Fast-forward two weeks.
Practice 3
When Isolation and Mistrust Are the Norms, Forge Meaningful, Intergenerational Relationships
Building meaningful relationships means being devoted to fellow believers we want to be around and become.
My wife, Jade, and I (Mark) are sitting across the living room from a young couple. Their wedding is coming up, and I have been asked to officiate. Even though this twosome is younger than usual, especially with the trend of Millennials getting married in their late twenties, my first session with them leaves me feeling impressed. They display maturity beyond their years and have all the building blocks of a strong relationship that normally lead to a healthy marriage.
As I always do, I’ve asked them to do a premarital inventory before the wedding; this can help set up a couple for communication success in the early months and years of marriage. After some discussion, it becomes obvious that neither has much interest in church even though they both grew up as Christians. Realizing the delicate nature of the subject, I gently venture in, asking about their spiritual backstories.
The mood in the room changes. After an awkward moment, they turn to each other, each hoping the other will jump in first. Finally, the bride-to-be shifts in her seat and begins. “We haven’t talked about church and that stuff a lot. It’s something we both may want to do, but it isn’t really that important to us. Besides, it just feels like a show every weekend, you know? It’s just like spiritual entertainment.”
“Yeah, what she said,” says the young man, and he mumbles some additional details about his parents and about not being against “any of that stuff.”
I can sense both are uncomfortable, and since these are the first hours of our friendship, I decide not to press further until more trust has been built.
Fast-forward two weeks.
The next session comes along. I open the folder to review the assessment results with the smiling twentysomethings and to discuss areas in their relationship in which they have strong compatibility and areas in which they’ll have some work to do. I glance at the printout of results. It shows that faith and spirituality are an opportunity for them to grow as a couple; in fact, these areas also represent the least agreement between the otherwise stable pair.
“This part of your marriage, if addressed, could lead to some of the greatest breakthroughs in your intimacy as a couple and offer strength and hope in times of crisis,” I say as I begin to read the insights from the assessment.
Quite suddenly, just like the first time, the mood in the room turns. The bride-to-be starts talking over me as if she is having a conversation with someone who isn’t in the room. She is speaking softly and quietly, her head turned away. I try to reel the connection back in, but the young woman continues to talk, her attention directed elsewhere. This goes on for nearly five minutes. It’s as though she doesn’t like the radio station she is listening to, so she creates her own stream of content.
Finally, I lean back in my seat.
And then, as if nothing had happened, the bride-to-be looks at me and asks with a smile, “What’s next?”
I feel a sinking feeling in my gut. What did the church do that would create this kind of avoidance behavior? What happened to this poor church girl that she could be so deeply wounded?
This young woman is an extreme example, but we often see a less severe but similar reaction among other young Christians. It’s often rooted in strong emotions.
pain
disconnection
emotional distance
skepticism
withdrawal
Consider that this younger generation has grown up in the most corporate (in the business sense) expression of the local church since its inception. Its leaders have often acted more like entrepreneurs and showmen than prophets and shepherds. Meanwhile, churches have lost influence in their local communities.1 This generation is the first to form their identities—and their perceptions of church—amid high-profile sexual abuse scandals and sky-high levels of church skepticism.
At the same time that the church is fighting back perceptions of irrelevance and extremism, social pressure is leading to more isolation. All of this means that young people have to travel a long road in order to find supportive relationships, inside or outside the church. This leads us to the third practice of resilient disciple making in digital Babylon: when isolation and mistrust are the norms, forge meaningful, intergenerational relationships.
Resilient disciples’ connections in the church are far and away more extensive than those of habitual churchgoers, nomads, or prodigals. The vast majority of resilients firmly assert that “the church is a place where I feel I belong” and “I am connected to a community of Christians” (see table 6). Fewer than half of habituals experience this kind of relational connectedness. Furthermore, as we’ll see, the emotions resilients feel in their churches are far warmer and more positive than others experience. Their churches feel like a family and are made up of people they actually want to be around and become.
Resilients tend to maintain a rich set of friendships and relational connections; they are people people. They exhibit exactly the kind of profile we would hope to see in our own lives and in the lives of those we care about. And this is the case not just because they shake hands with other Christians on their way out the church door on Sundays. Something deeper is going on relationally.
There are two signposts that can lead the way toward meaningful, intergenerational relationships; one is aspirational and the other is reality-based.
The aspirational element is best attained by keeping in mind what the church represents: “the best example of what God can do with human community.”2 Throughout Scripture, and especially in the New Testament, we read exhortations about this kind of Spirit-transformed, cross-shaped community of believers.
I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought. (1 Cor. 1:10 NIV)
And we urge you, brothers and sisters, warn those who are idle and disruptive, encourage the disheartened, help the weak, be patient with everyone. (1 Thess. 5:14 NIV)
Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. (Col. 3:13 NIV)
What a compelling, beautiful picture of the potential of human community!
