4: Exiles
Ryan was, in his words, “born on the pew.” That’s only a slight exaggeration. He grew up in a charismatic megachurch in Southern California, attending four worship services and Bible studies per week, plus two or three church-centered social events. His family’s life revolved around church, and Ryan, like his parents, was very serious about faith. At the age of twelve, he asked his youth leader, “Why do we do so many pointless activities like car rallies and lock-ins when people are on their way to hell because they don’t know Jesus?”
Hell figured prominently in Ryan’s childhood theology. He says, “I learned that I was a sinner in constant danger of the fires of hell but I could avoid eternal torment and instead go to heaven if I acknowledged Jesus as my personal Savior. This ‘salvation’ depended on me repenting of every specific sin I committed before I died. So, starting around age seven, I would lie in bed at night and tearfully confess every sin I could think of, begging God to help me remember them all, in case I died in my sleep.”
Ryan was gifted in music and decided to study at a Christian university to prepare for worship ministry. Even though he had misgivings about the gospel he’d grown up with, he “wanted to live as significant a life as possible and I still believed serving in ministry was the primary way to do it.”
He got married and was hired by a large church to launch a “modern” worship service, an idea not everyone in the congregation supported. (Ryan once laid a hand of support on an older lady’s shoulder because she was obviously in the throes of intense intercession, only to realize, when she began to pray aloud, that the “apostate, heretical kid who introduced Satan’s music into our church” was the subject of her petitions.) Despite that, his ministry went well for several years. During the same time, Ryan and his wife, Dawn, got to know many non-Christians in their neighborhood. Their nonbelieving friends seemed always to want to talk about God, Jesus, spirituality, and how to do good in the world, and Ryan and Dawn began to wonder why their church friends, in contrast, seemed obsessed with church programming and conservative politics. There was increasing tension between the part Ryan felt he had to play to keep his church job and the calling he sensed to rethink what it means to “act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8).
Then Dawn began to have major problems with depression and anxiety, making home a very stressful place to be. About the same time, things at work took a turn for the worse, due in large part to negative leadership. Ryan tried to juggle both crises for about a year, but the pressure spun him into a dark depression. Eventually he resigned from the church, which had become increasingly dysfunctional, and focused his remaining energy on Dawn and their marriage.
That was three years ago.
After everything he has experienced in church, Ryan has not given up on Jesus—but he doesn’t plan to work in a church long term. He leads worship part-time in a small faith community while he works toward a degree for a nonchurch career. Ryan says, “I want to build loving friendships with those in the church, but my main focus will be anyone who cares about the things I believe Jesus calls us to care about, whether they label themselves Christian or not. I’ve had too many negative experiences in church and I don’t see myself working inside the institution over the long haul. But I still want my life to be about the way of Jesus.”
Ryan is an example of a person on a third type of spiritual journey, those who feel stuck between two worlds, pushed out and pushed away from something familiar—the exiles.
MODERN-DAY EXILES
In the previous chapter, we got to know nomads and prodigals, two types of dropouts who may be found in any generation but who have certain cultural particularities when they come from the Mosaic generation. In this chapter I want to consider a third way of being “lost” from the church—the path of exiles. For our purposes, let’s define exiles as those who grew up in the church and are now physically or emotionally disconnected in some way, but who also remain energized to pursue God-honoring lives. They feel the loss, in many ways, of the familiar church environment in which they once found meaning, identity, and purpose.[31] They feel lost, yet hopeful.
One hallmark of the exiles is their feeling that their vocation (or professional calling) is disconnected from their church experience. Their Christian background has not prepared them to live and work effectively in society. Their faith is “lost” from Monday through Friday. The Christianity they have learned does not meaningfully speak to the fields of fashion, finance, medicine, science, or media to which they are drawn. Ryan originally thought his calling to music was best expressed through working in a local church. Yet his growing desire to make a difference outside the walls of the church, along with the negative aspects of working inside the church, left him feeling lost and listless.
Before we get to the latest Barna Group research on next-gen exiles, I would like to explore some boundaries for this discussion. This may be a difficult category for you to grasp—it has been for me. So I would like to help you understand what I mean—and don’t mean—when talking about exiles.
First, my use of the term “exile” comes from the Old Testament biblical narrative, most notably the lives of Daniel, Ezekiel, and their less famous friends. These young Hebrews were, as you may know, taken captive or forced into political exile when the nation of Judah was overrun by the kingdom of Babylon, an event that occurred hundreds of years before the time of Christ.
