The African Bonhoeffer

Last updated on: February 20, 2021 at 3:56 pm By Gene Veith

Thanks to my former student John Ehrett, now a fellow Patheos blogger at Between Two Kingdoms, for letting me know about Gudina Tumsa, the Ethiopian Lutheran theologian who was martyred by Marxists and has become known as the “African Bonhoeffer.”

In his post Living Christianly in the Face of Political Change, John discusses his sense that the prevailing strains of “political theology”–from the liberalism and Marxism of progressives to the “integralism” of Catholics and many evangelicals–are inadequate. He sees a way forward in the thought of Gudina Tumsa, who applies the Lutheran doctrine of the Two Kingdoms in some interesting ways.

Gudina (1929-1979) became the General Secretary of Mekane Yesus (“Place of Jesus”), the largest Lutheran church in the world with some 10 million members, which recently broke ties with various liberal denominations and is developing a relationship with the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. He was arrested and killed by the Communist government that ruled Ethiopia from 1974-1991. (See this and this. For an excellent survey of his life and faith that hails him as a “saint,” read this.)

His works are collected, along with a memoir by his wife Tsehay Tolessa, who worked closely with him and who was tortured for her faith, in The Life, Works, and Witness of Tsehay Tolessa and Gudina Tumsa, the Ethiopian Bonhoeffer.

Read John’s post about his “political theology.”

Whereas most theorists try to develop “the best” political system that is meant to last for all time, Gudina recognizes the transient nature of all earthly regimes. He concludes, drawing on both the doctrine of the Two Kingdoms and the doctrine of Vocation, that Christians can, within limits, function in and serve under virtually any temporal system. (Think of how Daniel, Esther, Nehemiah, and other Biblical figures served productively under pagan regimes, even when they became hostile to the faith.) In John’s words,

What this suggests is that there is no single, valid-for-all-time Christian answer to the question of the “best form of government.” That question can only be answered by reference to any number of contingent circumstances. In a monarchy, is the king wise? In a democracy, are the people virtuous? Ex ante, removed from any particular circumstance, these questions are entirely unanswerable. (Even St. Thomas Aquinas admitted a degree of ambiguity on this point.) But Gudina goes beyond Aquinas (and the integralists who claim to follow him) in working out an expression of Christian faithfulness in the midst of dramatic regime change. If God’s kingdom is administered by way of two swords—temporal and spiritual—is it possible to live rightly when the former sword is blunted or broken? Gudina certainly believed so.

The issue for political theology is not so much constructing the best possible form of government. Rather, it has to do with the faithfulness of the individual Christian and of the Church, especially in the face of tumultuous social change, injustice, and hostility to the faith, as was the case in Ethiopia. And is also the case, in a different way, with us.

Illustration from the Gudima Tumsa Foundation.

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Horror and the New Nihilism

Last updated on: October 5, 2019 at 2:59 pm By Gene Veith

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God created the Heavens and the Earth. “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Gen 1:31). Then an alliance between human beings and the devil brought sin into the world and all our woe. Then sinners, to excuse themselves, see everything that God had made and behold, it is very bad.

Augustine said that evil is an “absence of being,” that is, a lack of something God created good. Death is the absence of life, and murder attempts to negate someone else’s God-given life. Sexual sins reflect the absence of life-giving sexuality according to God’s design. False witness, stealing, coveting, cruelty, hatred, and other sins against our neighbor exhibit the absence of love. In this view, sin amounts to a rebellion against reality.

What provoked these thoughts is a post by John Ehrett, former student and fellow Patheos blogger, entitled Lovecraft and the Metacrisis of Liberalism. It is a masterful example of how literary criticism can illuminate a worldview issue and give us insight into our times.

The post is about the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), whose writings are enjoying a comeback, along with the horror genre generally. Lovecraft developed the Cthulhu Mythos, in which human beings inadvertently awaken the underlying deities of the universe, who are utterly malign. I’ll let Ehrett explain it:

Lovecraftian “cosmic horror” is built around the premise that the cosmos is utterly indifferent to human beings. But that’s not to say the cosmos is empty. Rather, the most powerful forces in reality are ancient, godlike beings of chaos—the Great Old Ones—whose intentions are inscrutable and who care nothing for humanity. These Great Old Ones cannot be comprehended within the frame of normal human experience: even momentary exposure to the Great Old Ones’ presence is enough to reduce a human consciousness to gibbering madness.

This, of course, is very different from horror stories influenced, if only implicitly, by Christianity.

