A Closing Window of Opportunity?: Bringing Millennials and Gen Z into the Great Commission

(Hello everyone. I've been traveling a lot this summer, and have been able to spend a few weeks in the US for the first time in 3 years. My post today is on a topic which I feel is important for the North American Church, and very relevant to the future of Global Missions from this part of the world.  While there has been great concern over how younger generations now have largely stopped attending church, I submit that this is because attendance was indeed the issue of concern when leadership and ownership should have been. You may disagree with my analysis of how we got here, but we are here. I believe we don't have to stay here, however.)

Don’t Get Them Confused: Millennials vs. Gen Z

Every couple of decades, a new generational cohort comes along, with a fresh outlook and worldview, and sometimes very different assumptions and expectations from those of their predecessors. Millennials were the hot topic for years, with their marked differences from previous generations and defiance of many long-standing US cultural institutions. No longer now the college kids frequently targeted for criticism by their elders, even the youngest Gen Y/Millennials are already getting past their mid-20’s. The college students of today are not Millennials but Generation Z, who have already been exerting their own unique influence on society for years now, albeit to less media fanfare.

People tend to break down the generational differences between Millennial and Gen Z in certain ways: Typically Millennials are regarded as idealistic and concerned with the great events and causes of their time, while Gen Z are seen as more pragmatic and focused on their own day-to-day lives. Millennials have been slower at setting up their own households and pursuing a stable income compared to previous generations, preferring to invest their time and resources in other areas. By contrast Gen Z seem more interested in achieving financial independence, and even starting their own businesses. Most Millennials had the internet from a young age, with smart phones coming later, while Gen Z are mobile device natives who have grown up regarding wifi as a basic resource.

Some more comparisons of Millennials and Gen Z.
This chart was a better summary than most I found.

Rather than compare these stereotypes against each other positively or negatively ("Gen Z are harder workers" "Millennials are more relational"), I believe it’s more helpful to understand them as natural preferences developed at different periods of recent history:

Millennials were the first generation to have access to the online social world at their disposal from a young age, and so there is an innate desire to connect and unite. Inherited material resources and optimism from the Baby Boomer days also provided a context where society seemed to moving forward; Millennials understood their responsibility was to keep that going and make the world a better place, and a great many feel that this is indeed the purpose of their lives.

By contrast, Gen Z grew up in the post-9/11 era, more destabilized, pessimistic, and less prosperous. They feel the stress of financial anxiety more keenly and don’t consider society to be progressing forward. Thus rather than worrying about making the world a better place, they tend to focus on achieving personal security in the midst of uncertain times.

Personally I have experienced the sense that a certain large block of people used to have a voice and influence in the way society as a whole runs, but that it's a sort of privileged group that requires a certain level of social integration and sufficient personal resources, and as society fragments, that group has shrunk drastically and no longer speaks for the majority of society. (Although many senior Americans still imagine that this consensus exists, and try to fight political battles to regain control over it)

Growing up with mostly Boomer parents, many Millennials could at least have witness this world by proxy, and infer that top-down influence was the most effective way to steer society in a better direction. (An increasingly leftist progressive media also assume this as a first principle and communicate accordingly) By contrast, I submit that Gen Z, with mostly Gen X parents who were increasingly outsiders (both inadvertently and by their own jaded and system-weary choice) to that broadly influential social club of "people whose opinion matters". Gen Z also grew up in an increasingly fragmented society, and have little conception of that kind of social integration and inherited influence which existed in the past. Thus the idea of top-down influence obtained by collective process makes less and less sense; they are growing up in an un-integrated society, and each goes their own way as seems best to them. We have arrived at situation described at the very end of the book of Judges: 

"At that time the Israelites left that place and went home to their tribes and clans, each to his own inheritance. In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as they saw fit." - Judges 21:24-25

A Missed Opportunity: Unled Millennials

That may be the condition of society, but let us shift our focus specifically to the Church and Global Missions and how they could be blessed by these new generations: Millennials seek to work in community to bless the world, and they understand the great value of mentoring. Meanwhile Gen Z are focused workers who aren’t afraid to start building amidst uncertainty. These are not only both valuable mindsets for the mission field, but the two are also naturally complementary.

It would be a pity if current leadership in the Church and mission sending agencies missed out on these God-given strengths, but sadly for the Millennial generation this has already happened. The passionate but often naive idealism of Millennials met a prosperity-addled Church in love with its comfort zone, with leaders focused on maintaining an acceptable status quo or still fighting the culture wars of previous decades.

It has been widely observed that Millennials are all but unanimous in their desire to make a difference in the world. Yet, at church they often encountered a lazily fatalistic mentality which insisted things will simply get worse until Jesus comes, simultaneously conflating social and spiritual authority, and thus was increasingly disengaging from the world as popular culture drifted further and further from Bible-belt culture. Few leaders actively recruited maturing students into the great work Christ left us to do, but expected loyal attendance without any undue boat-rocking or change-making, or simply gave over spiritual responsibility for tomorrow's elders and deacons entirely to youth groups, so the adults could continue in their accustomed ways undisturbed. It’s not surprising then that when secular voices told Millennials a more optimistic and empowering tale--that change was coming and necessary, and by working together students like them could indeed make a better and more just world than that of their elders--Millennials allied themselves excitedly to those causes instead, and abandoned church attendance en masse.

For Millennials who did find their way into missions, surveys showed an interest in innovation and teamwork, and their highest priority was to find a seasoned missionary to connect with relationally and be mentored by. Yet arriving on the field they frequently ran into entrenched and outdated ideas and methods which had persisted less due to any bad motives than simple inertia. A sink-or-swim/hands-off mentality often prevailed over missionary mentoring, leading to widespread discouragement and burn-out.

Millennials only partly deserve their reputations as snowflakes.
As always, there is also some projection in those accusations...

It’s Not Too Late: Bringing Millennials into the Fold

Millennials are already changing global missions by their relational and technological focus (and willingness to totally reject defunct narratives and systems) but churches and sending agencies need to find more ways to channel their passion and desire to make a difference. Mentoring, mentioned above, is an urgent and crucial need. Millennials deeply desire to be mentored and led into ministry by people they respect, and then work hard to make a difference there; whether in the workplace or full-time ministry, they have consistently refused to be treated merely as the next batch of workers with an obligation to show up and maintain status quo. Mature believers who have been working actively for the kingdom of God should reach out to Millennial singles and couples and guide them into obedient service, not wait for them to appear.