While we keep this high calling of Christian community in mind, we must also balance it with an “earthy, everyday” understanding of Christian relationships.3 High, heavenly aspiration is kept in tension with the lived reality. In other words, relationships are never perfect.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer reminds us in his seminal book Life Together that we don’t merely bear one another’s burdens; the true burden is bearing one another. We overlook offense. We forgive. We show mercy and grace. We disabuse ourselves of our own pipe dreams and illusions of Christian community in order for the power of that community to take effect.4
Living in the tension between these—the great good of Christian community and the lived reality of its imperfections—is hard, soul-crafting work. And because of the ascendant cultural forces of isolation and loneliness, this work is more needed than ever.
Isolation Nation
We experience some of our highest highs and lowest lows in the context of relationships. Any perusal of literature or history demonstrates the fundamental relational brokenness of human beings.
Fast-forward to today, and relationships are no easier. Despite the progress made in the fields of counseling, psychology, and psychiatry, staying on the path to relational wholeness continues to require grinding effort. On this side of heaven, we’ll never truly experience relational wholeness due to the inherent fractures endemic to human hearts.
Digital Babylon doesn’t make things any easier, even though we are more technologically connected. We have more tools of communication at our disposal than ever before, and there are truly wonderful elements to life in the modern world. Who would want to go back to the 1990s, when we had only landlines and snail mail and we couldn’t FaceTime to check in with relatives or friends who lived abroad?
Yet in spite of all the technology that connects us, the isolating conditions we face show no sign of letting up.
Epidemic Loneliness
Today, an epidemic of loneliness sequesters tens of millions of people. Barna’s data shows that adults are twice as likely to say they are lonely compared to a decade ago; about one out of five Americans say they feel lonely. Regardless of the hundreds of millions of smartphones we’ve bought, apps we’ve loaded, posts we’ve written and read, and the “likes” and retweets we’ve given and received, we feel lonelier than ever.
Can you imagine how that’s possible? You probably can. While our screens provide a plethora of opportunities to connect, we’re spending more and more of our hours in digital bubbles, rarely interacting in a meaningful way with real human beings. Just read some of the stories of suicides or mass killings, and you’ll find a common thread: tragic levels of isolation. Even before the era of ubiquitous digital connections, Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone describes the collapse of America’s social connectedness, in many ways predicting our emergence as an isolation nation.
Christians have an opportunity to provide a comprehensive solution to this kind of isolation by spending time together in and through the church.
Digital Strain
Another problem of isolation is that screens allow us to avoid the hard work of being human. Interpersonal interactions, mediated as they are by screens, often become rarer and more difficult. Breaking up via texts. Twitter fights. Facebook monologues. Cyberbullying. There is plenty of evidence that people will say and do things digitally that they would never consider saying or doing in person. Yet most people say they would rather use digital, text-based communication than talk things through in real life. We see this all the time in the business world, where workers would rather send an email than pick up the phone. “It’s just easier. I don’t want to bother them or be bothered.”
Digital life strains families too. Given the addictive nature of screens, more tension exists in households when it comes to technology than ever before. Parents pounce on their kids (“No more screen time today!”). Children feel their parents are screen hypocrites (“Leave your work at the office! Put your phone down and listen to us!”). The subtitle of Jean Twenge’s excellent book iGen says it all: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy—and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood—and What That Means for the Rest of Us. There are extreme challenges in raising relationally whole kids in the present digital environment. Churches need to provide structures that minimize digital strain in order to produce relationally whole, relationally enabled people.
Questioning the Meaning of Life
Another component of our isolating times is the popularization of nihilistic worldviews, which reject moral and religious underpinnings to life. Life is essentially meaningless. Take 13 Reasons Why, which is a popular Netflix teen drama describing thirteen reasons why a young woman decides to commit suicide. The fictional young woman leaves a series of videos enumerating her reasons (most of which are based on real and heartbreaking relational breakdown) for making this “sensible” decision. It’s a cold calculus that life can be weighed in the balance of the “reasons” to live or to take one’s life. This was a wildly popular book and is now a wildly popular program, which algorithms recommend to multitudes of viewers each month.
At the other end of the spectrum, digital Babylon tempts us to believe that human bodies have no limitation. We can extend our lives and influence indefinitely. In the gaming world, we can bulk up or slim down, making our avatars anything we wish them to be. By way of social media and YouTube, we can extend our thoughts, our visages, and our brands around the world. The body seems to matter less and less as we embrace this practice of living in a variety of disembodied ways.