Lovecraft’s tales of cosmic horror reflect a metaphysical picture wholly alien to Christianity. Other stories like Dracula, The Exorcist, or even Event Horizon emerge from a distinctly Christian milieu. The forces of evil in those stories are understood to be evil by virtue of what they oppose: Dracula sets himself up over against God, a demon seeks to claim the soul of an innocent girl, and an ancient power of evil defiles the image of God in man. That is to say, there is a distinct moral duality at work in these tales and others like them—one that allows the descriptor “good versus evil” to be properly applied to them. The heroes are on God’s side, and the villains are on the devil’s.

But that is not how Lovecraft’s tales proceed. “Evil” is an unintelligible concept in Lovecraft’s literary world, because there is no transcendent ideal against which “evil” might define itself. There is no good or evil, only comprehensible or incomprehensible power. Indeed, the very essence of the Great Old Ones is near-absolute coercive authority that feels no need to justify or legitimate itself. They will do what they will do, and be what they will be, regardless of what human beings might think. There is nothing democratic or deliberative about these power relations; Lovecraft’s cosmos is ruthlessly, relentlessly hierarchical—and the human species is at the bottom of the ladder. The primary objective of any human character in a Lovecraft story is simple: escape!

I remember watching a modern Dracula movie that purported to be more faithful to Bram Stoker’s original 1897 story (1897) than the iconic black-and-white 1931 film starring Bela Lugosi. But it wasn’t. In the Lugosi film, as in Stoker’s novel and as in vampire folklore, Dracula is vulnerable to sacred symbols and cannot remain in the presence of a crucifix. But in the modern version, Dracula attacks a man who, cowering, holds up a crucifix. The vampire swats it away to general laughter.

Consider today’s hit movie Joker, which portrays the comic book villain in terms of the isolated involuntary celibates associated with today’s school shooters and mass murderers. His world is “utterly indifferent” to him, wholly bleak and ugly and evil, which eventually transforms its victim into someone who himself becomes “utterly different” to other human beings, wholly bleak and ugly and evil, his “human consciousness” reduced to “gibbering madness.” In this Joker, there is no Batman.

Ehrett relates this nihilistic worldview to the “postliberal” mindset that we have discussed.

The increasing popularity of Lovecraftian horror, I think, tracks (at least in part) a broader cultural shift away from the good/evil conceptual duality. In Lovecraft’s pitiless world, the traditional “good/evil” dyad is replaced by the dyad “freedom/oppression”—as it has in much contemporary discourse.

Leftists think all authority is a Cthulhu-like imposition of oppressive power. The only hope is for the oppressed to assert their freedom by resisting the power structure and its imposed values until they can seize a similar power for themselves. But conservatives, while being very different, sometimes think in terms of the same dichotomy, with government, by its nature, exercising oppressive power, with individuals needing to assert their freedom against it.

We have lost the basis of legitimate authority and legitimate power, the sort that is “very good.” Vocation teaches that God, in His providential love, works through human beings–in their ordinary callings in the family, the workplace, the church, and the state–to care for His creation. We not only lack that understanding, we have a lack of people carrying out their callings in love and service to their neighbors, preferring instead to use them for their own Cthulhu-like self aggrandizement.

In the absence of God and His righteousness, people assuming that “the real world” is intrinsically evil. When people do talk of God, they often project Him as being intrinsically evil too! This is evident in the new atheist’s moral arguments against God’s existence. And sometimes even believers in God present him as an arbitrary, indifferent, amoral power not much different than Cthulhu! Ehrett notes that we sometimes hear this view of God from extreme Calvinists–of the sort Lovecraft grew up with–though the Reformed folks that I know do not go nearly that far but always insist on God’s radical and inherent goodness.

Still, I appreciate Ehrett’s Lutheranism:

As a Christian, I would argue that the legitimation of power (in the very deepest sense) begins with the fundamental ontological hierarchy inscribed into the very fabric of creation: the infinite God calls into being the order of finite things. This foundational hierarchy can never be transcended, try though we might. But the Lutheran tradition goes a step further: God’s power is revealed in the death of Jesus on the cross and His subsequent resurrection—not through explosive demonstrations of sovereign will that shatter human categories. And in the cross, the categories of power relations are accordingly subverted: the truest and best leader is the one who voluntarily dies for his people. Power, in short, manifests as love.