As a generational cohort, Millennials are often criticized for delaying traditional milestones of adulthood, but that also means they are less tied down than previous generations at this point in their lives. This means it’s late but not too late to bring them back into churches and onto the mission field. The fact that they haven’t shown up doesn’t mean they never will, but it will take relationship building and invested leadership, not expectations of immediate changes in habits or ideological leanings as a sign of spiritual development. As Millennials have children and settle down, they won’t lose their desire to make a difference in the world, and families serving together can be uniquely effective on the mission field too. (Especially in the supportive and relational ministry environment in which Millennials seek to serve).

Coming and Already Here: The Challenge of Gen Z

With all the media focus up till now on Millennials, it’s important to recognize Gen Z are not a hypothetical future challenge, but an opportunity facing us today—they are already graduating college and beginning to enter the workforce. Having initially dropped the ball with Millennials, how can the Church and sending agencies avoid doing the same for another generation?

Fortunately, some lessons learned with Millennials will benefit Gen Z as well:

• The connectivity of the digital age is now increasingly an integral part of operations.
• In recent years many sending organizations have scrambled to catch up to the 21st century and are now moving into better and more flexible positions to work with modern missionaries.
• A mentality shift from waiting for qualified workers, to active recruiting and guidance.

All these things will help reach Gen Z, who will present new challenges to missionary recruiters. They tend to lack the deep Millennial passion to see change in the world, and also increasingly lack background understanding of the legacy of the Church and the missionary task. They are focused on working hard to reach personal goals in a fragmenting society. For them it may often be necessary to start from the beginning and explain why missions is important, why we do it, and what spiritual growth and other benefits they will personally experience as a result of obedient service. ("What's in it for me" is a self-centric question, but a very human one that the Bible anticipates and teaches us to grow beyond)

Gen Z missionary candidates will probably be less likely to come in with a Millennial-style crusading ideological stance on issues of gender, privilege, etc. but will be accustomed to that language and have a live-and-let-live approach; again it will be important for someone with a deep understanding of scriptural (and not merely "conservative christian") teaching on these topics to explain via authentic dialogue (not a long monologue) why a doctrinal or faith statement, etc., has certain firm language on these topics, or why it's absent. (Be sure to include informative graphics and not only text in the explanation)

It is probably also best to share real examples of kingdom opportunities and give them a clear picture of what they’ll be doing (The “it’s complicated, just show up with a willing heart and figure it out” mentality makes a lot less sense to digital natives who may prefer to simply video chat with their future coworkers in the field and get some answers directly), and explain what skills would be helpful to acquire before going in. Lastly, Gen Z members seem not to expect as much hand-holding as Millennials, but they need mentoring and discipling just as much whether they ask for it or not--and they shouldn't need to ask to receive it. In a healthy church culture, it should be the default.

We Millennials and Gen Z are the experienced kingdom workers of the future, but still largely the unrealized opportunity of the present. May we submit ourselves to Christ as obedient servants of His gospel, and may the Church rise up and embrace the opportunity to establish a healthy generational relationship of mature believers actively discipling and guiding their younger brothers and sisters in Christ!

President Trump, and How the Evangelical Church Could Regain Lost Millennials

[This is the first of at least two blogs I'd like to do on the recent election, which was unlike any we've experienced before, and which revealed many interesting things about America and the Church in the process.]

Many have just been finding out the news: The 2016 U.S. Presidential Election ended in a significant electoral win for Trump, while Hillary retained a slight edge in the overall popular vote. My Facebook wall is covered with people in the various stages of grief, mostly Christian millennials.

Why do millennial evangelicals break so sharply with their elders, who voted overwhelmingly for Trump, in not only not refusing to support him but finding it repugnant that any evangelicals could?

I believe there is a very natural answer, and in exploring it we also discover one of the primary reasons churches have had such difficulty attracting or keeping millennials. Let's take a look:

1. How do we "do" our Christian Identity in an Election Year?

As Christians we recognize that our political identity, if we are to have one at all, must be subservient to and interpreted in the light of our Christian identity. We are not voiceless in a democracy as Christians were in the Roman Empire, but are blessed to each have a tiny part and responsibility in self-governance. But without any clear examples in scripture of being a Christian in a post-Christian political climate, there is no roadmap on how to do this. Many people end up with an unsatisfying hybrid that seems open to guilt attacks from both sides.

On the one hand you might hear, "How come you seem to love your version of America more enthusiastically than the Jesus?" and on the other, "If you have the chance to stand against aggressively anti-God forces in our culture, how can you be a Christian and not do that?" My Facebook wall has been full of both sentiments.

2016 has been very eye-opening for me in this regard. I have watched a wide range of people, many with a firm grasp of scripture, promoting opinions and ideas that stem from a secular humanist worldview utterly at odds with that of scripture itself. They do this with the best of intentions and without perceiving anything paradoxical, and indeed often regarding themselves as the prophetic voice of moral authority and justice, crying out in a wilderness of idolatrous patriotism and cold-hearted preference for order rather than chaos.

There are multiple reasons for this unconscious dichotomy, but a primary one begins, I submit, with the unfortunate reality that when it comes to "doing life as a Christian," evangelicalism tends towards the very abstract. A focus on sound doctrine and careful theology attracts abstract thinkers, and without an intentional effort to provide a rich and thorough Christian life, courageous obedience lived out in the flesh and not merely the mind, the whole thing perpetuates itself as a series of propositions. We might have very sound doctrine, but struggle to make that sound compelling to those who prefer to sleep in on Sunday mornings.

2. Leadership: The Vital Missing Element

To avoid the problem above and flesh the Christian life out in a concrete and not merely abstract sense (or really to tackle any difficult task in the world) people need leaders who set examples to follow. So, in a healthy church, younger Christians are led by older Christians, new believers are discipled by spiritually mature and godly men and women, and in this way the Way of Christ is not merely explained but demonstrated to a new generation.