Christian relationships provide a deeper way to discover meaning in human life as well as the blessings and limitations of the human body, what the Catholic community calls the theology of the body.5
Another contributing factor to this isolation nation has been the steady rise of individualization—everything is my-sized. As we described earlier, individuality can be a good thing, and God’s love for individual persons is one of the most distinctive parts of Christian theology; each and every soul matters to God, and it should to us too.
Still, our my-sized world has led to an overwhelming me-first set of expectations, especially when so much of life is experienced through screens two feet from our faces. There’s even a term for the reflective, self-focused output of the smartphone era: the selfie! Capture the perfect image of me, myself, and I. This is so strange that a time traveler from the past would wonder at our mental stability.
But almost all of us take selfies, don’t we?
In what ways have the screen era and the selfie phenomenon contributed to the breakdown of community and a crisis of loneliness? One of the fascinating developments is the fact that Americans are highly likely to say their friendships are formed with people who are most like themselves—in terms of ethnicity, religion, education, faith. It’s true that birds of a feather tend to flock together, but the digital commons allows us to hole up in our own nests.
The church can and must be a place that brings people together across differences and in pursuit of more than ourselves. But this isn’t an easy or straightforward endeavor.
In fact, many people are extending their individualism to spirituality.
In a study we conducted for Navigators, The State of Discipleship, we discovered that people, especially young Christians, believe that discipleship can be accomplished as a solo effort.6 For example, 41 percent of Christians say, “I believe my spiritual life is entirely private,” and 37 percent say that they want to be discipled “on my own.”
“Solo discipleship” may as well be an oxymoron, because those two words are completely antithetical, like pretty ugly, jumbo shrimp, a deafening silence, or acting naturally. Yet so often church is created for the individual. Songs are sung vertically to God; we no longer sing “horizontally” to one another. Even sacraments like baptism are often described in terms of individual spiritual journeys, disembodied from the corporate experience of the body of Christ. Both the vertical and the horizontal are important. A good litmus test is whether worship or baptism would be possible without other people in the pew. If you can do it on your own, it probably isn’t church.
To disciple effectively in digital Babylon, we have to confront the myth of lone-wolf, do-it-yourself, sole-proprietorship discipleship. To do so, some churches have moved to a covenantal model of membership. To be a member of the Village Church in Texas, for example, a believer enters into a covenant similar to a marriage, with both sides making solemn promises before God, because “membership at the Village is participation in a family, a microcosm of the universal household of God. All members are united to Christ and thus to each other.”7
In God (and Church) We Mistrust
A few years ago, the Barna team was conducting research among teenagers who had left the church. While interviewing a young woman about her relationships within the church before she left, David asked, “Did you have good friendships at the church?”
“No, not really. I guess a couple of my age group were my friends, but not close.”
“None of the adults?”
“No.”
“What about the youth pastor?”
“The youth pastor was paid to be my friend.”
David needed a couple of seconds to catch his breath. “What do you mean?”
“That was part of his job. He’s paid to be a marketer of church to teenagers.”
Ouch.
That intense exchange and the one described at the beginning of this chapter exemplify the sediment of mistrust building up in and around the next generation. Beyond isolation, another layer to the relational pressures facing Gen Z and Millennials is skepticism about leaders and institutions that previously were seen as authoritative without question.
The stereotypes between generations can be barbaric. Ask a roomful of older adults what they think of Millennials, and you will see the mud start to sling. Interestingly, younger adults, while certainly not angels, are less likely to hold negative opinions and stereotypes of older adults than their parents and grandparents hold about them. For example, this percentage is nearly zero: Christians over the age of fifty who believe that Millennials are among the most generous or the most hospitable in their church. But Millennials are magnanimous when ascribing generosity or hospitality to Boomers.
In other words, when it comes to dredging up bad feelings, older adults are masterful. And yet our churches must be places that cut through generational clutter and reconcile people to one another in and through Christ. (We’ll propose some ideas for how to do this in pages to come.)
Pastors are aging and thus have greater difficulty connecting with younger generations, if you believe the conventional wisdom that communicators ideally need to be within a ten-year age range of their audiences. It’s not that older pastors are unable to connect with younger audiences; we just need leaders across all age ranges. We’re finding, though, that younger leaders are increasingly rare. In a study conducted for Pepperdine University, Barna discovered that the typical Protestant pastor in the US today is fifty-four years old—ten years older than the average age of pastors in 1992.8
The industry of ministry leaders is aging. And that’s a problem because without a sufficient supply of younger leaders advocating for the gospel—and for meaningful, intergenerational relationships in Christ—the church will struggle to raise enough leaders and future disciples.
Taking mistrust to an even deeper level are the brutal revelations of clergy abuse and the horror of #metoo and #churchtoo stories. Shining a light on these sickening injustices is good and healthy, albeit painful. Unfortunately, the negative perceptions produced by these situations often cast suspicion on tens of thousands of leaders who are not guilty, leading to further disengagement from the church community.
