort of person I have in mind here, and it is his attitude that characterizes late modernity. This sort of person works overtime to create an impermeable barrier between self and other. If you allow yourself to become dependent on others for your happiness, you’ll never be happy, because eventually everyone will let you down. So resolve to find your completeness in yourself. Don’t let others in.
When you combine this Stoic resolve with arbitrary sexual impulses, the last thing you get is love of life — much less love of another person. Sex takes place purely on the other side of the barrier, in a realm of mutual release — purely physical and external — that can neither threaten nor summon us out of our cocoon to discover, delight in, and desire the other. “No strings attached.” There is no covenant — a free exchange of persons and gifts. One may give his or her body to the act, but never the heart and soul. It’s just a contract between “consenting adults.”
Christianity is far from Stoicism. It affirms desire far more than what we improperly call hedonism. As C. S. Lewis observed, “Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak.” “We are halfhearted creatures,” he adds, “fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”22
No, to be sure, “hedonism” is too noble a word for this. It’s not even a love of life, a lust for something that is in itself a good gift of God. It is no more erotic than the mating of cats outside my window in October and lacks the charm and sociability of diverse mating rituals in the animal kingdom.
There is a problem with our pursuit of the next great experience, our attempts to feed our insatiable appetite for significance. Like excellence and action, happiness needs a worthy object. The pursuit of happiness as an end in itself is “vanity,” as we learn from the book of Ecclesiastes. Philosophers call it the “hedonist paradox”: the irony that the pursuit of pleasure actually chases it away. “Happiness is like a cat,” writes William Bennett. “If you try to coax it or call it, it will avoid you; it will never come. But if you pay no attention to it and go about your business, you’ll find it rubbing against your legs and jumping into your lap.”23 Happiness is something that happens when you’re looking for someone or something other than happiness. You can’t find meaning, fulfillment, or purpose by looking for it, but only by discovering something else. And that discovery comes with careful discernment, which takes time, intentionality, and community.
The same is true of success or impact. Many young people today are filled with anxiety about choosing a major in college. Then they obsess over whether to take a job that has nothing to do with it. They say, “I want to make something of myself, to leave my mark” — or, more altruistically, “to make a difference” in the world. But when we make these desires themselves the object of our life-quest, they become idols. Like all idols, they overpromise and underdeliver. When they fail us, we become bitterly unhappy. Since we can’t really get much reaction from an idol, we begin to resent other people who were their messengers.
We do not find success by trying to be successful or happiness by trying to be happy. Rather, we find these things by attending to the skills, habits, and — to be honest — the often dull routines that make us even modestly successful at anything. If you are always looking for an impact, a legacy, and success, you will not take the time to care for the things that matter.
We Want It All: Autonomy and Community
A spate of books in recent years points up the narcissistic tendency that makes genuine growth and community difficult in virtually every area of life. Over a decade ago, David Brooks identified the Boomer generation as “Bobos in Paradise.”24 On one hand, they demand autonomy, resisting settled beliefs, norms, and values. They want to do it and have it their way. On the other hand, they crave community and belonging. You cannot have it both ways, though. Belonging to a community requires individuals to live within a certain level of mutual accountability.
But misery loves company and I take some perverse comfort in learning that this anxious narcissism isn’t just a Boomer phenomenon. Led by Jean Twenge, a group of psychologists followed trends among the Busters, also known as Generation X (1965 – 83) and especially the Millennials or Generation Y (since 1984). The title of Twenge’s book reporting the findings is telling: Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — And More Miserable Than Ever Before.25
Judging by recent studies, the Boomers’ children and grandchildren are if anything even more intense in their struggle with this inner contradiction between autonomy and community. Wanting to belong, to be part of something larger than themselves, they soon realize that communities are inherently limiting. There is no community without consensus: a basic, shared agreement about the things that define it. You have to show up in order to belong. And shared agreements have to be patrolled (disciplined) in order to be maintained and to endure through the various crises that individual members might provoke.