Second, I think the metaphor of exiles works especially well, given the modern-day North American parallels with Babylon. Our cultural backdrop of access, alienation, and authority isn’t far removed from the spirit of Babylon nearly three millennia ago. At its worst, today’s western culture is indulgent, distracted, idol-following, and hedonistic. The time and place may be different, but the tension of living in-but-not-of lives describes the challenge for the faithful both then and now.
The late Richard John Neuhaus, a prominent Catholic thinker in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and theologian Walter Brueggemann, among others, have shown the common challenges faced by modern Christians and ancient exiled Jews. Neuhaus’s last book before his death was American Babylon, in which he suggests that Christians live in exile in a foreign land, for our citizenship is in the kingdom of God. Similarly Brueggemann draws parallels between the “dislocation, uncertainty, and irrelevance of the Old Testament Jewish exiles in Bablyon”[32] and the tensions felt by North American Christians today. Expounding on Brueggeman’s work, Australian leader Michael Frost writes, “The experience that faced the Jewish exiles mirrors the church’s experience today. In fact, the biblical metaphor that best suits our current times and faith situation is that of exile. Just like the Jewish exiles, the church today is grieving its loss and is struggling with humiliation.”[33]
I believe the Christian community must come to grips with its current cultural setting, understand the ways in which our collective experience is like (and unlike) Babylon, and respond faithfully to the new opportunities afforded by exile. Eugene Peterson, translator of the popular biblical paraphrase The Message, writes this: “Every generation faces a changed culture, different social problems and challenges, new patterns of work, evolving economic and political conditions. Much of what a Christian community in each generation does is learn together how this is done in its particular circumstances.”[34]
The desire to tackle this task is strong in exiles, who sense the church’s calling to counter the culture by living Christ-shaped lives. They want to inform and transform the “foreign” culture that surrounds them, rather than withdrawing from it. But many don’t know how. They are trying on new ways of Christ-following that make sense to their communities and careers. Their rejection of some mindsets and methods common to the North American church stem from this desire. They sense that the established church has internalized many of “Babylon’s” values of consumerism, hyperindividualism, and moral compromise instead of living in-but-not-of as kingdom exiles. As a consequence many of today’s exiles, while they are not political exiles in the Old Testament sense, feel isolated and alienated from the Christian community—caught between the church as it is and what they believe it is called to be.
A PROFILE OF EXILES
In our research among young Christians, we encountered a number of views that can help us identify the reality of being stuck between two worlds. As we have for nomads and prodigals, let’s look at some of the characteristics of young exiles and their perspectives about the faith. Then we’ll meet a few exiles who are following Jesus on the frontiers of cultural change.
Estimating the proportion of young exiles is a more complicated task than trying to gauge the proportion of prodigals and nomads. The latter groups are much easier to categorize because they have a discrete profile in terms of leaving church (nomads) or leaving faith (prodigals). I think it’s best to define exiles based on their attitudes and perspectives. As such, our research suggests that about one in ten of eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds with a Christian background qualifies as having a strong exile-like perspective on their faith. At the same time, nearly half of today’s young Christians demonstrate at least some inclinations toward an exilic posture.
This brings up another point. We discovered back and forth movement among nomads and exiles (and occasionally prodigals). Young people move between categories based on their level of engagement with church and their sense of personal commitment to and intensity of faith.
Exiles Describe Their Faith Journeys
Percentage of 18- to 29-year-olds who have a Christian background
completely true of me
completely or mostly true of me
I want to find a way to follow Jesus that connects with the world I live in.
15%
38%
God is more at work outside the church than inside, and I want to be a part of that.
12%
33%
I want to be a Christian without separating myself from the world around me.
14%
32%
I want to help the church change its priorities to be what Jesus intended it to be.
12%
29%
I am a Christian, but the institutional church is a difficult place for me to live out my faith.
8%
21%
Christian community is important, but I want to do more than get together once a week for worship.
10%
23%
I feel stuck between the comfortable faith of my parents and the life I believe God wants from me.
4%
11%
Barna Group | 2011 | N=1,296
EXILES IN THE FLESH
This profile of exiles is research based, but who are these young people in the flesh? Early in the process of writing this book, I presented the findings on prodigals, nomads, and exiles to an intergenerational church group. One twentysomething young woman came up afterward and said that the exile category reassured her about her brother. “Really? What does he do?” I asked.