Without God all you have is the devil. The Biblical worldview recognizes the darkness inherent in a sinful world. Those who feel trapped in that world–the depressed, the hurting, the unfortunate–are not abandoned in their suffering. God Himself entered that dark and sinful world, bearing it all in the cross, bringing redemption. And then He rose from the dead. He now calls us to join Him in the battle against the Cthulhu in the world and in ourselves.

Illustration: “Cthulhu,” by Reiner Zaminski [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons

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Changing the Culture from Above or Below?

Last updated on: May 7, 2025 at 8:26 am By Gene Veith

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Is culture changed primarily from below, by masses of people transforming their thinking and behavior, or from above, as a small number of elites exert their influence over everyone else? Both secularists and Christians have been debating which tactic is the best strategy.

Last week we blogged about Antonio Gramsci, who urged his fellow Communists to switch from trying to mobilize the working class to taking over institutions so as to create a revolution from the top down.

The Left took that advice. Today they dominate our elite institutions–universities, the arts, journalism, the media, to name a few–and their biggest revolutions have been in overthrowing the traditional family (as in the sexual revolution, feminism, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, transgenderism, the raising of children by the state, etc.)

Although Gramsci’s ideas were heretical from the perspective of orthodox Marxism, he did describe how Communism actually worked in practice. In the countries that went Communist, there was no withering away of the state, as Marx predicted. Rather, the countries were ruled by party strongmen who installed an elite corps of nomenklaturato impose state control of all of life.

That the base of today’s Democratic party is no longer the working class, but affluent, university-educated professionals, leaving the working class to the Republicans thus makes perfect sense.

It turns out, a similar debate over tactics has been churning among Christians who would like to change the culture in a more Christian-friendly direction.

I came across an article in First Things by one of my former students who is now a formidable Christian (and Lutheran) thinker, John Ehrett. In his article Colson’s Last Word, Ehrett tells about how a book by James Davison Hunter fell into his hands that belonged to former Nixon-operative turned Christian activist Charles Colson. The book, in which Hunter urged the top-down approach, was filled with marginal notes from Colson, who favored the bottom-up approach, resulting in a kind of debate between them.

Ehrett’s account of that debate and his own contributions to it are worth reading, but I want to make some points of my own. I’ll let Ehrett explain Hunter’s position:

In 2010, James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World landed like a bombshell among Christian intellectuals. It is difficult to do justice to the scale and sophistication of Hunter’s argument, but at bottom To Change the World argued for a new “Christian strategy.”

In Hunter’s telling, the possibility of Christian social transformation had far less to do with “worldview” than with “culture,” a social matrix of values and assumptions that “often seems eerily independent of majority opinion.” That matrix was shaped by influential people “operating in common purpose within institutions at the high-prestige centers of cultural production.” These elites, Hunter argued, tended to form tight networks that exercised creative power in ways unavailable to those outside the inner rings. The decline of Western Christian influence was due to Christians’ “absen[ce] from the arenas in which the greatest influence in the culture is exerted.” (The decline was also, Hunter made clear, linked to the fact that mainstream Christian tastes “run to the lower-middle and middle brow rather than the high brow.”)

Hunter concluded that generations of Christian efforts to shape society through conversion and revival had been fundamentally misguided, because “cultures change from the top down, rarely if ever from the bottom up.”

How did I miss that bombshell? I was vaguely aware of Hunter’s book, but I didn’t read it or follow the controversy. I guess I was too busy as an administrator and teacher at Patrick Henry College. I see now that PHC was working both sides, encouraging the grass-roots popular movement of homeschooling, while giving bright homeschooled kids a powerful classical education that equipped them to blow the top off of law school and other graduate school entrance exams and so break into the nation’s elite institutions. Ehrett, for example, went to law school at Yale. Many other PHC grads now have Ivy League pedigrees. PHC grads can be found scattered throughout the nation’s think tanks, legal systems, and political staffs. One of my students, Gabe Evans, is now a congressman from Colorado.

Let me add another distinction. We can speak of “folk culture,” the culture of the people as a whole. And we can speak of the “high culture,” the realm of unique individual achievement. Folk culture is about traditions, customs, and assumptions. It is innately conservative, which is why Gramsci gave up on it. High culture comes from a civilization’s artists, thinkers, scientists, inventors, and other elite creators. These denizens of the high culture are often at odds with the unwashed masses of the folk culture, criticizing them and bringing new ideas that the people don’t approve of.

The conflict between the two makes for a dynamic civilization. Sometimes the high culture of the elite class does indeed influence the masses, as in the sexual revolution, often to their harm. Sometimes the folk culture influences the elite, as in the Romantic movement of the 19th century. Sometimes, though, they work together, as in the American revolution.