So people get anxious about making commitments. “You are better off leaving your options open,” they are told. And, wow, what options there are! We can scour the Web for bits and pieces of the identity that we are crafting for ourselves and the accessories that we think will help us pull it off. The choices are endless — and, therefore, both overwhelming and anxiety-producing. People seem to be (or at least are expected to be) in the middle of making a new life-altering choice at every moment.
For Boomers, this wonderland of consumerism is fascinating — still a bit novel. Yet for Millennials and those coming along after them, it is normal — so normal that it becomes boring. The world of choices and limitless options is no longer a trip to the carnival; it’s their home. The experience of young people today is not one of being uprooted as much as of not having had any roots to begin with. As numerous studies indicate, this is just as true in evangelical churches, where the average person raised in our circles cannot articulate even the basic message of Christianity. (This is in sharp contrast with Mormons and Muslims, for example.)
The Internet is the quarry from which younger generations craft their own selves and then advertise a desired persona on Facebook. A new word has been invented to describe the source of information and identity: wiki, the Hawaiian word for quick. Due in part to economic instability, Millennials are more cautious — even a little anxious — about the future. Marrying later, and having children even later still, the idea of being “tied down” is even more disconcerting.
Deep Sea Diving in a Jet-Ski Age
Psychiatrist Keith Ablow joins the chorus of his colleagues along with sociologists and historians in a recent online article, where he argues a simple premise: “We are raising a generation of deluded narcissists.”26 Today’s college students “are more likely than ever to call themselves gifted and driven to succeed, even though their test scores and time spent studying are decreasing.” A number of recent studies point up “the toxic psychological impact of media and technology on children, adolescents and young adults, particularly as it regards turning them into faux celebrities — the equivalent of lead actors in their own fictionalized life stories.” He adds:
On Facebook, young people can fool themselves into thinking they have hundreds or thousands of “friends.” They can delete unflattering comments. They can block anyone who disagrees with them or pokes holes in their inflated self-esteem. They can choose to show the world only flattering, sexy or funny photographs of themselves (dozens of albums full, by the way), “speak” in pithy short posts and publicly connect to movie stars and professional athletes and musicians they “like.” Using Twitter, young people can pretend they are worth “following,” as though they have real-life fans, when all that is really happening is the mutual fanning of false love and false fame. Using computer games, our sons and daughters can pretend they are Olympians, Formula 1 drivers, rock stars or sharpshooters. . . . On MTV and other networks, young people can see lives just like theirs portrayed on reality TV shows fueled by such incredible self-involvement and self-love that any of the “real-life” characters should really be in psychotherapy to have any chance at anything like a normal life. These are the psychological drugs of the 21st Century and they are getting our sons and daughters very sick, indeed.
Tragically, narcissism frequently leads to self-loathing. As Ablow says, “False pride can never be sustained.” Young people are looking for more highs to define and distinguish themselves. “They’re doing anything to distract themselves from the fact that they feel empty inside and unworthy.” However, the bubble will burst. Ablow warns, “Watch for an epidemic of depression and suicidality, not to mention homicidality, as the real self-loathing and hatred of others that lies beneath all this narcissism rises to the surface.”
Technology has always rearranged our social and psychic furniture. As Jesuit priest and media scholar John Culkin pointed out, “We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.”27 Ever since the printing press, evangelicals have always been at the front of the line for new technologies for spreading the Word. Radio, TV, the Web, and worship with rock bands, video clips, and PowerPoint presentations have become common.
There are two easy responses to technological innovation: embrace it or reject it. As evangelicals, we have a tendency to embrace popular culture, with its bent toward the ephemeral. Ironically, while we jazz up our worship spaces with gadgets and glitz, it is often specialists of technology and culture who caution greater reflection. One thinks of Marshal McLuhan’s The Medium Is the Message and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. In his bestseller, The Shallows, Nicholas Carr argues that in the Internet age we are losing our capacity for deep thinking, reading, and conversation. Instead of deep sea divers, he says, we jet ski on a sea of words and especially images.28 Having taught a generation of students to develop new technologies, MIT professor Sherry Turkle raises this question from a commonsense perspective. The title of one of her recent books tells the story: Alone Together: Why We Expect More of Technology and Less of Each Other.29 Despite their fondness for theological novelty, liberal Protestantism is typically more indebted to high culture with its conservative suspicion of technology.
