The Young and the Restless Sermon by Amber Naylor Lake Street Church, February 17, 2019 As many of you know, I am the Director of Youth Programming here at Lake Street Church. In addition to leading the program for the last three years, I have been studying trends in youth ministry and congregational life as part of my master s program. As we strive to build an intergenerational community, there are a few observations from my research I would like to highlight this morning. These are true not just here at Lake Street but across the United States, in all churches and all denominations. To start this conversation, I want us to take a moment to meditate on what pops into our heads when we talk about other generations in this church. Young children, teenagers, young adults, middle aged adults, seniors, and elderly. Here in this church we span six generations. What do we know about each other? What do we assume we know about each other? Pause. A year ago, I traveled to Tanzania for several weeks to attend the Global Mission Conference. I studied, worked, and ate with one hundred young adults from sixty countries and dozens of Christian denominations, envisioning what the 1
future of the Christian faith will be. At the end of our three weeks together, a leader from the World Council of Churches asked us, what was one of the most surprising things you learned here? We replied, It has been easier for us to understand and be understood by other young adults from different races, countries, and cultures, than it is to understand and feel understood by the older generations of our own countries. For us, connecting across race, nationality, language, and religion was easier than connecting across generation. I say this to illustrate intergenerational work is really hard. We live in a world that is changing faster than we ve ever known, and church is one of the few places left in society where we are allowed and invited to connect across generations. Intergenerational work is inefficient, so it is not prioritized in our economy. Ancestral knowledge threatens the power of colonizing education systems. A delegation spanning decades has revolutionary political power. There are external forces that want this to fail. As Dumbledore says, Youth cannot know how age thinks and feels. But old men are guilty if they forget what it was to be young. Like Harry and Dumbledore, Rei and Luke, Katniss and Haymitch, or Frodo and Gandalf, we need each other. 2
If we are going to maintain and grow our intergenerational community, we have to acknowledge that we are talking about being cross-cultural and multilingual. We have to practice that skill. As a community, we know it is wrong to say those black people or poor people just but often, we do say things like, those kids today and old people just It takes a tremendous amount of humility to say to someone older or younger, I have no idea what your life is like. Want to talk about it?, and then sit quietly and listen. We start this work with messy conversations. They might be awkward, because we don t know what to talk about yet. We might be confused, because we use different words for things or talk about technologies that don t translate across generations. They might be painful, because there are hurt feelings or assumptions to work through. I can promise you, they will all be fruitful in some capacity. This brings us to our second challenge. To have a conversation, we have to find each other. To be frank, the millennial generation, about age 22-40, my generation, is almost completely missing. We are not in church. We are not in this church, and we are not in most churches. Further, we are losing Generation Z as well. By age 15, 85% of teenagers have stopped attending church. Here at Lake Street, that number is about 40% for the past few years. What that means is that 3
there is a resounding silence in church from 15-40 year old s whenever we make decisions, whenever we set priorities, whenever we talk about what matters. Over the years, we have learned what does not work to retain people: you cannot buy them back with fancy facilities and technology, you cannot add a rock band and expect it to fix the problem, and you cannot lure them in with programs. No single adventure week, or mission trip or young adult bible study or OWL class or beer and hymns or singles mixer is going to entice the most overprogrammed generations in history. If you are feeling anxious, uncomfortable, or despairing about this situation yet, welcome to my world, and remember that is a great time to look to Scripture. Today s readings are on the Pentecost, when the Ruach, the breath, or the Spirit of God, descended upon Jesus friends. It was just a month after their leader, Jesus, was murdered by the government and then resurrected, and now this motley crew of people who believed in Jesus mission were hiding out, likely feeling anxious, uncomfortable, and despairing. God showed up as a violent wind it says. Not a calm breeze. Not a light draft. No, a violent wind. If you have ever left your windows open in a Chicago summer you know when a violent wind blows through, everything gets 4
overturned. Mail is on the floor, the plant falls off the sill, doors slam, and the whole place is a mess. When the Holy Spirit shows up, she makes a mess. With the help of the Spirit, they were able to overcome their cultural barriers and speak in a way they could understand each other. Instead of hiding within the four walls they ran out into the streets celebrating that they could understand and be understood. It drew crowds. Most people didn t know what to make of them, but many others joined. The community grew. This ragtag bunch of Jesus followers were from all different races, all different nations, and were of all different ages. They flew in the face of the hierarchy and order of the Roman Empire and the rigid religious authorities. The religious leaders even dismissed them as drunks because they didn t do things the way you were supposed to. Peter then quotes the Joel passage we read this morning. A promise that God will be in the midst of Gods people doing unexpected, unusual, and exciting things with the young, the old, and everyone in between. As long as we pay attention, the Spirit will continue to show up to our carefully organized and programmed lives and churches to make a mess and light things on fire. Mostly metaphorically. 5
Just like the very first followers of Jesus, we show up to this space for one main reason: relationships. We want to be understood, and to understand each other. We all crave a community to love us hard, to push us a little, and to make space for us to meet God. I cannot give you the answer to solving the challenges of intergenerational community. I can assure you Church isn t dying, but it is changing. And we don t really know what that will look like. My best advice is to open the windows to invite the violent winds. Embrace the mess. Look for the young people full of fire in the streets, and follow them. If you don t know their language, if for example, this morning s invitation to worship was full of foreign stories to you, maybe start with the young adult section at the library or on Netflix. Shared stories are one of the most powerful tools to build connection. And through it all, remember that God is as present with us as the air we breathe. Blessed be. 6