Where does Christianity come into this? As Colson points out, Christianity took root in the Roman Empire as a popular movement, but then when the Emperor Constantine was converted, it took hold among the elite. As Colson also points out, the Reformation was a popular movement, though it needed the Protestant princes to protect it. Throughout Western civilization, up until the last few centuries, Christianity played an important role in the high culture, with its artists, musicians, theologians, writers, and thinkers. Today, Christianity is still plays an important role in our folk culture–what with the churches, the holidays, and many of the values held even by non-believers. While the high culture, with some significant exceptions, has largely turned against Christianity.

That last point, as Ehrett also says, poses a problem for Christians wanting to pursue Hunter’s strategy. It’s hard for a Christian to break into an elite circle, such as the dominant art scene, if it actively excludes not just Christians but any religious expression. It’s possible, but it often requires Christians to keep quiet about their beliefs, which defeats the purpose of Christian cultural change.

When I was at Concordia University Wisconsin, the Cranach Institute sponsored a symposium on H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture, which examined the various historical possibilities of that relationship: Culture over Christ; Christ over culture; Christ transforming culture; Christ against culture; and Christ and culture in paradox.

My friend Wayne Martindale, a professor from Wheaton who had spent time in China, said that Niebuhr left out the possibility that was most pertinent for Christians in China and is increasingly pertinent for Christians in the West: Culture against Christ.

We naively assume that we can just pick a position, but when the culture, whether high or low, actively opposes Christianity we do not have the luxury of a choice. Being faithful and living the Christian life in a culture that hates you, even persecutes you, is a different kind of challenge.

To be sure, some elite professions are easier to infiltrate than others and Christians pop up in surprising places.

When Christians find themselves excluded from some professions because of their faith, one alternative is the parallel Christian institutions that have come into existence. For example, there are many Christian colleges and universities that can keep the Christian intellectual tradition alive. Though these might sometimes be tempted to conform to their secularist counterparts, on the whole they can be a haven for Christian academics and students. (That’s the route I chose.)

Christians’ main goal, though, should not be changing the culture, as such, but saving souls. There are still Christian churches, Christian families, Christian art, Christian music, Christian authors, Christian scholars, both from today and from our past. Learning our Christian heritage can give us a cultural and civilizational grounding that can get us through many of the conflicts we find today. So can the doctrine of vocation, which shows Christians how they can pursue even secular-seeming callings in love and service to their neighbors, and so be salt and light wherever God places them.

And vocation answers the question of how to change a culture. If you are displeased with the current society and want to make it better, start where you are: in your own life, your own family, your own workplace, your own church, your own community. Maybe you do have a vocation of major influence, but, if not, you can influence the people around you in the estates to which God has called you. And that’s usually the most significant.

Culture is people, and the goal of the culture-shaping elites is to shape and usually control “the people.” But we don’t have to let them. Our task first is be the people God wants us to be. As St. Peter reminds us, “Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people” (1 Peter 2:10).

Illustration: Collage Christian Culture by User:jobas – self-made fromOther photosThe lecturing priest is scientific Georges Lemaître, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31465391

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The Nihilism Beneath the Surface

Last updated on: May 5, 2024 at 5:30 pm By Gene Veith

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In his First Things article What the Pro-Palestinian Campus Protests Are Really About, Carl Trueman expresses skepticism about the demonstrators and their cause.

They aren’t really revolutionaries. “When, for example, did adult revolutionaries hold hunger strikes lasting a whole twelve hours or seize buildings and then demand that the university authorities give them food and water?” Trueman notes that Che Guevara, a real revolutionary, hid out in a Bolivian jungle. Never once did he whine to the Bolivian government he was trying to overthrow about the hard living conditions he was enduring or demand that he be supplied with food and water. “A cynic might say that even our revolutionaries are pathetic these days.” Nor are they really worried about Arab lives. Far more Arabs have died in Syria, but no one is demonstrating for them.

I would add that they are not really anti-war. As Ramesh Ponnuru says, in a Washington Post column about what to call the protesters, they are all for the war as waged by Hamas:

A leading group backing the demonstrations, Students for Justice in Palestine, exulted in the terrorist attack “against the Zionist enemy” on Oct. 7. Protesters at George Washington University and Cornell University have been chanting, “There is only one solution: intifada revolution.” (“Globalize the intifada” is another popular slogan.) Terrorist-group regalia has been spotted at protests at Yale, Princeton, Stanford and the University of Minnesota. . . .Jewish students have been subjected to such chants as “We don’t want no Zionists here!” and “the 7th of October is going to be every day for you!”