Church as Business
Our research has uncovered that many young Christians also mistrust the “big business” of church. These perceptions sound a note of caution not just to the biggest ministries and churches but to churches of any size. In our effort to achieve “success” as a church, are we sacrificing discipleship and the opportunity to transform people? In what ways can our churches be more human, more humanized? What is the relational IQ of our churches? We need to ask hard questions on this front because it matters. Could teens and young adults be getting the impression that staff are “paid to be their friend”? In what ways is the business of church contributing to relational mistrust?
By the way, we should run our churches in a transparent, efficient, and, yes, even businesslike way. But the driving ethos of the church should never feel corporate or stale. Our God is big enough to care about the hairs on each head and the condition of our souls; our experiences of church must embody this kind of personal and relational God.
Weaponized Humor
Another dimension of relational breakdown and mistrust in digital Babylon is the callousness of what we find entertaining or, more specifically, what we laugh at. God designed humor, and Scripture even describes it as a medicine. It plays a critical role in human life, sprinkling humility into arrogance and dousing anguish and anger with much-needed perspective. Satire, for instance, can provide corrective action to societal problems by speaking truth to power and helping to realign the imagination toward the good, true, and beautiful.
Yet Barna intends to conduct more research on the use and power of humor because we hypothesize that the kinds of things that are considered funny today are much more snarky and sarcastic than in the past. On the plus side, there has been a growing awareness that humor that denigrates race, sexuality, obesity, and disability is morally wrong. Still, consider that the kinds of programs we find entertaining often have a cynical way of portraying the world. The next generation has been raised on a steady diet of this kind of humor: The Daily Show, The Office, Jackass, and so on. Also consider the way Twitter or Facebook has led us to believe we are all effective comedians. Humor has been weaponized.
Think of Michael Scott from The Office television series. He is a self-important man who epitomizes the stupid things that bosses do and say. The Office is a “mockumentary” made to look like the real thing but told from a point of view that makes the true enough aspects of office life feel like a farce. One of the underlying messages of The Office—yes, there are messages in entertainment—is that workplace politics are so dysfunctional that surviving each day is the best one can hope for. We suspect that as members of today’s generation ingest this kind of portrayal of working life, they can’t help but change their engagement in real life for the worse, making them cynical and guarded, afraid to be openhanded and openhearted about contributing to a more functional workplace.
We are being conditioned to exhibit less confidence in others, particularly those in positions of authority. Digital Babylon frames our reality: people who are really, really, really earnest—like pastors—are probably nothing more than self-important people and perhaps even frauds. We are hearing from more pastors and youth pastors that their job as communicators is getting more difficult in part because people are more skeptical of the sage on the stage.
We contend that the changing role of humor contributes to a more anxious age in which we find reasons to mistrust one another and respond with sarcasm in the ordinary parts of life. As we disciple the next generation, how can we live with greater trust and openness toward one another?
Rediscovering Relationships in the Church
Mistrust and relational isolation cut at the heart of human and Christian community. To use a simple metaphor, the walls are higher and the barriers are thicker between us and meaningful relationships. And that means it’s more difficult for us to find critical, livable answers to some of our hearts’ deepest longings.
As we said earlier, the church can and should provide answers to the deepest questions of humanity in and through Jesus. In this case, our search for relational intimacy and supportive, others-oriented community is found in the church. As part of the community of Jesus, we bear one another’s burdens. We experience love and intimacy. In short, we find that we are loved, we experience authentic friendship, and we discover people who care deeply about us.
In exile, the church can provide answers to a relationally hurting society. The Christian community today has an amazing opportunity to address the epidemic of isolation and counteract the atomizing effects of digital Babylon—and thereby diminish the mistrust and isolation we’re all experiencing.
Did you catch that? The church can help fill a massive gap in our society: the desire to be loved, to be acknowledged for more than what we produce, to be known.
Resilient disciples have robust relationships in many different dimensions of their lives. In our survey, we inquired about relational connections without specifically talking about church, faith, or Christianity. As you can see in table 7, resilient disciples are far and away more relationally well-rounded than others their age.
More than three-quarters say they have “at least one close friend I trust with my secrets,” “when growing up, I had close personal friends who were adults,” and “I have someone in my life, other than family, who I can go to for advice on personal issues.” Two-thirds of resilients strongly agree with the statements “My friends help me to be a better person” and “I have friends and family who are honest with me about my weaknesses.” More than half firmly agree with the idea that “I am very content when I am by myself,” which is another indicator of relational wholeness. Flashes of loneliness don’t sneak up on them as often as others when they are alone. Finally, resilients are most likely to say, “I wish I had more close friendships”—an additional mark of an appropriate level of self-insufficiency.