“He’s an artist, a writer. And he’s really been trying to push our church to do things differently. I think he’s getting under some people’s skin. What you said about the church not understanding his calling in the world and people questioning his motives—that sounds like my brother. He really loves the church, but no one seems to bother to figure out what makes him tick.”
This story illustrates one of our findings from this study. We have learned that most exiles feel tremendous tension between their work, usually in mainstream arenas of society (the arts, media, science, fashion, law, and so on), and their faith. In large measure, they don’t feel supported or equipped by the Christian community to follow Christ in these endeavors. With this in mind, read the following descriptions of a few young exiles I have encountered during the past several years.
Exiles in Hollywood
Justin attended the Peter Stark Producing Program at the University of Southern California’s film school. He is one of the few evangelicals who completed that prestigious graduate level program. His father is a senior leader at one of the nation’s largest megachurches. Since Justin’s graduation, his parents—though enthusiastically supportive of his calling—have struggled with some of their friends to “justify” his films, which have language and other content that seem foreign to his Christian upbringing. His mother says, “I feel like he’s taking on the culture in order to influence it. I wish the church-at-large would understand that our children are called to mission fields that aren’t located on a globe but may be more culturally impacting than mission fields we currently recognize. I wish families like ours would be better understood, supported, and encouraged by the church community.” Justin’s take is that in order to influence the world of entertainment, he has to be willing to learn how to make great films. “A film isn’t Christian just because it has inserted the gospel message in there somehow. A film can point to Christ when it honestly portrays our human condition and invites us to experience something about redemption that each of us needs.”
Exiles in Science
Kathryn has a PhD in computational cell biology (don’t feel bad; I don’t know what that is either). She is actively involved in both the scientific community and in her church. She laments, “Many people I talk to think it’s impossible to embrace both mainstream science (especially evolutionary biology) and traditional Christian faith. Scientists tend to scoff at faith as being anti-intellectual, while Christians tend to reject scientific conclusions out of hand if they don’t fit with their view of the world. This should not be! Christians, of all people, should pursue truth with a spirit of confidence, and the church should take a more active role in encouraging that pursuit.” Kathryn is passionate about challenging the church to deal well with science, but not everyone in the Christian community is convinced she’s headed in the right direction.
Exiles in Music
A few years ago, I spoke to a roomful of young Christian musicians and artists. The meeting was convened by my friend Charlie Peacock at the Art House, a beautiful, old renovated church in Nashville where Charlie and his wife, Andi, offer hospitality and mentoring to young artists. After my talk, I had a chance to get to know some of the up-and-coming musicians. One of them told me that she had been pressured by people in her church not to license her music to a secular television show because “the message would get lost.” She said, “That just seems backwards. I mean, isn’t the message more likely to get ‘found’ if people actually have a chance to hear it?” One of the common denominators among the young musicians I have met is that they want their art to speak for itself, without having to call themselves a “Christian band” or a “Christian musician.”
Exiles in the Newsroom
Eugene is a journalist based in Phoenix. He’s no slouch; some of his work has appeared in national newsmagazines such as Newsweek and USA Today. I met him at a conference, and he said my description of exiles portrays his challenge. “In the newsroom, I am constantly trying to help my editors tell accurate stories about religion and faith communities. So that’s a tough place to be heard. But I am also hit on the other side—Christians who can’t understand why I would work here or why I would work in media at all. Because it’s what I am good at! It was really hard finding a church where I could learn about how to be a good Christian in the middle of this tension.”
Exiles in the Military
I met a U.S. military chaplain a few years back at an Air Force base in Washington, D.C. Gary described the incredible privilege of being a spiritual guide to men and women in the armed forces. “It requires cooperation without compromise, which is different than most ministry settings.” As he described it, chaplains are required to lead worship for various religious traditions. They must understand and appreciate Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, and Muslim traditions and cooperate with adherents to these faiths while not compromising their own faith convictions. “The chaplaincy is a place where we regularly have to navigate cultural and hierarchical tension in ways that are off the map for most religious workers.”
Exiles in University
Michelle and Paul are savvy leaders and strong believers. They live in Canada, an environment that is struggling at least as much as the United States with the cultural changes of access, alienation, and authority. Michelle mentioned to me the last time we were together that their eldest daughter is going to a public university in Vancouver. “I know we raised her right, but Vancouver and university are tough places to remain Christian. We pray for her and talk with her regularly, and she’s doing well. But we often wonder how her faith will hold up. And because we have a lot of confidence in her, we wonder how her development will stretch our faith when she’s done.”