And they aren’t really “pro-Palestinian.” Says Ponnuru, “The massacres of that day have, after all, been a proximate cause of immense Palestinian suffering. The Columbia protesters have not hesitated, either, to shun Palestinians and Palestinian Americans they consider insufficiently confrontational.” How about “pro-Hamas”? Well, some protesters say they aren’t supporting that particular organization. “Anti-semitic”? Closer, but some Jews are among the protesters. Ponnuru says the best description that all would agree to is “anti-Israel.”

But Trueman goes beneath the surface rhetoric to find a deeper pathology. He says of all of the contradictions,

This also points to the nihilism that lurks just below the surface. When one notes the craziness of some of the protests—queers professing solidarity with Palestine, for example, or a drag queen leading children in pro-Palestinian chants—it becomes clear that, for all of the blather about “human rights,” these people share no common vision about what it means to be human. The thing that unites these groups is neither concern for Arab lives nor a respect for Islamic culture. They are united only in wanting to tear down. In short, these protests are a manifestation of the Mephistophelean spirit of negation or, in religious terms, the spirit of desecration. To borrow from Marx, all that is holy must be profaned. What is to replace it—Shariah law, drag queen story hour, Judith Butler reading groups—is anybody’s guess. There is no agreed moral vision here. There is only consensus on a hatred of Jews, of Israel, of America, and of what is. And ironically, it comes from those who enjoy some of the greatest privileges that America has to offer.

Hatred of what is.

As in the transgendered who hate the reality of their bodies and think that their self-identification, with or without the help of hormones and surgeries, can change “what is.” They too are among the protesters, even though their lives would be short if they went to the radical Islamic states they are championing.

Hatred of what is. That also explains postmodernist constructivism, the relativist view that we each create our own realities, as well as the other Gnostic rejections of reality that have become commonplace in people’s lives.

Hatred of what is manifests itself in the denial of all truth, goodness, and beauty, and the meaning of life. In short, as Truman says, in nihilism.

See also my post The Need for Chaos on the phenomenon of “political nihilism,” the impulse to just “burn it down,” which exists on the left but also on the right.

See also my post Progressive Nihilism, which discusses Ashley Frawley’s point that “the vanishing of a utopian horizon left only a politics of subversion, in which disruption became an end in itself.”

And yet another Cranach post, Horror and the New Nihilism, based on insights from my former student John Ehrett, who notes, among other things, how “the traditional “good/evil” dyad is replaced by the dyad “freedom/oppression.”

Illustration: Portrait of a Nihilist Student by Ilya Repin (1883), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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The Debate Over Nations, Empires, and the Church

Last updated on: September 18, 2022 at 1:52 pm By Gene Veith

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We blogged about A Manifesto for National Conservatism, issued by a number of prominent conservatives.

National Conservatism is not the same thing as Christian Nationalism, though they are often confused. And no wonder, since one of the manifesto’s articles says that Christianity should enjoy a privileged position in America’s public sphere. (See our post about this, National Conservatism and Religion.)

Now an international group of prominent and mostly-conservative leaning theologians have responded to that manifesto with An Open Letter Responding to the NatCon “Statement of Principles.”

The letter says, for example, that

A pure nationalism, disconnected from universal ideals, risks becoming the mirror image of the abstract globalism the statement’s signatories rightly reject. By implicitly asserting the supremacy of nations over culture and communities, it subordinates both the universal and the particular to the national, as if national interests and national traditions were necessarily good and anything exceeding nations must therefore be evil.

The signatories criticize the “nation-state” for obliterating local cultures and is critical of the “Statement’s” focus on the American constitutional order, leaving out European models and issues of European conservatism:

The commitment to an explicitly “Anglo-American” ideal of “free enterprise” and “individual liberty” is at odds with much of the European conservative tradition which has historically sought to limit the market and uphold a non-individualistic model of liberty, balancing rights with responsibilities.

Furthermore, the Statement, while saying much about moral values, says nothing about love, which is “the supreme theological virtue and the guiding ideal of Christian civilization” and which binds binds members of society together.

“In the end ,” the letter concludes, “the National Conservative statement is neither conservative nor Christian.”

John Ehrett, a Lutheran and a political theorist, responded to the open letter with his post Some Questions for National Conservative’s Theological Critics. He notes that some of the signatories have advocated an “imperial model” as something to be desired over the “nation state.”