Generally speaking, it can be seen that Millennials especially tend to choose their leaders based on Causes, on shared burdens and passions. When they find leaders setting the pace to address causes dear to them, they follow. Having become followers, how they "do" their faith and how other convictions are ranked will follow the example of those leaders too. Here's an example to show what I mean:

Suffering
It has become widely recognized in recent years that the Church in America lacks any coherent theology of suffering. For generations now, Americans have viewed suffering as inherently wrong and unnatural, vs. a natural and unavoidable part of life in this sin-corrupted world, and indeed something to be bravely embraced on some level by Christians (2 Tim 2:3). Americans on the whole are so suffering-averse, however, that many people consider infanticide by abortion a reasonable decision based on even a high probability that a child's life on earth might involve lots of suffering, or if having the child would result in too much emotional suffering on the part of the mother.
The message is clear: avoiding suffering is considered more important than life itself.

The extreme desire to avoid suffering is a truth of the human condition, of course, not specifically an American problem; a major world religion (Buddhism) is based largely around how to utterly escape it. So one can't expect Americans--who find themselves born into a nation where suffering is remarkably absent, historically speaking--to suddenly rush to embrace it. In 2016 no one can be unaware of just how much suffering there is in the wider world, however, so the question of what to do about it is still urgent and pressing.

Like any generation, Millennials want an enemy to conquer. Born into comparative ease, peace, and plenty, many have noticed all do not equally share in these riches, and have chosen injustice as their adversary. But young Christians in the US who are passionate about alleviating suffering and injustice didn't find much in traditional churches on that topic. Seeking to better educate themselves and get involved in the ministry of alleviation of suffering, they quickly found that the Left 'owns' this topic, though they typically don't think of it as "the Left," only "those voices speaking up about suffering and justice." And especially for younger people, those voices who speak in a way that resonates with their passion on this subject will soon come to have authority for them on other matters as well.

3. Millennial Convictions

So on the political side of things, that's how you suddenly have a generation of young Christians who, for example, largely don't see what the big deal is about socialism. Why should they believe you about the long-term dangers of a particular economic approach, a topic they don't know much about, when you don't speak out for the causes they do care about?
Yet when they find that the people who speak with passion about the things they too are passionate about, also promote socialism, globalism, and other pet topics of the Left, parents and conservatives in general foolishly believe that will then discredit those leaders in their eyes. That is very much not the case, as many people found to their surprise in the 2008 election (where attempting to discredit Obama by explaining his socialist leanings, they were met with a response of "Sounds great, why would free education be a bad thing?").
Passion may initially spring from a child's inherited worldview and education, but the natural teen/tween rebellion against the worldview imposed by parents is augmented and crystallized if they are guided by leaders who raise their voices to support that person's passion in directions away from the traditional values they grew up with.

If the Cause of Christ is Not Exemplified... (Then the World has many Compelling Ones to Choose From)

Some millennials are well-meaning and passionate to a degree that older people have trouble believing. We really want to change the world, in fact we were taught it's our responsibility to do so, to the extent that if we, individually, cannot see that we've significantly impacted the world in some way to make it a better place, we feel like a failure. Like the generation of the American cultural revolution, we're a generation in search of a Cause, but now with the internet there are a plethora of worthy causes clamoring for our time, efforts, and sympathies. When previous generations in the Church failed to present the Cause of Christ in a compelling way--a call to action and not merely assent to carefully worded intellectual propositions that were understood to imply action but somehow tended not to get around to it--then millennials went to find their Causes in other places, and Cause is the native language of the Secular Humanist Left, and now, many Millennials too.

It's truly a tragedy that the Church lost most of a generation who were all geared up to pour themselves into the work of the gospel, because it largely lacked anyone with the maturity, intensity, and willingness to lead them. Outside the Church, this could be blamed on generational tendencies (The materialism of Boomers and cynicism of Gen-Xers were ill-equipped to guide the self-sacrificing passion of millennials), but with an enduring mission from Christ to reach the world, the Church doesn't have that excuse.

Either way, many millennials found that passion and drive to sacrifice oneself to a greater cause in the ideological Left, and that's where most of them have found their worldview home. It's a view that will lead them further and further from the scriptural truth they still cling to simultaneously, and my Facebook wall is a testament to how some will choose scripture and slowly mature out of progressive ideology while keeping its strong points and thereby nourishing the church, while others will slowly take leave of one biblical principle after another to embrace more radical leftism.

For now, they are very much Christians, but they're also very much plugged into Causes under the leadership of both Christian and secular bloggers, thought leaders, and communities, and the local church is always going to fall short of what the combined efforts of online movements can provide. The internet also provides the illusion of impressive perpetual progress, whereas actual people in the concrete world just don't seem to cooperate, a fact I'm all too aware of as I invest tough years of gospel work in a local community.

4. Trump, the Earthquake which Revealed the Fault Line

With a generation of Christians passionate about social justice and understanding that topic from a mix of good biblical admonitions and bad secular humanist ideology, that older evangelical church leaders would support the candidacy of someone like Donald Trump seems less problematic than utterly absurd and repulsive. The reaction is not logical but visceral, an instinctive aversion born simultaneously from Christian-moral disapproval over his legacy of prideful worldliness and from Popular-moral disgust over his white, male, one-percenter entitledness. This hybrid of the latest crowd-sourced morality and unchanging moral standards of scripture is where many millennials are caught, and Trump is the living symbol of everything this hybrid worldview detests and condemns. When they compare Trump to Hitler, that is what they mean: he is not merely wrong, not merely sinful, but he unabashedly commits precisely those biases and sins which are most morally fashionable to hate just now, making him an pariah in their eyes, deplorable and indefensible.

To ally yourself with such a bully-pariah, in their minds, can only result in the destruction of your witness and the grief if not anger of Christ. That Trump is the subject of many grateful testimonies from "the least of these" is totally ignored, along with any other evidence that goes against the narrative about him. Part of this is politics as usual. In an election, all people have voices they listen to, websites they frequent, and narratives that align with their worldview, and are not usually open to persuasion on that front.  (Witness how Wayne Grudem, a good man and respected theologian who wrote a reasonable--if insufficiently articulate and excessively partisan--argument that voting for Trump could be morally acceptable if it were done with certain facts in mind, was absolutely castigated. I rarely saw anyone tackling his arguments, merely the idea that he could align himself with the person their trusted sources told them Trump was disqualified him in their eyes.)