In comparing resilient disciples to the other young adults who grew up as Christians, it’s striking to see that being a resilient disciple, which is based on a set of questions about theology and faith engagement, correlates to overall relational well-being. Keep in mind, as we’ve cautioned before, that correlation doesn’t imply causation; we don’t know what factors come first. However, this kind of relational resilience is something all of us want, whether we’re Christian or not. These young exemplars show us that a kind of relationally connected life is possible, even if they have room for growth too.
Christians can help to answer the deepest longings of our society for connection. Then instead of saying, “In God we mistrust,” people might be able to honestly say, “In God and his people we trust.” Helping people achieve connection is not easy, but there are intentional steps we can take to foster meaningful relationships.
As we turn to some of the practical ways to become this kind of relationally transforming community, we need to remind ourselves of one of the most common pitfalls: thinking this is no big deal. Relationships? Easy enough. Yep, we got that.
You probably don’t. In our experience, it’s especially easy for church leaders, pastors, and parents to assume that supportive relationships are already happening. Please do consider what’s working and why, but also consider that your assumptions may not be as true as you’d like them to be. Relationships are easy to assume, especially when human beings show up for church events. Also, because pastors and church leaders tend to be more relationally minded, they can easily assume the same thing is happening for everyone else too.
With that in mind, let’s dive into ways to build meaningful relationships.
Do the Work of Relational Health and Wholeness
The first step is to have a resilient, robust definition of meaningful relationships. Based on our research, here’s what we’d suggest:
Relationships are meaningful when we are devoted to fellow believers we want to be around and become.
Simple, right? But such relationships are more difficult than you’d think.
Saying we love other Christians is easy, but do we like being around them? That’s the target. We want our young people to enjoy the time they spend with and around other church people. That will likely mean getting together outside of regularly scheduled worship and class times, doing the “stuff” of life together. Many churches focus on what happens during the weekend worship events, and insufficient time is spent working to facilitate experiences in which people grow to like being with one another.
Perhaps older adults could go to kids’ soccer games and school plays (even if they aren’t their own kids or grandkids). We’ve heard of churches that help young people conduct video interviews with the older generations and then create a short film about the history of the church; that film is shown during a weekend worship service, reflecting the voices of the generations coming together.
In fact, making things together can be a powerful relationship builder. An older woman who volunteered in Mark’s youth group was the quintessential TV homemaker with a dash of Betty White thrown in. She made individual birthday cakes for each of the students, specially decorated to reflect their personalities and interests.
A couple of the girls were gushing over how great the cakes tasted and asked her what mix she used. “Mix?!” she said, almost offended. “This doesn’t come out of a box. I make it from scratch!”
The girls looked at each other and then asked, “What does ‘from scratch’ mean?”
What happened next were cooking lessons at that sweet lady’s house. Every girl (and a few of the guys) learned how to bake cakes with ingredients they measured and sifted themselves. After a couple of classes, the kids wanted more, so she taught them how to make a complete Thanksgiving dinner—with gravy made from scratch.
Shared experiences of all types in which generations can connect—short-term mission and work-service trips, mentoring, back-to-school shopping, museum visits, and more—create opportunities for people to enjoy being together. This is something we should prioritize if we hope to help grow meaningful relationships for resilient disciples.
The second element of meaningful relationships is spending time with people we want to become. This looks like young Christians hoping to emulate the lives, aspirations, and values of older generations. We recently came across a tweet that sums up what we should be after here: “The teenager who looks out over the congregation and thinks ‘These are my people—I belong here’ is most likely to look up and say, ‘You are my God—I belong in your presence.’”9
How can we create such a compelling picture in our church communities?
One part of being healthy and whole is admitting when things aren’t working. One year the youth pastor at Mark’s church asked him to lead the senior class group, which in most youth programs sees a major drop-off in attendance over the course of the school year. Mark agreed. The first night he passed out index cards and asked the seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds to anonymously share something they wanted him to know but were reluctant to say out loud, thinking he would then be able to plan his programming for the year based on what was on their minds.
About half the cards had some variation of “I don’t believe in God anymore; I’m just playing along until I graduate.” So rather than planning a bunch of programs and activities, Mark spent the year listening to and talking with the seniors about their doubts. Nothing was off the table. And instead of shrinking, the senior class group grew. And grew. Today, over ten years later, most of those almost-thirty-year-olds are still walking with the Lord.
The resilient disciples we’ve talked to are surprisingly candid about their frustrations and disillusionment with their churches. Yet they haven’t given in, for the most part, to cynicism. They’ve learned to talk about and process their feelings. Experienced a bad church leader? Join the club. Let’s talk it through. Seen something in the church that burst your bubble? That’s pretty normal. Let’s get to the bottom of the illusions we hold about church and figure out what to do with the not-so-great feelings—together.
