The book unChristian is a wake up call to the church.  We as Christians need to stop talking about living the Christian life and following after Jesus and start doing it.  Jesus calls us to live lives of radical mission reaching out to the least of these and having a heart for people who do not know Him.  We need to be the people who live authentic, Christ-centered lives that glorify God and draw people to Him instead of turning them away.  My hope and prayer is that God would raise up a church that is focused on His gospel and glory and is willing to be Jesus’ hands and feet to a closely watching world.

The sixth perception presented in unChristian is that Christians are judgmental.  This is something that I hear young adults raise all of the time as a problem with Christianity.  I think the reason that we come across as judgmental is that we fail to accept people as they are.  We have a fear of people that are not like us, and we tend to look down on them and stereotype them in light of this fear.  Another issue in light of being judgmental is that we think that everyone should act like us.  We see morality as something that we can legislate, but this seems to never work.  Take for instance the wet paint sign on a wall when we see the sign that is encouraging us to not touch the paint it just makes us want to touch it all the more.  We cannot expect people who do not know Jesus to live like Jesus.  We judge people and stereotype people which just leads to further division between us and further hurts us in sharing the gospel.  We must not judge people and expect people who do not know Christ to live like people who do.

The fifth perception of Christians noted in unChristian is the they are too political.  This has become a huge issue recently and was greatly seen in the last few presidential elections.  Young adults have begun to closely associate Christians with a political party which creates lots of problems.  The main problem is that they see anything that they disagree with the political party doing as something that Christians are doing and that Christians support. This adds an additional arena which creates even more concerns that young adults have with the church.  When a future presidential candidate takes time to meet with a prominent Christian pastor to seek approval and additional votes, we have reached a new level of connection between the church and a political party.  I am not saying that we should not be involved as Christians in politics or vote our values.  I believe that these are both things that we should do, but the problem comes when we as Christians strongly unite ourselves with a political party.  I heard Prison Fellowship founder and former White House aide to Richard Nixon, Chuck Colson, say something in an interview the other day that sums up the Christian’s role in politics very well.  He said that when a Christian unites himself or herself with any ideology besides the gospel they only dilute their impact.  When we as Christians unite ourselves with the ideology of any political party, we are in turn dividing ourselves from everyone who is part of another political party.  We are dividing on an ideology with regard to government policy which is making it even harder for us to share the gospel with someone because we have created an additional barrier and division with the person.

The fourth description of Christians offered in the book unChristian is that Christians are sheltered.  This is something that seems to turn people outside of the church off to Christianity because they see Christians as having a disconnect from the world around them.  This makes people see Christians as people who can relate to real world situations and struggles.  This idea of Christians being sheltered is something that the church today seems to embrace.  The argument is used that the world is sinful and evil and that we should shelter ourselves from the world by constructing a Christian bunker within the walls of our church so that we do not let the evil of the world rub off on us.  This is seen in the great amount of church programs and Christian companies we have in America.  It is now possible with the additions of the many Christian companies to go work out, go to the doctor, and go through our everyday lives as Christians and have very little interaction with people who do not know Christ.  This is also seen by all of the opportunities that Christians have to be involved in church functions which have gone from being just a Sunday and Wednesday thing to something that you could be involved in almost everyday of the week.  I am not saying that either of these things are bad in and of themselves, but we are without knowing it creating an in-group versus out-group mentality.  The Christian in-group is who we spend all of our time with while missing an entire out-group who needs to be told about Jesus.  This sheltering in the Christian bunker keeps us from fulfilling the Great Commission and reaching others with the love and gospel of Jesus Christ.  We seem to spend most of our time hanging out with the religious people, yet we claim to follow a Savior who spent His time ministering to prostitutes and tax collectors.  Jesus hung out with the out-group crowd while we so often stay to the in-group crowd.  Jesus called us to be in the world but not of it.  We are bunkering ourselves in a Christian bubble in order to be not of the world but are missing the fact that no matter how think we think that our bubble is we are still in the world.  Since we are clearly in this world, we must look for ways to connect to the hurting world around us in need of a Savior.  I think that this can be done through many ways, but it must start by building relationships with people in the out-group.  Once relationships are being developed, we can then open up and share the gospel with others.  This is done partially through finding a common ground whether that be a longing or desire or an idea presented in a movie that you both have seen.  We must be willing to learn and be exposed to the culture enough that we know how to speak its language.  This is a language that revolves around media and different worldviews presented therein.  We must be willing to open out eyes to what people around us are seeing and experiencing in order to know how to connect to their lives and experiences in order to share Jesus with them and make them disciples.  Christianity was never intended to be lived in a monastery or the modern-day Christian bunker.  We must embrace the call of Jesus to impact others by first and foremost being willing to come out of our cave and build relationships with them.

The third perception of Christians as presented in unChristian is that Christians are antihomosexual.  This perception comes from Christians tending to harp on this particular sin over all the rest.  Christians also tend to further promote their negative view of homosexuals by making jokes about them and treating them differently from everyone else. Christians look down on homosexuals and so often see themselves as superior.  There is a difference in opposing legislation regarding homosexuality and being antihomosexual.  I would argue that you are not being antihomosexual if you vote against a bill that would give marriage rights to homosexuals if you are against such a piece of legislation.  You become antihomosexual when you begin view them as less than human and horrible people.  They are just people struggling to find acceptance, meaning, and love just like anyone else.  We must extend the love of Jesus to them and not a hatred for them because of the sin that they are struggling with.  Jesus must be the one to change a person’s heart.  We cannot legislate morality and force others to reform their lifestyles prior to Jesus transforming their lives and then by the power of the Holy Spirit transforming their mindset and desires.  We must be willing to love them for the broken people that they are while remembering the broken people that we were before Jesus put us back together. 