His first question is “how to account for the fact that premodern “empire” did not appear to conceive of itself as universal or global in the modern sense, but required an “other” against which to define itself?” Rome defined itself against the “barbarians.” “Today, however, the institutions of liberal internationalism do claim to enjoy universal/global jurisdiction.” Ehrett concludes (his italics):

given today’s empirical knowledge of the extent of cultural differences, it is reasonable to believe that a global transnational political authority is unlikely to be able to identify a common “center” that can justify terms of coexistence capable of peacefully mediating and preserving local differences.

His second question: “Is the nation-state always and everywhere more opposed to the preservation of local difference?” He thinks not. In fact, ” the American example of federalism [which the Open Letter signatories disdain] appears to pose an empirical problem for this claim.”

Finally, “to what extent are the potentialities of Christian theology actualized through an encounter with alternative traditions?” He cites evidence that Christianity has thrived when it encounters different perspectives and that a single global church that suppresses religious differences–I think of Roman Catholicism–might not be a good idea after all.

To my mind, national conservatives can make arguments against globalizing theo-political projects that sound in a distinctively Christian register, without forfeiting the universal claims of Christian morality by succumbing to a thoroughgoing relativism.

So which is better, individual nations or an empire that brings together many nations? Individual churches or a global church?

Next time, my thoughts on the controversy.

Illustration: War Flag of the Holy Roman Empire, Ad17minstral, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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An Actual Millennial Responds to Church Efforts to Attract Millennials

Last updated on: February 29, 2020 at 2:26 pm By Gene Veith

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My former student, John Ehrett, has written a response to a church growth consultant who is urging churches to become even more contemporary to attract millennials. Since this is talking about his generation (I can tell your generation if you catch that allusion), John takes issue with the consultant’s suggestions.

John’s position is evident in the title of his post: How to Lose a Generation: Against Tony Morgan’s Worship Quick-Fixes. Did you catch that? Far from being techniques for reaching this generation, these tactics are a formula for losing this generation.

John takes up each of the 10 points the consultant raises. The essay defies excerpting, so I will simply quote the beginning of the post, expecting you to click to the link to read every word. After that, I’ll quote another millennial and former student cited by John on what this generation is really yearning for.

From John Ehrett, Between Two Kingdoms at Patheos:

As a general rule, I try to be a pretty charitable reader. Most of the time, I can manage to put a positive spin on an argument I disagree with—because most of the time, there’s a kernel of truth to be extracted. (This principle generally keeps me from getting too outraged by the Internet.) Every once in a while, though, I happen on a piece that’s wrong on so many different levels that the presumption of “there’s a good insight in here” no longer applies.

Full disclosure: the first time I read “church consultant” Tony Morgan’s recent article, “#OkBoomer: 10 Signs Your Weekend Services Aren’t Designed for the Next Generation,” I thought it was a straight-up parody. But based on the surrounding website, I actually think it’s sincere (I’ll revisit this post with a correction if the author shows up to explain that, no, it was actually satirical). Morgan’s article, in essence, is a plea to make contemporary church worship even more contemporary, in an attempt to attract millennials and Gen-Z types who’ve drifted away from institutional religion. It won’t surprise anyone who’s read things I’ve written over the last few years that I think he takes a wrong turn from the start, but let that slide: what’s really mind-boggling about the article is the sheer audacity of Morgan’s central assertion: “You can’t reach the next generation of young adults without being a church for young adults. In other words, everything you do must be designed with the next generation in mind.”

There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s take Morgan’s “10 Signs” point by point. I gather, demographically speaking, that I’m Morgan’s “target market” (I hate using that term in the church context, but if the SEO profile fits…)—and I’ve attended a pretty wide range of churches over the years, so I guess I’m as qualified as anyone to weigh in on whether this is what “young people” actually want.

[Keep reading. . .]

John concludes by quoting the talented and perceptive Gracy Olmstead (again, also one of my former students, though I can’t take credit for them):

“The millennial generation is seeking a holistic, honest, yet mysterious truth that their current churches cannot provide. . . . Protestant churches that want to preserve their youth membership may have to develop a greater openness toward the treasures of the past. One thing seems certain: this ‘sacramental yearning’ will not go away.”

Did you catch that? “This ‘sacramental yearning.'”

Photo: “Day 77, Project 365 – 1.7.10” by William Brawley, Creative Commons 2.0 License, via Flickr.

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