People who seek Causes to which to sacrifice themselves have a weakness in this direction, a tendency toward revolutionary or even fanatical thinking. All for the Cause, We for the Cause, Nothing as important as the Cause. Older evangelicals and traditional churches, weighed in these scales, will be found very wanting.
If discipleship and mentoring relationships been established earlier in the lives of more millennials, there would at least be a deeper level of trust and respect for authority present. The anger toward evangelicalism would be something more like frustration and confusion, which indeed one sees in many millennials as well. A productive conversation between the old, perhaps too cynical or too politically-influenced, and the young, inexperienced in life and dogmatic in the direction of their passion, could have taken place, for the enriching of the Church.

Yet this is not what has happened, instead we see something closer to a schism emerging.

Q: So, What Should Churches Do?

How to get millennials back? I submit the best way is not, at this late hour, trying to belatedly jump onto the bandwagon of Social Justice, as I see churches and christian groups doing now. The American Church is forever missing these big cultural shifts, finding itself several steps behind, resisting, then apologizing profusely and trying to catch up, meanwhile missing the next big shift.

Social Justice as the cause de jour overlaps with commands we already have in scripture, to remember the oppressed, show loving-kindness to the downtrodden, etc. We don't need the Church to join the social justice movement, led by worldly academics and, often, those who profit from the disorder wreaked in the name of justice by well-intentioned but naive young people, but we do need to be the Church to the world, and part of that always involves Christian charity (in the older, broader sense of the word).

In other words, if we do the Christian Life as instructed by Scripture, social justice will result naturally from that. Bringing the Church into a secular movement or being instructed by it will simply give moral authority to those outside the Church. (Much could be written on that particular topic, but this blog is already too long...)

A: Fill the Leadership Vacuum

There is often a statement made in the context of egalitarian vs. complementarian views on marriage, to the effect that someone has to lead in a marriage, and if the man can't or won't, the woman can't be blamed for trying.

Not commenting on that here, I nevertheless think the situation with Millennials, Causes (particularly Social Justice), and the Church is very similar. If the Church is being the Church--which means not merely assent to rightly-constructed theological propositions and proper inductive Bible study methods, but also being the Hands and Feet of Christ--then to whatever extent the social justice movement has biblical elements, they will be happening already. If they don't at all, one can't blame millennials for joining a movement which is providing the secular moral equivalent of that, and simultaneously trying to understand it in light of Biblical truth, which is exactly what we see happening from youth groups to famous seminaries.

But how much better would it be if the Church, like Paul, emphasized discipleship and leadership. I believe trying to bring back disillusioned millennials by appearing to belately embrace their Causes will not produce the results hoped for in any long term or satisfying way. However, if we begin training a generation of leaders, starting with ourselves, to proactively love and disciple students and young believers, then we'll have a generation who will tend not to leave the church.

Speaking from my own experience, growing up attending a number of churches, there was no intentional system of discipleship or Christian leadership training in place at any church I've ever attended. Only two men ever put effort into discipling me, even in an informal sense. (for which I remain grateful to this day)

Changing that massive leadership vacuum would be the biggest step towards preventing the "vanishing millennial" problem from continuing and worsening. As Trump's rise to the presidency has so effectively demonstrated, there is a quiet but widespread thirst for bold leadership in America. Trump won, partly, because he is an effective leader; he is bold, confident, persuasive, not easily daunted, able to cast a vision people want to be a part of, and recruit people to his banner. Many people want to follow such a man.

Few would suggest, however, that he is a model of Christian, servant-hearted leadership. Perhaps one day he will be. Stranger miracles of grace have happened. But that specific kind of Christ-like leadership many Christians were saddened to find lacking in Trump can't be found outside the Church. Christ-likeness can only be had from Christ.

So rather than venturing belatedly into the world of Social Justice or other Causes dear to the hearts of millennials, I submit evangelical churches should begin to train in and practice courageous Christian leadership, and recommit to a culture of discipleship, and see what happens when that leadership is not merely put to use in the business world, as is too often the case, but invested back into the Church. New ministries. Proactive work for the Kingdom. A Cause to be passionate about: the Cause of Christ, not merely as an idea but modeled by leaders who train leaders who know how to reproduce themselves too. Christians of every age, millennials very much included, would come to be a part of that.

And I think we might all be surprised and give glory to God at what would result.

The "Courage" of Bruce Jenner

Pain on Display

I have noticed something about what people post on Facebook. Every so often, some people will post a status that is basically a cry for help: "I can't handle this situation." "Please pray for me, today was really horrible." "I don't know what to do."

This kind of status is not all that common (compared to say, pictures of food) not because people don't have problems all the time, but because most people have to arrive at a place of particular pain, emotional discomfort, or desperation, before they are willing to "go public" in this way. Some people might be dealing with even greater problems, but feel they have enough resources to handle it, or simply have the kind of personality that hides the pain instead of seeking the comfort of others. They don't want to announce it to hundreds or thousands of people on a social media site.

I neither condemn nor approve of this practice; I did it pretty often in darker, younger days, and tend not to share so much now. It's not that millennials aren't tough enough to be the strong, silent type, it's that the social conditions which produced strong silent types are much less in play in 2015. We share our lives online, and that means sometimes sharing the pain too. Being strong is great, even in a time when weakness has never been more celebrated, but being silent just means you are not participating in what has become an integral part of life for developed-world internet generation kids. (Every age has its benefits and drawbacks. One day the value of silence will be rediscovered too.)

So the sharing itself is not the problem; it's a method or channel for communicating the pain someone is dealing with, a kind of pressure valve. But the more the pain, the longer it hurts, the more desperation creeps in, the less anyone cares what other people think. The pain longs to be expressed. It can't be held inside forever. It breaks out and becomes obvious to everyone.

What Courage is Not

Bruce Jenner's very public act of doctor-assisted self-mutilation (regardless of what you think about his "true identity," physically speaking that is what occurred), is being presented, even awarded, as an act of great courage. Not caring what anyone thinks, the story goes, he (My pronouns are chosen in light of genetic realities) was willing to do something still considered extremely outre, making a spectacle of himself and being held up in many cases to derision and the ogling of the general public, in order to be "true to himself/herself," and in doing so is held up as an example. I imagine some parallels to the courage required to "come out" as homosexual (into a society where lgbtetc people currently enjoy most-favored status and can shut down businesses for not recognizing that) are in play here.

