Last summer, while working on the staff of a leadership conference for young adults, I decided to post signs around the camp welcoming people to join me in the chapel for compline every night. “Compline,” I wrote on the notice, “is a traditional Christian prayer service for the end of day.” This was not a Christian camp; it is open to people of all faiths, agnostics, and atheists. Participants are young people from all sorts of backgrounds, reflecting fairly well the demographics of society today. I didn’t expect anyone actually to come to compline. The first evening, two college sophomores showed up. I chose not to explain the service, but simply to light the incense and the candle in the midst of the vast, dark space and begin. They joined in. They picked up the tune of the Tallis round quickly. When the service ended, they didn’t want to leave. They just sat in the silence. The next evening, they returned, bringing several friends. The next night, a dozen of us crowded around the candle’s light. All of these people were college students. Few were “active Christians” of any denomination. None had ever heard the word “compline” before. They came back, night after night.
I wondered about that experience for months after the conference ended. What was it that attracted these young adults? How would they explain the experience to their friends back home? Why did compline at a camp at 11 p.m. with “nonpracticing” young adults attract more people than evensong at 5 p.m. in the Episcopal church I serve?
Much has been written recently about the spirituality of the younger generations– the Gen Xers (born approximately 1964-73) and the Bridgers (born approximately 1974-1984). Tom Beaudoin, a young Roman Catholic theologian and author of Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X, argues that Generation X is a deeply sacramental generation, searching for authentic spiritual guides and dependable, genuine communities in which to encounter God and interpret their own experience of the divine. Liturgical churches, Beaudoin believes, have a unique charism in their sacramentalism that has the potential to speak powerfully to this generation’s spiritual yearnings and experiences of suffering.
Nondenominational pastor Dieter Zander, coauthor of Inside the Soul of a New Generation, emphasizes the importance for worship planners of understanding the post-modern mindset of today’s younger adults, with its irreverence, experientialism, and capacity for mystery and paradox. Having grown up in an era of divorce, political disillusionment, and media manipulation, they have watched society’s meta-narratives collapse, and they seek in worship a trustworthy story into which they can insert themselves. They are emphatically uninterested in style or technique, and passionately seeking authenticity and genuine love.
Thom Rainer, Dean of Southern Seminary in Kentucky, reports on his interviews with teenagers in 2000 churches across America in his book The Bridger Generation. He believes that the “bridgers” seek structure, moral boundaries, and direction, and are frustrated by the adults around them who will not mentor them. Bridgers are very religious, but they tend to construct their own “religions” by weaving together elements of lots of spiritual traditions presented to them in the culture. Very few are landing in churches, and those who do are choosing Mormonism, Islam, and fundamentalist Christianity.
These three authors were among the presenters at a recent conference in Baltimore entitled “Gen NeXt and the Church: Virtual Faith and Spiritual Hunger.” Although the focus of the conference was broadly on evangelism, the issue that came bubbling up to the surface, especially for the Gen Xers who attended it, was liturgy. How can our worship reveal the love of God in Christ for today’s younger adults? What in our liturgical heritage is particularly helpful? How (if at all) can projection screens, microphones or even the internet be used to enhance and re-present ancient, saving truths? We shared a frustration that few churches are doing much creative thinking about how to join what Tom Beaudoin called our unique charism– our liturgical heritage and sacramental theology–with the vocabulary, symbols, shared experiences and technological tools of the modern culture within which Gen Xers and Bridgers were formed.
Put simply: liturgists and Gen Xers need to talk to one another! How many young adults in our congregations read Open? How many of you, reading this article, read Fast Company magazine? God is speaking in both places. I believe that we all have a lot to learn from one another. More importantly, such a conversation is crucial to the mission of the church as it moves into the new century. I want to suggest four sets of questions that would be central to such a discussion. These questions might be used within a congregation, perhaps by a worship committee. They might be questions for clergy and liturgists to wonder over together or separately. Most importantly, they are questions worth asking in a venue that includes a broad range of people: churched, unchurched, and dechurched; young and old; professional liturgists and newly baptized adults; traditionalists and charismatics. They are questions, I believe, that lead to the center of our mission: revealing and worshiping God in Christ here and now.
- How have today’s younger adults experienced creation, sin, and redemption in their lives? What are the words they give to these experiences? What are the shared symbols, rituals and cultural expressions of these experiences that they have developed? One of the messages that runs through much of the literature on Generation X is that their lives and culture are not taken seriously by the church. Many recent authors have pointed out how popular music and films, fashion and bodily expressions such as tattooing and body-piercing are dismissed as superficial or irrelevant to faith, rather than being seen as the expression of faith or spiritual yearning that they are. Understanding and taking seriously these movements and symbols is not equivalent to “selling out” to secular culture. It is about seeing seekers as the children of God they are. It is an act of hospitality which prepares us to present the Christian story creatively in a way they can hear.
- How is authenticity communicated in liturgy? Do we believe in the liturgy we create and participate in? Are we passionate about it? The word that came up in nearly every presentation at the Gen NeXt conference in Baltimore was “authenticity.” Time and again, presenters emphasized that what Gen Xers seek more than anything else is authenticity. Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold, in his keynote address, said that what younger adults are looking for when they walk into a church is “glimmers of authentic community.” Their unstated message is, “What I really want is you, not your constructed piety.”
- 3How can we incorporate elements of modern life and culture in our worship in a way that reveals rather than distracts from the gospel? This was perhaps the most hotly debated question at the Gen NeXt conference. What does projecting the scripture readings onto a screen during worship communicate theologically? How can modern visual images be used during the sermon, the prayers or the liturgy of the table to point to a truth beyond words? When much of what is presented on screens or over electronic amplifiers in our culture is fleeting or manipulated, how can we use these tools in a way that is trustworthy? These are, to some extent, age-old issues of inculturation. But the explosion of technological tools, the access to endless information and countless images, and the perception of shortening attention spans in younger generations freights the issue with a new immediacy.
Liturgical churches have so much potential to speak to the spiritual hunger of today’s younger adults. But it will take some willingness on our part to listen, to change, and to let “those people” who don’t look very holy or grounded teach us. As a Gen Xer with a heart for my own generation, and as an Episcopal priest with a deep love of the sacramental life of the church, I look forward to the conversation ahead.