You may recall the story of Jim allowing a young woman to talk through an exceptionally bad mission trip with a bad leader. Unfortunately, those things happen. We can’t hide them or bury the emotions. Jim told us, “I let her unload the emotional stuff with no challenges. Then after a long time of listening, I suggested that sometimes we need bad leaders in our lives so that we can clarify our own ideas and behaviors as leaders. I didn’t try to defend the other leader, and I tried to move us past blame to more vulnerability.”
We’ve all been disillusioned by someone. Getting past it, and even growing through it, involves talking it through, coming to a broader perspective, and agreeing on a way forward. The process of listening and redirecting the bitterness to more productive outcomes—through relationships—is an important way for resilience to grow.
Seek Specific Relational Outcomes
A second key to building meaningful relationships in exile is being intentional about the desired outcomes of our efforts. As we’ve argued, there are all sorts of land mines on the way to relational wellness. So we can’t casually spend our weeks and months in digital Babylon—in the midst of crushing isolation and systemic mistrust—and hope to come out with meaningful relationships. We must be intentional about our goals.
We’ve seen some of those outcomes in our exploration of the relational wholeness exemplified by resilient disciples. Those specific outcomes are the kinds of things we should aspire to, especially as we consider how to boost the relational network of the next generation: a friend to confide in, adults who are considered friends, a wise adviser, someone who is honest about my weaknesses, a sense of being okay when I am alone.
In addition to general outcomes of friendship and supportive relationships, we discovered evidence that resilient disciples experience a very different kind of Christianity than do habitual churchgoers. Again, we can’t say what comes first, but the gap is astounding. For example, 82 percent of resilients strongly agree that they are connected to a community of Christians, compared to only 33 percent of habitual churchgoers and just 7 percent of nomads (see table 6). That’s a massive gap, and it suggests a very real difference in lived experiences. The top relational predictors of resilient Christians are these: I feel connected to a community of Christians; the church is a place where I feel I belong; I feel loved and valued in my church; I feel connected to people older than me in my church.
Faith communities and Christian households, then, must become resilient villages designed with outcomes in mind. Here are some of the things resilient disciples exemplify:
By showing these outcomes, we hope you will begin to seek ways to achieve them with the young people you encounter in church, at a Christian school or college, or in your family. Evidence suggests that churches, schools, and families that produce resilient disciples have a clear set of well-articulated goals and outcomes in mind, and they run all their decisions through the grid of whether these outcomes will be gained by virtue of their time together.
A good starting place is asking the question “Where are we achieving these goals already?” If the answer is “Um, nowhere,” then ask, “How can we modify existing programs or create new ones to achieve these goals?” The simple addition of meals before and after services could allow broader connections and opportunities to meet and connect with others.
Want to think even further outside the box? Imagine a church with no service and no stage. Yet you still have to accomplish your stated mission. What changes?
Pay Attention to Emotions
The places we want to go and the people we want to hang out with are full of feelings—and these can be positive, negative, or neutral. This is one of the things that most commonly defines the perceptions we uncovered in unChristian and You Lost Me: human beings are quick to discern when they don’t feel welcome.
The implication is that we must assess and build an emotionally healthy context for relationships.10 This happens (or doesn’t) in our families. This occurs (or doesn’t) in our churches. This is facilitated (or isn’t) in our workplaces and institutional structures. We have a responsibility, whatever our age or role, to contribute to this kind of healthy environment.
Look at the data in table 8. Resilient disciples are much more likely than habitual churchgoers, nomads, or prodigals to describe emotionally positive experiences in the context of their churches. Interestingly, nomads are about the same as prodigals, which suggests that the emotional distance between nomads and the church is quite substantial.
Whatever the nature of a young person’s spiritual journey, we can help to bridge the emotional gaps by using words that convey a warm emotional experience. “You are loved and valued here. You are family. We are brothers and sisters in Christ. Tell me how you’re feeling. I am really sorry about how hard it is to grow up today, but you’re safe here.” As we mentioned, dealing frankly and openly with disappointment and dysfunction is helpful.
In addition to what we say, we can also build an emotionally healthy context by offering our most precious resources: our time and our attention. If you think about it, most of what church leaders are compensated for is running worship services and programs, which are important and valuable. And most of the ways we measure and experience “church” involve doing things for people, not necessarily being with people. We have to change this imbalance of program over presence. Doing so will help us create a healthier emotional climate, together.
When we talk to those who attend Christian colleges and universities, they say that one of the best parts of that experience is getting to know—and being known by—the professors and administration. Being invited to have a meal together. Getting to know them outside the classroom. Getting help sorting out difficulties they face. Students notice the people who care. And this is demonstrated by giving time and attention—the ministry of presence.
