What’s Next
What’s Next
Finding Hope in Exiles
For years, the two of us have advocated for the next generation of believers. We’ve tried to warm up older leaders to the fact that Millennials, and now Gen Z, aren’t going to ruin the world or the church. Sure, there will be frustrations between generations along the way, but young adults and teens today are smart, connected, funny, creative, genuine, ambitious, and optimistic. They are a generation of hope. We, the Christian community, would do well to put our confidence in them.
We’ve spent the last few years researching and listening to young resilient disciples across the country, who are Bible-minded, mission-driven, Jesus-centered people. We come away from this project with massive respect and love for young Jesus followers, these faithful exiles. Yes, they are young and make mistakes. But we were young once too. We made, and continue to make, mistakes by the truckload.
The next generation of resilient Christians face uncertain times. The pressures of digital Babylon are brutally dehumanizing and often antithetical to faith. They deeply feel the dizzying effects of the screen era. They talk about the bittersweet experience of being faithful in exile, their frustrations and disappointments and concerns—often with the church. They, like any group of young leaders who face stiff headwinds, realize their task won’t be easy. Society is confusing, and the Christian community is complicated.
Yet they long to serve and to lead the church into the next decades. We do well to place our hope in them. Our ultimate hope is in the resurrected Christ and his promise of new life. Raising resilient disciples and then trusting the church to their care is an exercise in trusting the Lord.
For many of us, balancing realism and hope is a tall task.
David’s father, Gary Kinnaman, spent nearly thirty years pastoring a church in Phoenix, Arizona. He planted the church in the suburb of Mesa in the mid-1980s and remained there until 2008. The church grew every year under his leadership, reaching weekly attendance of more than five thousand people. But then came several years of declining attendance and giving, so he decided to move along to the next assignment God had for him. He did so in his late fifties, much earlier than most successful leaders with a good salary and job security would think to do.
My dad has always been kingdom minded. For instance, he took very much to heart the idea that the years of decline weren’t his “fault,” that the people of God were not his sole responsibility. But he also took to heart the knowledge that the years of incredible growth were not his doing, so he took no credit for the great things God had done. Being realistic about the ups and downs of ministry allowed my dad to give God the glory.
I asked him recently to describe his decision to step aside. There were many reasons, but two interesting parts of his story are relevant. First, he said I had told him that I couldn’t think of any examples, based on Barna research, of church decline that were turned around by the current pastor. I have no memory of this conversation, but it shows how the Holy Spirit was active in his life, helping him to look squarely and realistically at what might work.
Second, he read a book by Reggie McNeal called The Present Future: Six Tough Questions for the Church. In recounting the impact of the book, he told me, “I read it on a long flight from Australia, so I had a chance to sort of marinate in what it was saying. And I sat there thinking, I don’t really have answers to what Reggie is raising. I don’t think I have the skills in my leadership to lead the church through these issues. That thought left me feeling hollow but also resolved that it was time for me to make a change.”
Freedom comes by facing reality. Stepping away wasn’t easy, but my father’s realism helped him to leave his church gracefully. Today, the church he planted has become Hillsong Phoenix, under the capable leadership of Pastors Terry and Judith Crist.
Facing reality is powerful for those in exile. Jeremiah’s writings pulsate with being realistic. Daniel’s life is marked by sheer determination to call things as they are. Esther’s mantra “If I must die, I must die” is yet another example. As exiles, our resilience depends on our becoming reality-recognition artists.
Exiles are instrumental to God’s purposes. During times of major change and intense pressure, exiles show the way forward. Exiles help to reform and revitalize the church, reorienting it toward God. A faith for exiles represents hope for the church.
In each of the previous chapters, we tried to look squarely at our present condition—specifically, how hard it is to make disciples in post-Christian digital Babylon. At the same time, we also wanted to remind our fellow believers, without equivocation, that the five practices we outlined lead to hope—hope that we find in Jesus. The church will find a way forward, even and especially in exile.
The first practice for resilient discipleship is experiencing Jesus, which relates to finding our soul’s rest—our deepest identity—in Jesus. Problematically, churches often settle for presenting a cheap Brand Jesus imitation, just as our culture sells many false pretenses of identity. Clearing religious clutter to find closeness with and joy in Christ is the starting place for our discipleship efforts. Experiencing Jesus answers the deep longing of human hearts by answering the question Who am I, really?
