Almost Christian

A new book about youth ministry and the church is getting a lot of attention these days. It’s by Kendra Creasy Dean, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and a leading expert on youth ministry, and the book is entitled Almost Christian: What the Faith of our Teenagers is Telling the American Church. (See additional links at the end of the post.)

The book is a summary of Dean’s research on the faith lives of teenagers, based on interviews with over 3,000 youth about their views on religion, faith, and God.

She found that, overwhelmingly, teenagers today practice what she calls a “moralistic therapeutic deism.” Dean explains that the teenagers she interviewed feel that “religion helps you [to] feel good and do good, but God pretty much stays out of the way. …you can call on God if you need God to solve a problem, but God’s track record on solving problems is pretty bad.” She says the primary images of God for these teens are as “cosmic therapist” that helps you feel good about yourself, and “divine butler”, someone who comes when called upon but otherwise stays away. She boils his belief system down into these five things:

1. God exists, God created and watches over the world
2. God wants us to be good, nice and fair to each other
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself
4. God is not involved except when I need God to solve a problem
5. Good people go to heaven when they die

Moralistic (do good) therapeutic (feel good) deism (a weak, distant, generalized idea of god).

However, Dean says that before we bemoan or somehow scapegoat our youth, we must first take a hard look at ourselves, because this is the faith that our youth are seeing and hearing from us – from churches and the adults in their lives. She writes, “If this is the God they’re seeing in church, they are right to leave us in the dust. Churches don’t give them enough to be passionate about.” “If teenagers lack an articulate faith, it may be because the faith we show them is too spineless to merit much in the way of conversation.” Ouch.

This probably comes, in part, from our (sometimes desperate) attempt to keep teenagers (and adults) in church. We try to make faith nice and easy, we set the bar low, but youth actually want more. They want a more radical faith, something they can be passionate about, that will challenge them, something that they can grab hold of, something that will grab hold of them…something that could actually, profoundly, change their lives. They are longing for a faith worth living and dying for.

I think we adults want the same thing, don’t we? And yet, and, if we our honest, I think Dean is right, that most of us easily veer into this “moralistic therapeutic diesm,” this “gospel of niceness.” We want a God that makes us feel better, feel safe. And yes, our God does do this and it is a good thing…but not the only thing.

It is “almost Christian,” perhaps “partially Christian.” It is part of the picture, but not the whole thing, and not by far.

Take Up Your Cross
But that’s the church, that’s not Jesus. Because Jesus is all about a radical faith. For, there was absolutely nothing that Jesus didn’t turn upside down in his life: whether it was the social order, notions of wealth, meal etiquette, common wisdom, honor and shame, sin, religion, or death.

That’s what Jesus is talking about in our Gospel lesson for today. In that lesson, we hear some of the hardest sayings of Jesus in the Gospels – of which there are many, and which we tend to gloss over. He tells the crowd traveling with him, “Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.” And, even harder, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself cannot be my disciple.” He was telling them that when you follow him, your allegiance must shift to the family of God, that one’s loyalty and trust must be in God above all others.

He essentially says, “If you want to follow me, its going to change you, and that probably means its going to hurt, because change is always hard, and changing the world is really hard. It means dying to yourself and living for others. It means giving up a God that only requires niceness and following a God that gives and requires sacrificial love.”

Follow to the Cross

Dietrich Bonhoeffer 1906-1945

In his book The Cost of Discipleship, Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

What does Bonhoeffer mean by this? Put simply: we are called to follow Jesus; and where does Jesus go, literally, in his life, where did Jesus go? To the cross. We follow Jesus to the cross. And what happens to Jesus on the cross is what happens to us. We die…but in dying, we live. Being wounded, we are healed. Broken by the world, we are made whole. The cross is the place of transformation – for us, and for the world.

But what kind of dying is it that happens at the cross?

• It is dying to self: putting our love of the neighbor at the forefront of our lives
• It is dying to the things in our lives we trust more than God
• It is dying to our limited notions of failure and success
• It is dying to what we want, and opening ourselves to what God wants
• It is dying to what the world wants to sell us as “life-giving,” and receiving true life in Christ
• It is dying to sin (the things that separate us from God), so that we can live in God’s grace and mercy, without fear or shame

And, in all this dying, we are made alive, we discover real living, we experience resurrection life.

And it happens in moments.

For, there is a moment when we forgive someone, and we discover that we are the one who is released. There’s a moment when you hand a meal to a homeless person and feel that you are the one receiving. There’s a moment when you take a stand for something you believe in, and your belief is suddenly strengthened and confirmed. There’s a moment when you realize that living for others is the best kind of living there is – when you realize that every act of love, no matter how big or small changes the world.

And so, I invite you this morning and I will be inviting you in the weeks ahead to know this Jesus, who calls us to the cross – who calls you to sacrificial loving and giving yourself away, this Jesus, who, for our own sakes and for the sake of the world, bids us to come and die, so that we all may live.

If Dean is right, and I think she is, this is the God we want. And this is the God we have…but it is not always the God we follow. Jesus is always calling us to the deeper and harder places – perhaps some of us are already there – and in those places, the places we know well, and the places that are foreign and far-removed, Jesus is calling us to life.

He is calling us to the place where, as Kendra Dean says, “Empty hands receive, empty wombs are filled, empty tombs proclaim resurrection – and the unformed selves of adolescents [and adults] make room for Christ….” And so now, let us follow him. Amen.

More on Almost Christian:

From CNN: Author: More teens becoming “fake” Christians

From the Christian Century: Faith, Nice and Easy

From Patheos: Almost Christian: An Interview with Kendra Creasy Dean