Ministry is not so simple anymore; you need a program to tell the players. Boomers were not such a big complication; if someone was not a child, a youth, or a senior, they were likely a boomer. Now we have Builders, Boomers, Generation X, Generation Y, and Generation Z. David Kinnaman (You Lost Me—Why Young Christians Are Leaving the Church) writes about Nomads and Prodigals and Exiles (pp. 61—86). Don’t forget about the Nones, as in “none of the above” on surveys about religious devotion. This increasingly "none of the above" portion of our society has no tethering to any type of faith community and has little feeling for any clearly articulated religious convictions. In the midst of all this good analytical work, we who care about congregations and faith sometimes feel overwhelmed. With the growing numbers of Nones, we can live under a cloud of discouragement. At those times I remind myself of Andries.
I met Andries at De
Pelgrim Evangelische Baptistengemeente in Oostende, Flanders; I was interim
pastor there for several years. Flanders
is a wonderful place to live. The Flemish are intelligent, caring, hardworking,
and masters at baking bread and making chocolate. The schools are great and the traffic orderly. The Flemish care
well for the elderly, the young, and the poor among them.
Flanders is, however, thoroughly secular. Religious faith has been eschewed by all but
a small minority. They see the church,
historically, as an oppressive institution and are glad it has been pushed to
the margin of society. One man said to
me: “We worked for so long to be free of
the church, why would we want it back?”
They consider God, in a practical sense, dead.
Andries was a typical Flemish man: reserved, private, sober, and thoroughly
secular. He believed God was the main
character in a fairy tale that modernity and science had put the lie to. When I met him was still a pretty sober guy
but no longer secular. He had, some
years before, become a Christian convert.
He shared with me that before he became a Christian
he felt nothing deeply. He did not feel
fear or hope, sorrow or joy, anxiety or peace. He was
numb in his heart, he said. When he
became a believer, he said that he “became alive in my heart for the first
time. “ He began to feel things
deeply—joy and sorrow, hope and disappointment, longing and contentment.I remember Andries when I consider the present trends in our society. He was the very personification of agnosticism in a deliberately secularized society. Yet the spirit of God got through to him. There was a beachhead of vulnerability within his anesthetized heart. He had a spiritual capacity for responsiveness that he did not know he possessed. I find that hopeful.
When I encounter people that have no interest in religious
faith and no regard for communities of faith, I try not to think of them as bad
or pagan or rejecters of God. Rather, I
try to think of them as numb, as people who do not fully appreciate what lies dormant within them. I believe there is a
capacity in each us capable of yielding to God and embracing the beauty of the
gospel—even if we do not all yet know it.
When I remember Andries, I feel hopeful, and I try to wake up some things in people.
Blessings,Jim Kelsey
Executive Minister--American Baptist Churches of New York State