Exiles in Ministry
Jay Bakker is the son of televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, former hosts of Praise the Lord Club or PTL, a religious television talk show. Jay’s dad was caught up in a sex scandal and went to prison after revelations of accounting fraud in the ministry. In the aftermath of his family’s downfall, Jay turned away from church to substance abuse yet eventually he found his way back to Christ. He founded a church called Revolution, “for those who feel rejected by traditional approaches to Christianity . . . to show all people the unconditional love and grace of Jesus without any reservations due to their lifestyles or background, past or future.”[35] His very public stand in favor of gay marriage has won him few friends in the Christian establishment.
Exiles
Rejecting “cultural Christianity” to seek deeper faith in Christ
Feeling stuck between the security of the Christian subculture and the realities of life in today’s society
Struggling to see how their faith connects to their calling or professional interests
Seeing the best in culture and desiring to redeem and renew it—sometimes experiencing the worst in the church
EXILES IN CONTEXT
These stories may make you feel angry or at least uncomfortable—some exiles are pretty far off the reservation, if by “reservation” we mean “acceptable to the Christian establishment.” It is not my intention to defend their views or activities, a handful of which I can’t, in good conscience, endorse. Instead, through their stories, I hope to focus our attention on the larger exile phenomenon these young adults represent.
From exiles in the next generation we often hear such words as “uncertainty,” “improvisation,” and “adaptability.” To the ears of the established Christian generations, these words may sound a lot like “relativism.” Sociologist Robert Wuthnow calls Mosaics a generation of “spiritual tinkerers.” But when we connect the dots between our modern-day “Babylon” and that experienced by the exiles of old, I believe we will see a picture emerge of faithful young adults doing their level best to follow Christ in an upended cultural context—and even showing the church how to be the community of God in a new world.
Let’s take a brief look at the social and spiritual context that faced Daniel, one of history’s most famous exiles, in Babylon. He faced the challenge of living in tension in a discontinuous culture, just as we do now. In his story, we find the familiar themes of access, alienation, and authority.
Access
When Daniel was forcibly moved to Babylon, his world got bigger. Judah, his home country, was a small-town backwater compared to the cosmopolitan Babylonian kingdom—and Daniel was dropped almost directly into the corridors of political, cultural, and academic power. Scripture tells us that he was fed a steady diet of the language and literature of the Babylonians. He experienced instant access (relatively speaking) to ideas and worldviews from across the empire, which stretched from the border of Egypt in the west to Persia in the east. Dealing with that massive influx of new information must have been overwhelming.
Alienation
The minute he arrived in Babylon, Daniel’s upbringing in a particular way of life and faith had to be reevaluated in light of his new reality. He had to make decisions about his faith and purpose, about what to hold on to and what to negotiate—and he had to make those choices very quickly. What had been his default positions were, in this new context, alien.
Exile causes disassociation, which is just another way of saying that, in a new cultural reality, significant relationships, social connections, and other forms of identity are cut off. Daniel had to find new ways to be faithful because the forms and traditions of faithfulness with which he’d grown up were, in Babylon, foreign and often irrelevant.
Authority
Daniel faced the balancing act of submitting to an earthly authority that was set against God while, at the same time, trusting God to sustain him. Reading Daniel’s story centuries later at a safe distance, walking that line looks almost easy; when Daniel chose to pray, knowing that he risked the lions’ den, his trust in God’s sustaining grace was never in question (see Daniel 6). But we should remember that his courage through that episode came after decades in Babylon, during which he had learned, day by day, how to serve the earthly king while trusting the authority of the eternal King.