The most consistent online reaction to this idea, and to the idea of his being presented with an ESPN courage award, was the sarcastic comparison of his act with soldiers of the US military, many displaying the wounds and disfigurements they have received in the line of duty. The implication is that this, by contrast, is what true courage looks like. My Facebook feed was half-filled with this kind of post for a few days.

I want to suggest this is not a very effective reply (not addressing the real issue, anyway). We all know, I think, that there are different kinds of courage. Yes, our soldiers are an excellent example of one kind, really a collection of different kinds of courage. But there are other kinds of courage, of course: a Muslim daughter's willingness to face her parents' wrath for accepting Christ; a young pianist getting up in front of everyone for a recital; someone suffering deep and damaging depression just deciding to get up and live another day. Robin Williams not killing himself; that would have been courage. To live would have been an awfully great adventure.

We do know this. And personally I don't doubt that what Jenner did involves some level of courage, though as I'll explain below I don't think that was the primary issue here. Courage is not a trait which bestows goodness or evil on those who exhibit it, it's simply a positive trait which we admire. However, if the person is clearly using their good courage to do evil, we no longer admire that in them. We may be tempted to say it's not courage at all, but give it other names, like madness. We call our friends "full of desperate courage" and our enemies "frenzied." They themselves would call it courage, of course, we just don't want to honor their motives by recognizing they too partake in common grace and can exhibit positive character traits, even while serving a cause we find repulsive.
(tl;dr- Some of the Nazis were brave too. Doesn't mean bravery is bad or they were good.)
 
So following the analogy C.S.Lewis uses at the beginning of Mere Christianity, courage is like a note on the piano, and our sense of morality tells us when to play it. To continue his analogy: we are tempted to call it the wrong note when we don't like the song, but in reality it was the same G we liked in Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, just serving another purpose.

What people are really saying, when they post those contrastive examples of soldiers, is that they feel the cause for which the soldiers exhibit courage and risk the consequences of physical mutilation (or even death) is Right and Just, and the cause for which Jenner exhibited courage (if it was courage, more on this below) and risked the consequences of his physical mutilation is wrong, weird, and sad. I think it would be more honest and courageous to just say this, rather than

It's not a question of courage. It's a question of what ideals courage should serve.

Despair and the Blade

That being said, I believe what motivated Jenner was not primarily courage. Going back the first section of this post, I believe the identity crisis and moral confusion raging inside him for years, and tendencies of which people around him were apparently aware, finally reached a head, and in despair he no longer cared what society's verdict might be. (Perhaps some interpret this as bravery because, lacking any received truth, what society's verdict might be is the final authority for them) That's not what courage is. Despair is not courage, it's the opposite of courage. Acting with courage is doing something despite the consequences; it's brave because you do actually care very much about those consequences and are willing to suffer them for a higher purpose. Acting in despair is doing something because you no longer care about those consequences.

There are those who would say I'm being too generous, and that the media circus and worldwide attention showered on Jenner is one of the reasons he did it. Maybe it's true; maybe the real battle was fought and lost many years ago, and this was a calculated decision to profit off the resulting debacle. It's impossible to know for sure. Whatever the case now, there must have been years of mental self-torment and deep delusion to even consider doing this. And the torment and the delusion have not been "resolved" with this act, but exacerbated. Letting the inner unwellness out only increases the totality of its bondage in the end; the chains of the mind are now engraved in the flesh.

Self-mutilating in an effort to force physical reality to reflect inner brokenness comes in many forms. Cutting, for example, is an epidemic which with nearly any Millennial is all too familiar. When it hurts too bad inside, many students are driven to hurt themselves on the outside too. Now imagine if, instead of trying to help those who cut and get them to stop, to bring healing to that brokenness, we glorified it. We celebrated it. We put scarred and bloodied wrists on the front page of newspapers, on the morning news, and proclaimed it a beautiful act of courage which should be praised and awarded. Wouldn't that be sick and twisted?

But that's exactly what is happening with Bruce Jenner. This is Cutting, taken from the wrists and extended as broad as the whole body and as deep as one's sexual identity. Slice it up to make the outside match the messed-up inside. But it won't stay feeling like that. There's a reason for the sky-high suicide rates after this kind of surgery. Yet we see that many of those with the authority and ability to do so are promoting this to the world's youth. Woe to them.

Sin is not a Choice

As distracting as the controversy him has become, Bruce Jenner is a symptom of a deeper problem. There is much we don't know about his motives, but the gender confusion with which he struggled would not even have to be his own choice to still be wrong; we live in a fallen and corrupted world. Flesh-eating bacteria don't ask permission to exist and wreak deadly havoc in your body, mental disorders don't ask permission to exist and corrupt your mind or psyche. Sin certainly doesn't ask permission to corrupt your soul, that's already the default state of mankind.

A particular sinful decision is a choice, but sin overall is no more a choice than being human is a choice; an unregenerated person can't refrain from sinning. That's what it means to be in bondage to sin. Sin is not freedom, it's an inescapable prison. The new life Jesus Christ offers is freedom from that prison, and friendship with Him. And who the Son has made free will be free indeed.

Bruce Jenner is not free, he is in total bondage to sin. He cannot escape by any effort of his own. That the expression of his sinful bondage is abnormal is itself not that strange. Sin breeds more sin, deeper corruption. We have simply arrived at the point in our culture where particularly unsettling forms of sin aren't being kept out of sight anymore.

It was inevitable that this would occur. Every nation, America at every point in history, every earthly culture, is entirely composed of sinful people. All cultures, all nations, eventually decline, decay, and fail. Nothing but the Kingdom of God, a kingdom not of this world, endures and remains unstained.

So if these damaged individuals were regarded as examples of unhealthy people especially needing love and patience and reinforcement of a Biblical idea of selfhood and identity in Christ, that would be the Church acting as it should. What we see in our society today, however, is a rush to exalt this deviance and praise the people who practice it. Let us not take our cues from them and think we need to fight over this issue with hopes of "retaking our culture." We never actually had it. It's pointless to try to fight a battle with society, since: 1) Society defines its values by common accord, so you will automatically lose by definition. 2) According to scripture this is the wrong battlefield. Society was a lost cause when Adam accepted the fruit from Eve. Christ will make all things new. Our job is not to make them look like that now, but to proclaim that fact. (And in doing so, some things will start to show signs of their future glorification even now)

So How Should We React?

