Claytonius

I know this has been discussed on in the blogosphere (ugg…I hate that word) plenty of times for years, but it keeps becoming more and more important to me. I have grown up with a love-hate relationship with Evangelicalism, especially of the megachurchy type. I am referring to the popular style of Evangelicalism that Robert Webber calls, “pragmatic evangelicals.” This is the kind of church that I grew up and that I now am the youth pastor at. Even now, I have this tension of appreciation and frustration with the way we do church. (Even my language of “doing” church betrays my pragmatic mindset.) And I am not the only one who has this tension. There are many other young Christians who grew up in Evangelical churches that are frustrated by them, and a lot of these young people are leaving Evangelical churches. They aren’t leaving the faith, but they are going other places. Actually, they are going three other places:

• Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican churches. Obviously, these are three fairly different groups when it comes to theology, practice, and culture. But, for the young, former pragmatic evangelical, they are the same. They are high church. They are rooted in tradition. They are sacramental.

• Emerging Churches. Again, there are lots of varieties to emerging churches, but to the former evangelical, they have a certain unifying quality to them. They are culturally-embodied. They are experiential. They are communally-oriented. They are concerned with social justice and the arts. They are open to question and change.

• Reformed Churches. This group of Christians, obviously, could be considered evangelical (as could many emerging and Anglican groups). But, to the children of the pragmatic evangelicals, it is a big difference. They are much more overtly theological. They are God-centered. They focus on glory and sovereignty. They also have a sense of history, at least in the Reformation era. They value the life of the mind in a way the more pragmatic side of Evangelicalism doesn’t.

Christianity Today, in the past few years, has done big stories on the popularity of these groups. In my own experience, nearly all of my friends who continued to take their faith seriously past high school have ended up in one of these streams. Very few are returning to the pragmatic evangelicalism (ala Willow Creek, Saddleback, etc.) of their youth. Some even try to combine these different streams (ala Mars Hill, Seattle’s combo of emerging missiology and reformed theology), but they are always these streams. Even I am not really comfortable with the pragmatic evangelicalism of my own church and have invested myself in our attempt at an emerging congregation, Ecclesia. All the while, I have delved into Reformed theology, and pray from the Book of Common Prayer daily. If I wasn’t so tied into the community (which, for me, trumps almost everything when choosing a where to worship), I might be at an Anglican church myself. Everyone my age seems to end up in one of these three places, and no one would have predicted it when we were growing up.

The pragmatic evangelical church seems confused by this, even frustrated sometimes. I know that at our church, we are not really sure how to reach twenty-somethings. We aren’t really sure if we need a college group or a singles group, or if our emerging-style service is enough. The elders and senior staff wonder about it all the time, and frankly, they seem to be slow in coming to really good answers. And we’re not just talking about how to reach never-been-churched young people. We are talking about how to minister to the children that grew up and were nurtured in our church. After youth group, we haven’t got a clue, and none of them seem to want to be around. They don’t want to abandon Jesus, but they don’t want to be in our style church either.

And my question is, why? What is it about our discipleship leads the faithful Christians of my generation to leave pragmatic Evangelical churches? I don’t think we are betraying our upbringing, but I think that either something that is missing in Evangelicalism drives us away, or maybe even something in Evangelicalism finds its fulfillment best in these other places. What lesson does a church like mine need to learn from this?