Part of growing up is developing discernment. Even where Scripture does not give us explicit direction, we have to continually ask each other how the tools we use help or hinder the growth of God’s garden (growth in depth as well as breadth). New technologies can’t be all bad, but then they can’t be all good either. That’s where wisdom comes in. Wisdom discerns not just between good and bad but between better and best. However, before they can even develop critical skills, younger generations are submerged in a sea of data, images, and ads.
Most of us have to stretch our historical imagination to understand a world that was normal not that long ago. With our automobile-driven culture of climate-controlled suburbia, anonymous individualism deposits us in our garage without having to bother with others. Add to that now the isolation of having the world at your fingertips in front of a screen — TV, Internet, and phone — and it’s easy to see why we’ve become quite different people in barely a generation. In a recent story on NPR, an older woman was talking about how train passengers used to bring baskets of food on the trip from Madrid to Paris, exchanging cheese, meats, and fruit among themselves. Now, she said, there are no baskets; they all sit alone, glued to their gadgets.
The spoken word, as a medium, is socializing. It puts you in the middle of an event instead of in front of a screen. According to Scripture, God spoke the world into being by his powerful word (Ps 33:6). The eternal Son is the Word of God. Jesus himself said, “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life” (John 6:63). The apostles taught that “faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Rom 10:17) and that we are born again through the preaching of the gospel (Rom 1:16; Eph 1:13 – 14; 1 Thess 1:5; 1 Pet 1:23; Jas 1:18). But we are turned in on ourselves as fallen creatures, and our growing captivity to texting and tweeting only deepens the tendency. We do not hear God address us in church, nor do we “store up [God’s] word in [our] heart” (Ps 119:11) since we can access the data on our smartphones.
On one hand, we are addicted to distractions (euphemistically called “multi-tasking”). On the other hand, like salty peanuts, all of this clicking, cutting-and-pasting, Googling and chatting, posting and texting just creates a deeper thirst for something more meaningful. Younger generations will say that they long for community, but the habits that they’ve acquired — and which are now deeply woven into the fabric of their personality — make it difficult for them to belong to any particular group with any serious and long-term investment. Breaking away from the herd to “be yourself” may have been an exhilarating rebellion in the days of “Leave It To Beaver.” But when everybody’s doing his own thing, there’s no fun left in being a rebel.
There are plenty of terrific ways in which social media connect us, but calling any of these communities seems like a bit of hyperbole. Community requires coherence, cohesion, and consensus — over time and, depending on the type of community, across spatial borders as well. Unlike Internet connections, deep community requires face-to-face, embodied engagement and accountability. You can’t just “unfriend” your next-door neighbor, much less your spouse or children, without daily repercussions. It also requires an agreement to live within that consensus. This is true for contractual relationships like those we have with service providers and banks, but all the more for covenantal institutions like marriage, family, and church.
In addition to the problem of constantly looking for significance, anxiously hoping that our lives will have a lasting impact, is our addiction to instantaneous results. If anything, younger generations are even more habituated to immediate gratification than their parents and grandparents. This is due less to their conscious choices than to social practices that have made them what they are — practices that reshape all of us in profound ways. For example, many of those in younger generations do not recall having sent or received a handwritten letter. Instead of composing a letter by hand, perhaps rethinking something we said and coming back to correct it, we blurt out scores of trivial messages. Sure, much has been gained with email and texting — especially the ease with which we can be in touch with many people. Still, much is lost, such as intimacy, reflective interaction and relationships, and care. The medium makes a difference.