 

One thing the Church must do, and only the Church can do, is to speak the revealed truth of God with the indwelling love of God. That means we very firmly reject the idea that what is wretchedly wrong can be called right, and that one man's confused self-nihilism should be put on display and celebrated as a model for others. At the same time, we must show sacrificial love, as Christ did. That means caring more and doing more for damaged souls than seems safe or prudent, while never legitimizing the damage itself.

If any condemnation is deserved -and indeed, the uncomfortable, twisted wrongness that is so obviously present in this situation does deserve and demand condemnation- let it be directed toward and fall on those who approve of this sin, promote it, and lead others into similar deception:

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil,
Who put darkness for light and light for darkness,
Who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!
(Isaiah 5:20)

The deceived will sin and certainly receive their due punishment, but it is the deceivers for whom scripture reserves special condemnation. It is from them that a love of deviance spreads through our society. We all have a sinful nature, but there are those who go further, who are described by Paul in Romans 1 as "those who invent new ways of doing evil," or those Jesus speaks of as leading children astray and for whom drowning is too soft a punishment. These people are not the misled sheep, but the misleading shepherds, themselves misled by their father, the Father of Lies.

A culture cannot be saved, only individual human souls. But if a reaction is proper, let us push back against those who are actively seeking to deceive, rather than giving in to kneejerk reactions against those who have been deceived by them. In recent years this is a typical trap set for the Church, and we have a bad habit of falling right into it. Make sure you are not simultaneously condemning those who are themselves partially victims and unwittingly supporting those who promote and push for acceptance of the lies in which an entire generation of youth are being daily saturated.

Instead, pray for those youth, disciple them and model Christ to them. (You yourself may be a youth, you can still do all of those things) Pray that God would give you wisdom in how to love sacrificially while also speaking truth and not condoning sin. And pray for Bruce Jenner. He is a soul God created, one that is wrong, confused, exploited, and statistically speaking may be on suicide watch soon. But imagine the witness he would have if he was delivered from his bondage to sin into the freedom of Christ and the light of truth.

It's time for the Church to once again fearlessly proclaim the grace and freedom and power of Christ into a world burdened with disorder, violence, and falsehood.

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch... like me
I once was lost, but now am found
Was blind, but now I see

What I Learned During a Week in Taiwan without My Phone

Not just a Phone...

The other day, my smartphone usb/charger port decided that instead of letting electrons go in, it was going to let smoke come out. The next day, the company came and picked it up. A couple days later, I had to make a trip down to another city for my organization's annual Thanksgiving retreat. It was a week before I had a working phone again.

Now if, perchance, you belong to a generation older than the millennials, you may be thinking something like "Whatever, a week is not very long," or "we used to live our whole lives without cellphones," or even "you kids these days are so fragile; take away your fancy phones and you have a nervous breakdown." (if you said that last one, I hope you wear tweed and smoke a pipe, they make statements like that not only acceptable but cool)

Perhaps all of those are right. But first let me rephrase the blog title:


What I learned during a week without my...
Alarm clock,
Wristwatch,
Notebook/scratchpad,
Bible*,
Nearly all the books I own in Taiwan,
E-reader,
Internet (including personal email, work email, search engines, news, online encyclopedias, etc),
Text messaging,
Digital camera,
Video camera,
Chinese dictionary,
Magic Chinese dictionary that knew the characters when I sketched them with my finger,
Magic Chinese dictionary that knew the characters after it looked at them through my camera,
Calendar,
Planner,
Reminder notes,
Telephone,
Video phone,
Local calling,
International calling (and it was Thanksgiving)*,
Address book,
Contact list,
Maps,
GPS/navigator,
Train and bus schedules,
3G internet,
Music,
Music library,
Music player,
Portable speaker,
TV,
Movie library,
Flashlight,
Weather forecasting,
Radio,
Emergency Alert System,
Digital storage device,
Various... (Games, Language Learning Tools, Sound recording, Photo and Video editing tools, handwarmer, etc.)

(*- In case you're worried, yes I do have other Bibles, not just the one on my phone. Also, I borrowed someone's phone to skype-call my family on Thanksgiving. And, we had a great time at Thanksgiving retreat. Wish I could post some pictures, but, no phone, so...)

That list should be an eye-opener. It was for me. Now, I had noticed that as each phone over the past decade got smarter, it was more capable and could handle more different things in my life. What I hadn't especially done is considered things from the opposite point of view: just how many eggs I was putting into one basket, technologically speaking? I consider that the first thing I learned. Here's the list of things:

What I learned during my week in Taiwan without a phone:

1. I am not redundant enough yet

Living in a Chinese-speaking country is fascinating in various ways, and I'm very grateful for the chance to have already learned enough Chinese to get around. At the same time, it adds a couple layers of difficulty to everything. I can't simply breeze into a store and query them about their products, for example. I either have to do a lot of online research first (a good idea anyway), or think about my vocabulary, what I know how to ask about, and maybe memorize some new words in order to have that discussion. That adds a layer of unwillingness to go shopping even beyond my male dislike of shopping to begin with. I want to know what I'm getting, go in and buy it, and leave. In Taiwan, something that simple can range from equally simple to rather complicated, depending on what I'm trying to buy. (and I'm not even talking about cars or furniture) This means that if I had something that met a need, like google maps on my phone, I didn't go looking for a place that sold maps to buy lots of paper maps too.

Redundancy got a bad rap in the 20th century. We were all about efficiency, not wasting anything, maximum productivity, etc. But efficiency has a downside: it's fragile. It doesn't leave room for error. Why should I have both a wristwatch and a phone that tells the time? Because it's important enough in modern daily life to know what time it is (to the minute, in this city with subways and trains where I don't have a car) that I need a backup in case one isn't working. It's true that I had saved money by not buying a wristwatch when I had always had a phone with the time on me, but in the end I found that the watch would be a good investment, like buying candles in case of a power outage. If the power never goes out, you can have a nice candlelit dinner anyway.

