Where Are They? / Why Aren’t They Here?
Jeremiah 31.15-17
Dr. Matthew M. Fry

[BEGIN PART A]

As we continue to experience The Word of the Lord together, Let us Pray. Lord, Open our hearts and minds by the power of your Holy Spirit, that, as the Scriptures are read and Your Word Proclaimed, we may hear with joy what you have to say to us today. Amen.

Where are the people between the ages of 18 and 40 in church. If you haven’t noticed, the average age of people in mainline protestant churches has gone drastically up. Which is due to the fact that everyone gets older every year, but mainline churches, which is more than just Presbyterian churches, are not attracting younger members. The fact is that people in this age bracket, my age bracket describe themselves as very spiritual, as very in touch with the God of creation and admire and love Jesus and his teachings. But they also describe themselves as anything but religious. “Oh, I’m spiritual, just not religious.” If you are over 40, just look around at the nods going on right now from the people in High School or college age. They know. The problem is not a lack of spirituality nor is it a lack of desire to connect with the great divine other. The problem is that these spiritual people want nothing to do with the church or with the community of people who call ourselves Christian. Recently I was talking to someone who said that they couldn’t believe I was a Christian, much less a pastor, because I was too cool for Organized religion. I said, “Don’t kid yourself, it’s not that organized.”

To me, it feels like a Babylonian exile, where a large segment of the population is just absent. As someone who is in that age group, and someone who cares deeply for the Church and her future, I lament this in a similar manner of lamentation over the exile. So, today’s scripture is lamentation and exilic scripture, from Jeremiah. Hear now The Word of the Lord. Listen. Jeremiah 31.15-17.

Thus says the LORD: A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more. Thus says the LORD: Keep your voice from weeping, and your eyes from tears; for there is a reward for your work, says the LORD: they shall come back from the land of the enemy; there is hope for your future, says the LORD: your children shall come back to their own country.

The Grass Withers, The Flower Falls, but The Word of The Lord endures forever…Thanks be to God.

I’ve begun to change my mind about some things, some important theological things, and some important ecclesiological things. Ecclesiological being the word which means how we set up church, how it works, and why it should work the way it should. So, this sermon, and the next 4 following it, come out of my changing views and understandings. I hope that you will engage in this process, and help me over the next month or so as we talk about that. I have said for quite some time that the Church has turned its back on my generation, has basically said that it doesn’t need folks from my generation. But I don’t think that I’ve been quite right. I don’t feel that the Church has turned its back on my generation on purpose, but that the Church has failed on one of its charges. The church is called to be in the world. Not of the world, but to interact with the world, to be in it. And right now, I don’t think the church is doing a good job of being in the world.

I presume that already I’ve lost you a little bit, so I’m going to go to the board, and try to slow this down.

[BEGIN PART B: THE SLIDE SHOW – Click on the “Start” Button in the window below]

When did history start? When people began to write out history.¹

So, before history, there was prehistory, the time before human could write their story. Human was illiterate, uncivilized, hunter-gatherer, stalking saber toothed tigers and giant ground sloths with crude spears, killing mastodons with rough clubs. Paleolithic and Neolithic are words we’ve learned to spell from this time.

The first great period in human history is called the Ancient World. Stretching from 2500 BCE to 500 CE, or Current Era commonly known as AD, Ano Domino, literally meaning “the Year of the Lord.” It was the age of the first historic civilizations: Egyptian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Greek and Roman Empires, just to name a few.

The second great period, the Medieval World from around 500 after the collapse of the Roman Empire to about 1500 with the collapse of feudalism. During this time, the church and Christianity dominated Western Europe. It was the age of castles and monasteries, lords and serfs.

Then from 1500 we have the Modern World, the age of reason and science.

But here’s the deal, we have to now re-draw this, with an arrow leading on, as this slide shows, because there is something after the modern world, a post modern world. I’ll explain a little bit. We have to distance ourselves from the ‘now’ we have grown up in and think of it as ‘then,’ a period in the past. The prefix ‘post-’ is helpful here. Think of it as post- when applied to the word pubescent. Yes front row, you can giggle. But this is something that several of you have gone through with your children, several of you are currently going through, and several of you, self included, are just about to enter as parents. Puberty is a time of life children experience and after it, they are not children anymore. To be post-pubescent means to have gone through puberty, to have been changed by it, and by virtue of having experienced it, to be now different, to be post-pubescent: no longer a child; moving through adolescent into adult.

