Big Tent Day 1: Millenneal Musings

Greetings from Louisville, KY and the PC(USA) Big Tent gathering.

Big Tent is advertised as a "family reunion" for Presbyterians and it has been great to see friends from around the church and catch up on news of ministries and families and friends.

So this morning I was having coffee at a place across the street from the Convention Center and struck up a conversation with a few other Presbyterians (easily identifiable by the yellow name tags and the theological pun t-shirts).  Two of the group are recent seminary graduates seeking calls and one is still in seminary.

We started talking about ministry in general and the future of the church and eventually the conversation came around to generational shifts in the denomination (shocker, I know).  Born in 1970 I am right in the middle of Gen-X.  The other three are part of Gen Y or Millenneals depending on which name you use for those born 1983 on.

After a few minutes of talking about ministry in different contexts and the growing number of bi-vocational pastors, one of the three said, "the problem with the church is that your generation thinks the institution is so important."  As a Gen-Xer, I reveled in the irony of that declaration being made by a participant in the largest annual gathering of the institution that is the PC(USA).  Irony is important to my people.

I spent a few minutes doing what so many people have done for me over the years and listened patiently as he worked himself up into a lather about the need to re-imagine what it means to be the church and what it means to be the people of God in an anti-institutional post-denominational age.  And if I am fair, I have to admit he made some good points.  There are some pretty substantial chinks in our denominational armor and this guy had a pretty good bead on most of them.

Once he had completed naming the sins of my generation (an I assume he was lumping the Boomers in with us), I posed a question.  "If not the traditional institutional church, what should the church look like today?"  In other words, he had a pretty good idea what is not working, so I wanted to hear what he thought would work.  That's where the conversation got really interesting.

Some of his ideas were familiar: stop worshiping Sunday morning and start worshiping God whenever the people gather; get more creative with liturgy and stop being so staid; Communion should not be saved for special occasions.  Those I had heard.  I was looking for new information.

What else should we be doing/being to reach the Millenneal generation?

His answer can best be summed up as "be different than you are now." There were not any new suggestions beyond what we needed to stop doing.  And that is the problem with so much of our generation focused ecclesiology.  It is too often based on what a generation does NOT want the church to be/do/say.  Want to attract young people, stop doing X, Y, Z.

I don't mean to beat on Millenneals.  My generation did exactly the same thing.  We came out of seminary declaring all the things we were going to fix that the Boomers and the WWII generation messed up.  It is a right of passage for church leaders to criticize past generations of church leaders.  The difference now is that we are at a turning point in the life of the church and we don't have the time or luxury of generational recriminations.  There is work to be done.  Serious work and we need all hands on deck.

So perhaps to move forward we need to stop romanticizing the wisdom of the Millenneals and demonizing the perceived follies of other generations.   At the same time perhaps we should stop putting the salvation of the denomination on the shoulders of one group;  we need to get past generational differences and rely instead on our common calling in Christ;  we need to stop TALKING about how the church needs to change and START CHANGING it.

I'm glad I got the chance to talk to those guys this morning.  It was good to hear the energy and excitement they have about the church (even the institution!) and to share our different perspectives on the form and future of the church.

I guess this is what they mean by Big Tent.