The second practice is cultural discernment, which relates primarily to the life of the mind—how we think about and perceive our role in a post-Christian environment. Exercising wisdom is harder than ever because the increasing complexity of life correlates with the rising anxiety of our age. In response to these trends and in order to cultivate cultural discernment, churches must become robust learning communities that help people address deep questions related to How should I live?
The third practice is meaningful, intergenerational relationships, an objective of resilience that is often undone by powerful forces of isolation and mistrust. That is, society’s centrifugal force of individualism tends to pull people apart, but the church puts people back together. We aspire to create a community in which people enjoy spending time together and want to emulate one another’s lives. In so doing, we lay a foundation for one of the fundamental questions people ask: Am I really known and loved by anyone?
The fourth practice is vocational discipleship, which involves crafting integrated lives of purpose, especially in the arena of work. Teens and young adults today are smart, connected, ambitious, and career focused. The church can disciple them into their God-given callings—what they were made by their Creator to do—by reframing things such as ambition, generosity, productivity, and meaning. Vocational discipleship builds a foundation to help people wrestle to the ground questions such as What am I called to do with my life?
The fifth and final practice is countercultural mission, the relentless pursuit of faithful and fruitful presence in our communities by living differently from cultural norms (pursuing holiness) and trusting God to show up. Despite cultural pressures toward entitlement and self-centeredness, Christians pursue a life of sacrifice and service to others. But this isn’t merely some social club for doing good; pursuing countercultural mission means acknowledging that God’s design for life is much bigger than we can imagine and helps us address gnawing questions like What is the significance of life? and What kind of legacy am I leaving?
The promise of these five practices reveals the need for both realism and hope. For these five things to “work,” we have to start with a realistic assessment of what makes them difficult to achieve.
Get Real
We have had so many conversations with pastors and teachers whose underlying (and sometimes overt) assumption is that what they do on weekends in worship services will be sufficient to bring about the kind of life change they hope to see in their people. David distinctly remembers having dinner with a good pastor friend who, upon hearing about the five practices we’ve covered in this book, said, “I think we’ve got those five things nailed with our new worship service.”
What? Nailed? I just told you about them, David thought. I must have described them inadequately, because it’s almost impossible to nail these things.
Pastors, you can’t address the five resilient practices only in worship-service planning. And if you think you can, you’re not being realistic. (Ask yourself if that is how you’re operating. Most pastors have a hard time admitting how much of their time and attention are spent on weekend worship services.)
Parents, you cannot form your kids in the way of Christ just by taking them to church, even though this is very important.
Young Christians, if you want to be a resilient disciple, you’ve got to do more than attend worship. You have to engage in other spiritually formative practices.
If we want to follow Jesus with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, all of us in modern exile must consider the total input and output of our faith. The input can’t simply be a few hundred hours of passive church attendance a year.
While we’re at it, let’s talk about getting real in terms of the words we throw around as though everyone understands what we mean. From research we have conducted at Barna over the years, we know that many churches do not have consistent definitions for a disciple or even discipleship, among many other concepts.1 And while most churches tell us that disciple making is one of the most important activities of the church, few pastors tell us they do it well.
If you’d like, please consider using the definition of discipleship we use in this book: to develop Jesus followers who are resiliently faithful in the face of cultural coercion and who live a vibrant life in the Spirit.
Part of getting real involves getting very specific. Defining terms. Clarifying goals. Keeping a hopeful vision at the center.
Resilient Hope
And finally we come to hope, which is among the most resilience-building gifts God gives. The research we’ve conducted for this study on the exemplary 10 percent of young Christians demonstrates that Jesus’s work is alive and well among millions of young people today, just in the United States alone. This is not a fact to gloss over. As much as we might wring our hands in frustration, the gospel is burning bright in many, many young hearts.
More than mere concepts, these young disciples represent a hopeful future for the church. They embody the way of Jesus and show us how to follow him in digital Babylon.
Hope and realism. They go hand in hand.
