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.

I had the opportunity earlier this week to go visit a ministry in an inner-city neighborhood of Birmingham, Alabama.  This was a ministry that does many things to help the people of this neighborhood, but the main focus of the area of the ministry which we were partnering with was tutoring students after school.  These students ranged from early elementary through high school students.  These kids did not have anyone in their families that could help them with their homework and answer questions about basic subjects.  This was really eye opening to me.  When you grow up in a relatively well-to-do suburb of a medium sized city with parents who both have college degrees, you seem to assume that everyone’s situation is similar to your own since all of your friend’s families had similar situations.  I was really saddened and shocked at what I discovered on the trip across town.  The saddest part which impacted me the most, however, was not the people or the situation itself but rather a box that I saw in the corner of the donation room.  It was a box from a mega-church in the suburbs that is very well known.  The box was filled with tons of toys for the kids, but these toys were not what you would expect.  These toys were not something that any of the mega-church’s kids would ever play with because they were ragged and dirty.  They were the trash of the mega-church kids, but instead of giving them to the garbage man, they decided to give them to the poor kids to which this ministry seeks to impact.  The box was filled to the brim with these toys with a note on the front saying “Love, The Mega-Church.”  Is this truly love?  Do any one of us show our love for someone else by giving them our trash?  This was so sad and convicting to me at the same time.  The church that has it all and can give it all gives something that costs them nothing.  This is so often how each one of us, myself included, views giving to others.  We are called to be the hands and feet of Jesus in all areas of our lives including giving to the “least of these” as Jesus called us to in the Sermon on the Mount.  My hope and prayer is that we would embrace not just the proclamation of the gospel, but the giving of the gospel so that all may taste the goodness of Jesus Christ through our lives.  We are blessed as Abraham was to in turn be a blessing to the nations!  Let us bless well for the glory of our Savior!

I was listening to a podcast today which was an interview with Ron Martoia who was talking about his new book, Static, about the words that we use in sharing our faith.  The premise of his book is that we are losing people in the midst of our churchy and religious language when trying to introduce them to Jesus.  People can so often be overwhelmed by our Christianese that they totally miss the heart of the message.  This book is a call to reexamine the heart of the gospel and to communicate that heart in a way that does not require a church background to understand.  I feel like this is something that we are all guilty of to a great extent.  Jesus spoke words to the longings of the hearts of the people around Him.  He showed them more than words by living out grace and being grace to them.  Our introductory words to people should be more than words.  It should be an outpouring of the grace that God has given us onto others.  Like St. Francis of Assisi said many years ago: “Preach the gospel at all times and if necessary use words.”