So now, smartphone restored, I have a much better sense of which few sensible purchases could make my Taiwan life much less prone to paralysis should my phone feel inclined to blow smoke rings again. (I will be careful not to download The Hobbit)

2. My smartphone is the cause of a lot of stress in my life, but I can reduce that

By about day 3, when the twitching had subsided (just kidding... mostly), I suddenly felt a wave of calm descend. The ability to communicate with anyone around the world more or less instantly is nigh-miraculous, and we don't marvel at it enough, I think, but it also means that I'm basically on call 24 hours a day. The knowledge that no one could reach me, even if I wanted them to, caused something inside my brain, some kind of unconscious awareness or connectedness, which apparently had been getting pretty exhausted, to utter a grateful sigh and take a nap. I slept really well those nights, and the effect has most continued even with the smartphone back now.

Related back to the first point, I think I can partially remedy my recurrent insomnia by taking steps to make my bedroom entirely smartphone free (it was already laptop free): keeping a physical Bible and notebook in there so I don't need my phone for either purpose, using my bluetooth speaker instead of the phone and headphones for music, etc.

3. Speaking of music - I listen to too much music

I don't think my generation, having never lacked portable music literally from birth (the Sony Walkman came out in 1980, usually the earliest chosen starting birth year for the millennial cohort), is even cognizant of this possibility. But when my brain is full of music, it goes into a certain mode (of many wonderful different flavors, depending on the genre and even certain specific songs), which overlays itself on the rest of my perceptions. It would be like spending most of every day with various kinds of strong-flavored gum in your mouth.

Being musically-oriented and very abstractly-minded, I take advantage of this, choosing music that fits the day and weather and ambiance of wherever I happen to be. Cold night and mostly empty streets? I have albums saved for that. Downtown and full of energy? I have them for that. Warm sunshine on a country train platform? That too. But this portable music enabled "reality enhancement" means I don't observe what is going on around me in the same way; it's like putting an instagram filter on it, and the popularity of the nofilter hashtag demonstrates that people still value unaltered beauty.

I also tend not to think the same kind of thoughts, and some thoughts only come with the comparative silence of only background noise (usually not at all silent in a Taiwanese city). There is also a kind of mental fortitude which comes with not relying on music to make boring waits and tasks go faster. It's not fun, it may not even be necessary, but it seems worth cultivating.

4. Reliance on technology diminishes life by removing uncertainty

That might sound weird. What I mean is, for example, back before you could -know- where someone was, you had to trust they were going to be there. Sometimes they weren't, then it was problematic, and cellphones are great for resolving that kind of situation. But go back just a couple decades, let alone previous centuries, and it was quite common to make an agreement to meet someone somewhere, then not be able to contact them until that time.

I did that in a small way this past weekend, taking the train down to Taichung and then up to the little station near our Thanksgiving retreat location. "Ah, you made it," someone said when I arrived, and I realized I hadn't heard that phrase in a long time, because now that everyone has cellphones there usually isn't any question about whether we will make it or not, and if there's a question one has half a dozen different channels of communication with which to ask. (And "I don't know, he's not answering his phone," is not the same situation as not having any phone to answer.)

So imagine telling someone "I'll see you next year when I'm back in these parts" and then having no way, short of perhaps mailing a physical letter, of knowing where that person was in the mean time. It was a different world, one in which two lovers trying to reunite could miss each other by 30 seconds and maybe thus never see each other again. Which makes cellphones seem like a really great thing. Except now, they'd just text... "im here, dont see u? :(" "lol me 2 in the bathroom wait a min"
For every gain, there is a loss...

5. I don't know how to not do anything

I was never very good at this, actually. My brain has always wanted something to engage it. Smartphones came along and did so very thoroughly, and with much freedom, so that I can turn a 10min subway ride into a mini language-learning session, or another chapter of the latest novel I'm working through.

Not having my phone for a week meant standing or sitting there, staring into space, or looking awkwardly at all the other people staring at their phones. Phones are what you do when you're waiting, now, that's pretty clear. (at least in Taiwan, where a really high percentage of the population have mobile phones)

I should mention at this point, I do tire of those people who want to joyfully smack all the phones out of everyone's hands and get back to the supposed good old days when everyone riding mass transit or standing in line happily engaged in witty banter and were the models of cheerful and socially outgoing people, like those lard commercials from the 50's, not like the downward-staring-drones of today. I am informed, by sources I trust, that the past was not actually like this. People just read, or stared into space, or were bored. Sometimes they talked to each other. Lots and lots of them smoked to pass time, or read newspapers.
Shall I go back in time to smack the cigarettes and newspapers from their hands and encourage them to socialize?

Conclusion

In the end, I can't say whether a lot of these things are good or bad; they are how life is, now. Phones are everywhere. One thinks perhaps they will become smartwatches, but that will require some display innovation to let one practically read or surf the web or check email. Then they'll shrink out of sight and we'll have some new way of interacting with technology that doesn't involve staring at one small screen all the time but is even more mentally absorbing, and certain people and elements of society will warn us that this self-imposed isolation will be our doom, and long for the good old days when the tech was in the palm of our hands and could be sat aside, not inside our heads 24/7.

In the mean time, I don't think smartphones are evil. I'm not going on a smartphone fast; that would make my ministry impractical in the mean time (working with Taiwanese students without a smartphone is like cooking without anything that can stir), and this week of no phone suggests that actually in the end, it would be more inconvenient for everyone else than it would be relaxing for me.

That's not to say I won't be changing a few things, though. They're incredibly powerful tools, affect our lives in increasingly influential ways, both obvious and subtle, and from now on I will be a little more intentional in how I use, and refrain from using, mine. And that is the best advice I can give you as well.

Bit by Bit - Grace Lag

Explanation for this blog series (Can skip if you're a gamer):

Back in the day, the internet was a source of great excitement, because now anyone could share their thoughts with millions of people. Shortly afterwards, the internet became a source of great frustration, because now anyone could share their thoughts with millions of people.

As one of those people trying to get your eyes to continue reading my words, I am aware of this difficulty, and that you don't want to waste your time. Therefore, I am trying to write about things regarding which I have some experience and can contribute something valuable. Whether I succeed or not is a subjective question that only you can answer for yourself.

For most millennials/Gen Y, especially perhaps those of us in the early years of the generational cohort, video games were a part of growing up. The first Christmas that I can remember distinctly, we got an NES, and 8-bit theme songs immediately began embedding themselves into my impressionable kid-brain. My parents, having bought it for us, decided to see what sort of thing it was, began playing around with it, looked up and found a couple hours had passed without their realizing it, and have instinctively disliked video games in general from that moment on. (They see nothing unusual with an evening of TV watching, however. Accepting the latter and not the former seems like a pretty clear example of generational bias to me!)