The second issue addressed by the book unChristian is the “get saved” mentality of evangelism in the church.  This is something that is really driving young adults who are outside the church away from Christianity.  The problem is that in our seeking to fulfil the mission of Jesus Christ of to the nations we have taken on the wrong mentality.  We see our goal in evangelism being to get people saved instead of seeking to make people disciples of Jesus.  Let me explain the difference.  The “get saved” mentality focuses on seeing how many people that we can save which is not a bad thing in and of itself.  The problem comes that when we are trying to get people saved it easily becomes a numbers game.  There are so many churches that are so focused on success which is becoming defined by the number of people who attend every week.  This desire for more numbers leads us to present the gospel in a way which comes across wrong to the people we are trying to share Jesus with.  We live in a world where our lives are dominated by marketing and advertisements.  We see them all of the time, and they have become the backdrop of our lives.  So when we present the gospel to someone and it sounds very similar to selling them a used car, we have lost our effectiveness in evangelism.  People do not need to be sold Jesus and being told that they can “get saved” in a few mumbled words to God.  This mentality also leads to a huge gap in our theology of the Christian life.  Jesus never called anyone to “get saved” and stop there.  We so often leave people who just got ”saved” in a bad position because we present following Christ in a way where it is seen as a single decision that a person would make, such as becoming an organ donor, that would have no real effect until after death.  Our salvation is intended to totally reshape every aspect of our lives.  We are saved in order to live out the gospel and to bring others into a lifestyle of following Jesus and making His gospel known to the nations.  Anything less than this is selling people short of the gospel.  The proper response and view on evangelism is the view that is laid out by Jesus in the context of the Great Commission.  He calls us to go and “make disciples” not to go and get people saved.  Making disciples is a process of not only introducing people to Christ but taking the next step in discipling them to show them what it means to live a life guided by Jesus.  This includes a life lived seeking to fulfil the call of Jesus on our lives to go into all parts of the world and to make disciples of others.  Evangelism is a process that cannot stop with just a decision but must be followed up by discipleship.  This is a key that the church has been lacking and another reason why people drift away from the church in their college and young adult years.

The first main issue brought to light in the book unChristian is the negative view expressed by so many young adults both inside and outside the church that the church is hypocritical.  The main connotation that this term takes on in the minds of young adults is that the people in the church say one thing and yet do another.  Hypocrisy in one way or another will always exist in the church because the church is made up of imperfect people trying to follow a perfect Savior.  Christians find themselves in a life-long process of sanctification. Let’s break down this process and big theological term. When a person accepts Jesus Christ as Lord, they become righteous and holy before God, but this righteousness and holiness is not because of the way they lived but rather because of Jesus Christ living a sinless life on their behalf and taking their place.   Sanctification is the process by which the Holy Spirit fills in the gaps between our unrighteous and unholy lives and the pure righteousness and holiness with which God views us in light of Jesus Christ taking our unrighteous and unholy lives and paying the penalty for them on the cross.  This is a slow and lifelong process of being conformed into the image of Jesus.  No Christian has attained a sinless and holy life on earth, except Jesus, so therefore the church will always have gaps between the holiness laid out for it as the Bride of Christ in scripture and the attempt at a holy life lived out by Christians under the power of the Holy Spirit.  This is something that must be recognized.  I think the main issue here, however, is not the times that each one of us fail to live and act out what we believe.  I feel that the main issue that is turning young adults away from the church is the promotion of the moral superiority of church leaders that is so often seen in our churches.  This causes leads to an inauthenticity in leaders by not sharing with others the fact that the Christian life is a struggle to follow after Christ even for church leaders and that they are still in this process.  When leaders fail to admit that they struggle and are vulnerable, this leads people to view them as hypocrites when they fall into sin in any area of their lives.  There is a balance between what a leader should and should not share with regard to struggles that needs to be determined, but the one thing that the church needs to come back to, starting with the leadership, is an authenticity that makes us willing to say that we do struggle and do not represent Christ perfectly at all times.  We are on a journey of becoming more like Christ which sometimes looks a little messy.  We are all fallen people who are through the work of the Holy Spirit becoming the people that God desires us to be.

We live in a culture in the United States where most students are involved in some sort of church experience during their childhood and early teens but seem to lose any connection with the church when they reach their later high school years and go off to college.  There are so many statistics that make us cringe about the students walking away from their faith.  The current generation of teens and young adults has been described by researchers as one of the most spiritual generations in decades.  So the question is why does such a spiritual generation want nothing to do with the church?  This is a question that I have been struggling with over the last several years seeing friends who I grew up with walk away from the church and my own disillusionment with the church.  I recently discovered a book that is willing to step up and address the issues involved.  This is a book by Barna Research group’s David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons called unChristian: What a New Generation Thinks About Christianity…and Why It Matters.  Over the next few days, I will be diving into the research from this book and offer some suggestions to how each and every one of us, myself included, can more accurately display the heart of Jesus to a watching world.  I feel like the key issue in students leaving the church is that they look at the Bible at the life and priorities of Jesus and then look at the Christians that they know and do not see the people that claim to follow Jesus truly living like Jesus.  For more information about the research or to get your copy of unChristian, check out the website.