Here’s the point: the early years of Daniel’s exile in Babylon were not so cut-and-dried. In Daniel 1 we see a young believer not quite so willing to draw a firm line in the sand between what he would and wouldn’t do under Babylon’s authority. It is clear from early on that his intention was to remain a faithful servant of Yahweh, but figuring out how to do so, in exile and under Nebuchadnezzar’s authority, didn’t happen overnight. As young Jewish nobles, Daniel and his friends were carried off from Judah to serve in King Nebuchadnezzar’s court. The young men were forced to adopt Babylonian customs, even taking on new names as part of the indoctrination process—Daniel was called Belteshazzar, while his friends Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah are even today better known as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. This was no small sacrifice, because the new names were derived from pagan deities such as Bel, one of the Babylonian gods; imagine being devoted to the one true God, Yahweh, and having your name forcibly changed to “Bel Worshiper.” On top of that, at least a few biblical historians have suggested that the young Israelite exiles may have been forced to become eunuchs![36]
Daniel’s wisdom and insight garnered him esteem in the Babylonian king’s court, which led eventually to his increasing power and opportunity. With every new promotion, the temptation to capitulate his faith, values, and allegiances to his new cultural reality must have been enormous. Yet Daniel was willing, in order to serve God, to be fully in this foreign culture—even as he had to figure out how not to be of it.
SAME SONG, DIFFERENT MILLENNIUM
Based on our research and a close study of exiles in the Bible, I believe that the number and impact of exiles rises during times of tumultuous social and spiritual transition. Although all dropouts, including nomads and prodigals, are affected to some extent by the environments that surround them, periods of social, technological, and spiritual change give rise to an increased number of exiles from the religious establishment.
That’s a good thing, because the generational patterns of alienation, access, and authority in our day are making these strategically disengaged young people increasingly important to the church’s future. As Christianity moves from the mainstream to play a more marginal role in our culture, and as North America becomes more religiously pluralistic, I believe that exiles are the people most able to help us navigate these changes. When the Christian faith is no longer autopilot for the broader culture, Christians who are comfortable in two worlds can orient the Christian community toward faithfulness in a new setting.
Again for insight, let’s consider the ancient exile’s life. Once in Babylon, Daniel was put on a dietary and training program that was to last three years and include the replacement of his religious upbringing with “the language and literature of the Babylonians” (Dan. 1:4 NLT). This was, obviously, a significant threat to the young Israelite’s beliefs, traditions, and faith. Rather than totally resisting their reeducation, however, Daniel and friends chose, in those early days of their exile, to refuse only the diet proposed by the court officials. And even in this small resistance, we are told that Daniel deferred the final decision to the Babylonian official: “Test us for ten days on a diet of vegetables and water. . . . Then you can decide whether or not to let us continue eating our diet” (Dan. 1:12–13, emphasis added). That certainly doesn’t sound like the Daniel of the lions’ den fame!
The young Israelites seem to have cooperated with many elements of their indoctrination program, and I want to suggest that they did so because they had to find a way to navigate a new cultural reality. The spiritual choices that had been automatic back at home in the nation of Judah were now uncertain, fluid, and almost certainly dangerous. They were pushed into a period of spiritual improvisation. The world they inhabited—much like the one in which we find ourselves—was characterized by greater complexity and more religious pluralism, as well as competing spiritual and political narratives of truth.
To God-fearing people in different circumstances, the adjustments that Daniel and other biblical exiles made may have appeared to be inexcusable or even unforgivable compromises. Yet in Daniel’s case, and in the cases of Esther, Ezekiel, and others, God blessed the exiles during times of cultural and spiritual upheaval—not because they did exactly as their parents would have done, but because they found new ways to be genuinely faithful. And not only that. The work of the exiles led eventually to spiritual renewal within their faith community. God used exiles like Daniel and Esther to restore his people.
Patrick Whitworth, a Christian leader in the UK, writes on the role of exiles during transitional periods:
For much of the last two millennia the church, in conjunction with [political] rulers, created paradigms of power which it later had to change or abandon, if it was to reflect in any way the Lord it claimed to serve. Often these essential changes were only brought about through exiles—individuals, groups, or movements willing to go into different kinds of exile to bring about renewal of mission, or reformation of the ministry of the church.[37]
The challenge for the Christian community is how to respond to the growing number of exiles. Will we do what we can to equip them to make the choices that faced Daniel in Babylon—choices about balancing cultural accommodation and faithful, Christ-centered living? Will we listen to and take to heart their prophetic critiques of the church’s posture toward our increasingly pluralistic society? Will we change our structures, guided by the unchanging truths of Scripture, to nurture their gifts and unique calling into a world deeply loved by, yet in many ways hostile to, God?
If so, I believe we will see the next generation flourish in a new cultural context as they find new ways to be faithful, new ways to be in, not of. And I believe their efforts will bear fruit for all of God’s people, just as the Babylonian exiles blessed and renewed the people of God in ancient days.