You may remember reports of clergy abuse in Pennsylvania that emerged during the summer of 2018. More than one thousand victims came forward to testify to a grand jury about horrific experiences of sexual abuse by priests.2
Dr. Susan Reynolds recorded her experience at church on August 19, 2018, the Sunday after the shocking scope of the Pennsylvania crisis had hit the headlines. Her Twitter feed reflected how Mass unfolded that day.
This morning at Mass, I witnessed something I have never seen, and words still mostly fail me. /1
Our priest gave a powerful homily. He explained how poor ecclesiology has disempowered lay people &, in simple terms, how we must view this crisis as systemic. He affirmed the statement on the bishops’ resignation. He concluded by calling for radical lay-led reform. /2
Then he sat down. And then, in the fifth row, a dad stood up. “HOW?” he pleaded. “TELL US HOW.” His voice was shaking and determined and terrified. His collared shirt was matted to his back with sweat. /3
Jaws dropped. My eyes filled with tears. I’ve belonged to call-and-response parishes. This isn’t one. This is a big, middle of the road parish in a wealthyish Southeast college town. In such contexts it’s hard to imagine a more subversive act than doing what that dad just did. /4
The priest stood up again. He looked the dad in the eyes, and he answered him slowly and haltingly and thoughtfully. The whole thing was so stunning I don’t even remember what he said. But what he didn’t say was, “Sir, please have a seat,” or “We can talk after Mass.” /5
He could have cited preservation of liturgical solemnity as an excuse to dismiss the man and thus escape this terribly uncomfortable moment. Instead, he let this father’s cry interrupt us. He allowed himself to be put on the spot, to answer for things he didn’t do. /6
“I have a son,” the dad said. “He’s going to make his first communion. What am I supposed to tell him?” In his searching, halting response, the priest made space for the wrenching inadequacy of every possible response to be laid bare. /7
This was not a brief, dismissive exchange. 10 minutes at least, and the two also talked at length after mass. At the end of mass, the priest offered to invite the Bishop to the parish for a listening session. “And if he won’t come, I will.” /8
The holy rawness of that dad’s lament and the renegotiation of power it effected transformed the experience of the liturgy in ways that far exceed my ability to articulate them in this moment. /9
People don’t want finessed press releases. They want to name their betrayal out loud, in public, in sacred space, before the tabernacle, before God and one another. They want to be listened to without condescension. They don’t want easy answers. They want contrition. /103
Dr. Reynolds’s digital journal of events lets us feel the emotions in the church that day. Do you see the powerful interplay between realism and hope? There is confession, lament, and aching questions, which are all exercises in realism. But there is also hope, yearning for a better way. Can you imagine how much realistic hope people had to muster just to show up at church? Can you sense how connected that priest had to be to people’s emotions and questions in order to pastor them? How much courageous anguish did the father have to find in himself to stand and publicly question the priest? There isn’t a nice, tidy, gift-wrapped solution to sin and anguish. And yet the community of exiles finds a path forward.
Realism + hope = resilience
The circumstances described here may be extraordinary, but they represent the kind of emotion-laden experiences that are inevitable for all exiles. How clear-eyed can we be in our realism? How courageous can we be in our hope?
Here we are, at the end, and it feels like when I was taking my firstborn to Berkeley.
“I feel like there are a million things I’m forgetting to remind you.”
There are so many things I’d still like to say, so many survey results I’d like to tease out, so many words from other wise people I’d like to leave you with. I would love to encourage you even more about the countercultural profile of young resilient Christians—all the ways we can have hope in what God is doing in them and through them.
You are living in the challenging age of digital Babylon, attempting to make (and to become) resilient disciples in a time when easy entertainment, comfort, and a kind of surface-level prosperity sing their siren song to lure us away from our truest selves and from the true God.
I am mostly realistic about what we are up against, and part of me even feels skeptical about the progress we can make, about the inexorable pull of digital Babylon. Digital Babylon presents us with challenges rarely experienced by the church. The allure of the screen age has surely undermined so much of what we as Jesus followers are trying to do.
And yet.
I am also bound to hope. Hopeful that young students like my daughter can enter the bastions of academia in our country and remain resilient disciples of Christ. Hopeful that the church, the bride of Christ, can become beautiful and transparent and true. Hopeful that, by cultivating these practices, we can form and be formed into disciples who thrive in digital Babylon.
Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.