Everything today must be quick and easy, because that is how the world seems to operate now. We falsely assume that we must change or we’ll be left behind. In the past couple of decades we’ve heard that churches still committed to the public ministry of preaching, sacraments, and worship will be like pay phones — that we need to “reboot” Christianity. One writer even suggests that the churches of tomorrow will be more like Wikipedia: de-institutionalized, quick, and democratic.
The point is that the movements that wash over us are largely determined by the attachment of evangelicalism to pop culture, which inevitably means youth culture. It may be exciting for the moment, but it is not sustainable and it does not serve well an intergenerational covenant of grace. Reaching non-Christians with “the faith . . . once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3) requires zeal and knowledge. Keeping the generations connected requires love and patience on all sides. The elders must be attentive to any disconnection expressed by the younger believers, and younger generations need to be less enamored of their own relevance as they assume their important place in the body of Christ.
The key to maturity is time and community. Discernment takes time and a lot of godly input spanning generations and ethnicities. There’s a reason why the Psalms have been sung for thousands of years, and why many young people still know “Amazing Grace,” even if they barely know “Shine, Jesus, Shine” and have never (happily) even heard of “In the Garden.” A consensus of believers in churches over a few generations has a way of weeding out the less edifying songs.
If staying with the familiar (no matter how bad it may be) is the tendency of a conservative temperament, the ideal of creativity and novelty — as an end in itself — becomes destructive of long conversations. At the end of a term, a student discovered the professor’s evaluation explaining the poor grade: “Your paper is original and creative. The parts that are creative are not original and the parts that are original are not very good.” The best changes are slow, incremental, and deliberate. Instead of cutting their own path, they extend the ancient faith into the next generation.
Wisdom challenges our youthful restlessness without quenching its zeal. It does not reduce the faith to a few important doctrines or offer a menu of options for creating one’s own. Remember, the past and the present are basically the same in at least one important respect. Both occupy the period identified in Scripture as “this present age” that is “passing away.” It is the powers of “the age to come” that are breaking in on us now, as they did on our forebears. If this is true, then neither the past nor the present is normative. It is the canon of Scripture that renders both relative and open to correction.
The key is to be able to distinguish between goals that can be achieved quickly and those that require more time and care, and to be able to value the latter as something worth waiting for. It is not difficult to compare a list of things that are quick and easy, yielding immediate results, with a list of goods that require long-term investment, care, growing expertise, and maturity. Aren’t most of the things we value most on that second sheet? And is it any wonder that we’re miserable if we do not care about things that take time, require submission to a community, and do not yield immediate and measurable results?
So it is time for all of us to grow up. It’s time for gifted communicators and leaders to become pastors, for restless souls to submit to the encouragement and correction in the body, for movements to give way to churches. As many are learning in emerging nations, especially in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, the energy of the masses gathered in the square can be exhilarating; the hard part is forming a working, living, growing set of institutions that can sustain a state over the long haul. Movements typically don’t like institutions. They live off the memory of the extraordinary moment and find it difficult to move in a united way toward a sustainable environment for generations. But the church, despite current appearances, is God’s emerging ecosystem of the new creation.
Instead of allowing youthful passion for the new and revolutionary to dominate our families and churches, let’s begin to recover our role as adults who discover and then hand over hidden treasures that we’ve been stumbling over each day in our own flight from the ordinary.
Exercise
1. Divide a sheet of paper. On the left side write down the things that are quick and easy, yielding immediate results. On the right side, list the things that require long-term investment, care, growing expertise, and maturity. Evaluate the relative value of each side of the sheet.
2. What are some of the characteristics of youth (positive and negative), and how does Scripture encourage maturity? Does Christianity in our culture today seem too youth-driven?
3. What is the “Hedonist’s Paradox”? And do you feel the inner contradiction between autonomy (having things your way) and community (submitting to others)?
4. How does the technology we use shape us, for better and worse? Divide two columns under the headings, “Appropriate” and “Inappropriate,” and consider what uses of technology may be right for one context but not for another.