Even while experiencing better-than-average positive emotions, resilient disciples still show plenty of room for growth, and negative emotions aren’t completely foreign to them. One out of ten feels they are not spiritual enough, and one out of nine says they are disappointed by the hypocrisy of Christians.
We need to evaluate and take action. What are the beneficial emotions people are feeling in my family/church, and how can I/we produce more of them? What are the negative, harmful emotions people are experiencing in my family/church, and how can I/we reduce them?
David used to have a professional coach, and whenever he brought up some negative emotions, she’d say, “David, that feels really sticky. Let’s talk about that more.” Another friend says, “David, don’t take that situation personally. You need to find a better way of thinking about it.” In each of these instances, the coach and the mentor helped identify the emotional context of what was happening—especially inside—in order to respond more effectively.
Now, we’re not talking about simply trying to bring out happy thoughts, like passing out mood-altering drugs at church or plastering smiley emojis on our Sunday faces. Emotionally healthy contexts allow healthy expressions of all emotions. Be angry and do not sin, the Bible says (see Eph. 4:26). Joy and sadness go hand in hand (okay, that’s from Pixar’s Inside Out, but you get the picture). Emotions are a huge part of what it takes for us to feel less isolated, more trusting—and ultimately more Christian. Psychologist and theologian Richard Beck describes his experiences growing up in a particular denomination. Those formative experiences were powerful, he says: “Being ‘Church of Christ’ becomes etched into your limbic system. When you’ve worked through emotions of awkwardness as a child and adolescent you’re not simply a member of the church of Christ intellectually, you’re a member emotionally. That identity goes very, very deep.”11
Be Vulnerable
One of the ways we break down walls of mistrust and isolation is to cultivate vulnerability, to interact with others without wearing masks or putting on pretenses. This kind of vulnerability has allowed Alcoholics Anonymous to thrive; meetings are a place where people can simply be, and are recognized for, who they are.
“Hi, my name is ________, and I’m an alcoholic.”
It’s deeply ironic that in a society more connected than ever, in a culture in which we can pick up a phone and contact any number of friends or “friends,” we are feeling less relationally fulfilled. In the Atlantic, Stephen Marche wrote:
We are living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more accessible. Over the past three decades, technology has delivered to us a world in which we need not be out of contact for a fraction of a moment. In 2010, at a cost of $300 million, 800 miles of fiber-optic cable was laid between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange to shave three milliseconds off trading times. Yet within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation. We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier.12
According to one major study, about 20 percent of Americans (or sixty million people) are unhappy with their lives because of loneliness.13
The church has a unique opportunity to break through this loneliness and introduce real vulnerability by returning to our roots as a confessional community. When we talk about our sin that so easily entangles, we create connections with others that transcend the transaction of posting a selfie in exchange for a few likes.
A big part of vulnerability in a Christian community is the ability to talk about and wrestle with doubt. You Lost Me found that a significant percentage of young people leave the church because they feel it is doubt-less and incapable of helping them handle their doubt. They feel that instead of engaging them in their space of questioning, the church tries to steamroll and look past their legitimate doubts.
In contrast, environments that help young people effectively talk through their doubt are places young people love to be. For example, Christian schools that provide forums for students to discuss their doubt and ask questions and that convey the idea that doubt is not the opposite of faith become places where young people feel accepted and involved.
Creating meaningful relationships within the church can’t be simply about encouragement or positivity. Meaningful relationships often arise out of difficult disagreements along our journey together. Part of being vulnerable is sticking around long enough to work them out.
Take Digital Sabbaths
When a friend recently took his family to a mountain cabin for their annual getaway, they left all their screens at home. As they pulled into the cabin’s driveway after a two-hour drive, he asked his children how it felt to be in the car for that long without playing on any of their devices.
“Freedom!” shouted one of his smiling kids.
“It kind of feels like we’re a family again,” another said.
Could it be that our screens are having a similar effect on our churches—causing us to feel less like family?
Andy Crouch argues in The Tech-Wise Family that our screens should wake up after we do and go to bed before we do.14 What if we deliberately put our screens away one hour a day, one day a week, and one week a year? What if our churches and youth groups taught young people how to have conversations in real life?
Great things are available to Christians on their smartphones: innumerable translations of the Bible, study guides, alarms that can serve as reminders to pray, and instant access to videos of helpful talks given by spiritual leaders. But addiction to screens is also possible. In one Denmark study, over one thousand participants quit Facebook for one week—and reported significant increases in their level of life satisfaction. They also discovered that frequent Facebook users were more likely than those who use it less often to feel angry (20 percent versus 12 percent), depressed (33 percent versus 22 percent), and worried (54 percent versus 41 percent).15
We need to practice consistent Sabbaths away from our screens if we are going to inhabit a better mental space and connect more fruitfully with those around us.