Anyway, what I'm trying to do with this series is connect in a humorous but truthful way with a generation who was raised on video games, whether console or computer or handheld. Video games, by their very nature, impact one's ways of thinking very deeply, and have affected our culture so greatly that probably very few people realize the true extent. Arguably, what sports analogies/metaphors were to earlier generations, video game metaphors are to ours.

For example, I know what "well boys, we're in the bottom of the ninth and the bases are loaded" means, but I don't 'feel' the analogy, it's not instinctive. I might even have to pause for a moment to process it. But for millions of us, saying "alright guys, we're at the final boss battle" communicates the same basic idea in an instinctive way. (Attend a business meeting years down the road and I bet you phrases like this will be thrown around.)

Since, for better or worse, so many of my generation's minds have been engaged in game-playing for hours every week for years, to me it only makes sense to speak to this subculture. Paul uses metaphors based on the culture of athleticism in Greek metaculture, something the Gentiles he wrote to (and probably most Jews of the period as well) would be familiar with. Though we are also a culture which highly values athletics and have no trouble understanding these metaphors, I boldly submit that thousands of students who know the meaning of "run in such a way as to win the prize" would still reflexively nod in deeper understanding if one paraphrased it "play in such a way as to beat the level."

So, with that being said, here's the first entry..

Bit by Bit: Grace Lag

(Bit by Bit is a series I'll do from time to time expressing gospel truths through gaming metaphors. The title refers to our progressive sanctification. And, you know, 1's and 0's)

One of the most frustrating phenomena a gamer can experience is lag. Your rocket-dodging skills are rendered useless as your character freezes on screen; a confused second later and you are dead. Or you are trying to recreate the batcave in minecraft and have to mine the same block 3 times before it stays mined. Or your game simply sits there inert until your internet connection stabilizes, and meanwhile your party members are messaging you impatiently. Nobody likes lag, except maybe griefers, who can only be described as the enemies Jesus commands us to love, if indeed we count them as human beings.

Lag is an old word which entered English before Shakespeare, from Scandinavia. (Thought to derive from the Norwegian "lagga," meaning "to go slowly." One imagines a bunch of vikings making fun of that one longship in back with an oar that keeps getting stuck.. "Ja, it's locked up again, they're lagging bad." Sweden's gaming culture has deeper roots than I'd realized...)

The word has a variety of connotations, but in the gaming sense it is a gap between your input and the realization of that input. This either results in delayed realization, or a failure for your input to have any effect at all. Let us say, for example, you are playing an online shooter, and right before a bad lag, you give the game a command:
<Toss a Grenade>

Having done so, in one sense the grenade can be considered thrown, because, unless your connection gets totally dropped or the lag exceeds a certain time limit, your command will reach its destination, some bits will shift around, and eventually the display will show you a graphical representation of the result. Most games do not have a Ctrl-Z function, so once you have told the game you want to toss a grenade, you cannot then take advantage of the lag-induced delay to quickly Undo the grenade toss, there is no such command. So the grenade, for better or worse, has already been thrown.

Yet in another sense, the grenade has not been thrown. While waiting on the lag to resolve, you do not know at what point in the process of a) the command being issued, b) the execution of the command, c) and seeing the results of the command you are. You do not know whether the grenade's actions have been seen by other people before you, or whether perhaps the delay was simply too long, and the results of the command will never materialize. From your perspective, the grenade has not yet been thrown.

So we could say, regarding the throwing of the lagged grenade, that it is "already but not yet" thrown.

This, as it so happens, is a very important theological concept: in a similar fashion, we say that Jesus is "already but not yet" enthroned.

Christ has received that name above every other name, that at His name every knee shall bow in heaven and on earth and under it. He has been proclaimed Lord; He has won the victory. Yet Paul says in 1 Corinthians, that He must reign until all His enemies have been put under His feet. If Jesus already won, what's all this "until" business? If the command was effective, why can't we see the results of it?

Lag.
Intentional Divine lag.

God is purposefully delaying the inevitable earthly display of Christ's victory and rightful status of sovereign Lord of all creation. There is no extra requirement Christ needs to fulfill, no steps God must take before Jesus is ready to assume His place as the Alpha and Omega, the God-King of a world burned clean of evil. Jesus assumes humanity, wins the total victory, comes back to life as the firstborn of the dead, ascends into heaven with the disciples thinking He will return at any moment, and... pause. Confusing lag in the display of what is proclaimed to have already occurred, and that was two millennia ago.

But why would God introduce two thousand years of lag into His victory? 

Short answer: For us. The lag is the world's limited-time opportunity to come to God before the end.
Jesus won the victory, and before He takes charge, He delays, offering the world the chance to change their allegiance, to join His side before He destroys all His enemies, which they currently are. That is purely grace. And it is intentional grace, because His self-sacrifice and victory over sin and death were unnecessary for Himself. He did it for us, so that we could share in His joy instead of perishing in His wrath.

The Apostle Peter talks about this in 2 Peter chapter 3:

⁸ But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. ⁹ The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.

Peter is saying, I think, something to the effect of: "I love you, but you really shouldn't complain that after saving you, God is delaying His return to save other people too."

It's natural, of course. No one likes lag. Paul says in Romans 8 that all of creation and our own inner selves are groaning in frustration at the delay. But the delay is for the salvation of millions of people from every tribe, clan, people group, and language.

So we have to endure the lag because we know the reason for it, though no one specifically enjoys it. Except possibly griefers, as I mentioned earlier, but Peter mentions their ilk a few verses earlier in chapter 3 as well: 

³ Above all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires. ⁴ They will say, “Where is this ‘coming’ he promised? Ever since our ancestors died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.”

In other words, scoffers gonna scoff. But we know that the level isn't completed until the required number of hostages are saved, and that having been rescued it's our job to free other hostages. Would you want Jesus to come back before your friends are saved? Take advantage of the lag, then, and tell them about Him.
This game has no save points or restarts; when it ends, it's over.

TL;DR:
God's gracious lag is a chance for the world to quickly swap to His side, because Jesus is just about to log onto the server, and as we all learned in Unreal Tournament, you want to be on the side that has the Redeemer.