“WHERE IS THE CHURCH ON THURSDAY AFTERNOON?”

7/19/12. “WHERE IS THE CHURCH ON THURSDAY AFTERNOON?”

I’ve been reading David Kinnaman’s provocative book: You Lost Me. It is a well-researched study about how the church is losing the twenty-something generation (variously called: Mosaics, Millennials, or GenY). Kinnaman is with the Barna Group, which keeps up with cultural trends.

His study focuses on those young adults who grew up in the church, and the reasons they have left.  He has broken them down into three categories: 1) Prodigals, those who have actually moved away from, or forsaken, the Christian faith altogether; 2) Nomads, those who have left the church over disillusionment with the church, and are looking around for alternatives, but have not forsaken the faith; and 3) Exiles, those who take the faith seriously but have found their church experience totally disconnected from their serious intent to engage their 24/7 lives with the culture, and to make their Christian presence influential through the excellence of their New Creation lives.

It is those defined as Exiles that speak to my own heart. I’m not a twenty-something (I’m actually an eighty-something), and I too am dismayed by the disconnect I find between so much of the church I experience, and any evident intention to equip and encourage God’s people for a fruitful engagement with the realities of the social, cultural, economic, political, controversial, hostile, sexual, and relational setting they live with. There seems not to be too many in church leadership who realize that the scriptures, well-taught, really can set people free to operate hopefully, freely, maturely and joyously during the other six days.

Happily, not all churches fall into this “disconnected” description, but it does require church leadership to seriously engage with the individual followers of Jesus, who make up their church community, and to be committed to equipping them both in personal contact (disciple-making), and in public/pulpit/worship communication, … unto maturity: “to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13). Every member of such communities is to be equipped to be a mature disciple, and equipped to function fully and freely in the mission of God, wherever their week may take them. Every member!

I wrote a chapter for a book once (the book was never published), entitled: “Where Is the Church on Thursday Afternoon?” Good question.

I like that question. Where is it, and what is it doing? This might point us to some answers to give Kinnaman’s Exiles. I’ll be exploring it in future Blogs. Peace!

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About rthenderson

Sixty years a pastor-teacher within the Presbyterian Church. Author of several books, the latest of which are a trilogy on missional ecclesiology: ENCHANTED COMMUNITY: JOURNEY INTO THE MYSTERY OF THE CHURCH, then, REFOUNDING THE CHURCH FROM THE UNDERSIDE, then THE CHURCH AND THE RELENTLESS DARKNESS. Previous to this trilogy was A DOOR OF HOPE: SPIRITUAL CONFLICT IN PASTORAL MINISTRY, and SUBVERSIVE JESUS, RADICAL FAITH. I am a native of West Palm Beach, Florida, a graduate of Davidson College, then of Columbia and Westminster Theological Seminaries.
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