Help Young People Identify Faith Champions
Each young disciple needs champions outside their immediate family who follow Jesus and can sponsor their spiritual development—other adults who can shape them, speak into their lives, and help them develop their gifts. Based on Barna’s research, David is working to deepen this area for his own kids.
One daughter, Annika, has a wonderful friend named Ava, a young mom. The two of them go running together, and my daughter spends time with their family. They text back and forth a lot and have deep, important conversations.
My other daughter, Emily, is under the wing of our friends Andy and Catharine. She’s gone on several trips with them, and they enjoy cool things centered on food, travel, art, and literature. It’s been remarkable to see how strong their connection has become.
My son, Zack, has made numerous connections with adults, all of whom have helped him navigate his life. We recently went through a family crisis, and they helped him deal with some of the grief we were all experiencing.
We can’t overstate the importance of these relationships with adults outside the family, especially as children move through their teen years. There are some things kids simply won’t be able to hear from or work through with their parents. High-quality, Jesus-seeking adults in their lives can help keep them involved in church, be people they want to be around, and provide them with examples they can emulate.
Realize the Crucial Role of Mentors
Intergenerational relationships are central to the concepts we’ve been describing, and these kinds of relationships don’t usually happen by accident. They require intentional planning and consistent effort from everyone involved.
Table 9 reveals that resilient disciples are more intergenerationally connected than their peers. However, there is room for growth even among resilient exemplars.
Four out of ten resilient disciples (more than double of any of the other groups) have had an adult mentor at church, someone other than a staff member. More than half of resilient disciples look to an older person for advice when making difficult decisions.
Of course, there are inherent challenges to these relationships, and one such challenge is that older adults must have some interest in becoming like the next generation. They must see strengths in young exiles that their own generation does not have and recognize that the new generation offers a different way forward. We call this “reciprocal mentoring.” The church needs young exiles, not so we can re-indoctrinate them but so that they can teach us, show us, what it means to grow in digital Babylon.
Exiles have to work out friendships and relationships in an entirely different context, something emphasized in 1 Peter, a letter addressed “to God’s elect, exiles scattered throughout the provinces of Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia” (1:1 NIV). It offers encouragement for the challenges that come with living away from home. The writer implores God’s people to remain faithful, to live holy lives, and to prepare themselves for suffering. But he also has very specific relational exhortations:
Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling. Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms. If anyone speaks, they should do so as one who speaks the very words of God. If anyone serves, they should do so with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ. To him be the glory and the power for ever and ever. Amen. (4:8–11 NIV)
Christian exiles, no matter the era, must be reminded to offer hospitality instead of grumbling, to speak responsibly, to serve one another well, and to operate within their gifts. This is how a new life of meaningful relationships can be forged together, even in exile.
David Medders has a folksy, completely authentic charm. He is uber-friendly. His Alabama accent disarms and draws people in. He adores his family and his grandchildren, serving them and praying for them and anguishing over their highs and lows. And David loves Jesus; it oozes out of everything he says and does. One time he skipped an entire afternoon conference session just to answer a young girl’s questions about faith. He had never met Annika Kinnaman before, but he focused in on her as if she were his own granddaughter.
I (David) met David Medders almost a decade ago in Orlando, Florida. He and his colleague Ralph had asked me to conduct a seminar for Christian college students. I poured my heart into it. My talks lasted most of the morning and afternoon. The students seemed engaged and interested as I described sampling error with stats-packed PowerPoint slides.
At the end of my nearly endless stream of data insights, when you could almost see visible z’s rising from the audience members’ heads, David stood up in front of the seventy-five young leaders sitting in the room. He broke the stats-induced haze with a few jokes, to great effect. The room filled with laughter.
Then David switched gears. “I’d like to personally repent for my generation, the Boomers, and how we’ve let these negative perceptions take root. Did you see all those negative perceptions your generation has of the church? Hypocritical. Judgmental. Antihomosexual.”
He paused as he struggled to catch his voice. “This happened on our watch . . . on my generation’s watch . . . and I am so sorry.”
I’ve rarely seen a room full of anyone, much less college students who’ve endured a stats-laden speech from a droning research geek, get so quiet and focused. They couldn’t believe what they were hearing. I couldn’t. David was apologizing for his entire generation. He continued for nearly ten minutes, sharing heartfelt concern for their dilemma, their future, and their faith, and the emotions of many students began to well up as tears.
Next, he prayed. And he asked students to pray. That hotel in Orlando became someplace holy that afternoon.
The reality of vulnerability.
The power of confessional community.
The presence of Jesus working in hearts.
One thing is as sure as my friend’s southern drawl: David Medders is a Christ follower I want to be around, and the kind I hope to become.