Similarly, to be a postmodern doesn’t imply being anti-modern or non-modern. To be post-modern means to have experienced the modern world and to have been changed by the experience.

Now, I’m about to give a gross over-simplification of the modern era. If the folks who just a couple of months ago heard this, they would take back my doctorate. But it is the best I can do.

Before I do so, though, let me put your minds at ease. This whole sermon, this part included, is not to say that we need to trade, that in an effort to be part of today’s world and therefore be attractive to the under 40 crowd, we will turn our back on our people who grew up in the modern church and have much emotional investment in it. See, I’m in that group too. What my proposal will be, when we get there in a few weeks, will be to try to find a way that the church can be faithful to the past as it grows into the future. And if you’ll stick with me, I promise that while it might be scary, it won’t be so bad. We good?

So, here’s my “don’t tell my CTS, or even my Princeton, professors how rudimentary this is” description.

Number 1, the Modern world of the past 500 years was an era marked by conquest and control. From Christopher Columbus to Lewis and Clark, the modern era meant conquest of the entire world by Western European philosophy, culture, languages, economies, religions and technology. Nature was conquered, native people were conquered, and problems from bad breath to measles were eventually conquered. Once you’ve conquered something, you’ve got to keep it conquered, which means controlled. Modern people have dedicated themselves to controlling people, results, risks, economies, experiments, profit margins, variables, nature, even weather.

2. Modernism was the age of the machine. Mechanization has been the unspoken goal of the modern world. Often, the universe would even be seen as a vast machine, controlled by the Big Engineer, and people became small cogs in the machine, or machines themselves.

3. The Modern age was an age of Analysis. If the universe is an intelligible machine, and science the master screwdriver to take it apart, then analysis is the ultimate form of thought, the universal screwdriver. By taking wholes (with a w, w h o l e s) apart into smaller and smaller parts or causes, each of which could be understandable, analysis renders the universe both knowable and controllable. Thinking and analyzing are synonyms for the Modern age.

4. It was the age of secular science. It is hard to conceive of a non-scientific worldview. In fact, you can’t say “non-scientific” without it sounding like an insult. With mechanistic and scientific views of the universe gaining authority, and skepticism about anything that can’t be broken down to its controllable parts, say God for example, the culture rose above church influence. Religion found that it could survive in the private sector, but no longer in the public sector of power in government and leadership. Separation of church and state was a thoroughly Modern concept.

Again, these are not bad things, they are just markers of an age which the dominant culture now has moved through, and we are now post these things. Sometimes the culture is post these things because they have been so widely accepted as to no longer be an issue. Sometimes the culture is post these things because they no longer work the same way.

Anyway, 5, it was an age aspiring to absolute objectivity, which was supposed to yield absolute certainty and knowledge. The ultimate knowability of the universe and everything in it was presumed. What was still unknown was ultimately knowable. Also assumed was the highest faith in human reason to replace all mysteries with comprehension, superstition with fact, ignorance with information, and subjective religious faith with objective truth. In modern times, narrative, poetry, and the arts in general took a back seat.

6. It was a critical age. If you believe that one can absolutely, objectively know the absolute objective truth, and that one can know this with absolute certainty, then that one must prove wrong anyone who sees things differently.

7. It was the age of the modern nation-state and organization. Since the collapse of the medieval world, modernity has been the age of organization and reorganization, from the assembly line to the picket line to the party line.

8. It was the age of individualism. As machine like organizations pursued conquest and control, communities were disintegrated, leaving their smallest parts, individuals, disconnected and hanging in midair. The modern era moved focus from “we” to “me”. Never have individuals been more “free” of all social constraint and connection as they are in late modernity. Consequently, never have they felt more alienated and isolated.

9. It was the age of Protestantism & Institutional religion. When religion most thrived in the modern world, it was in its most institutional forms and its most Protestant forms, protesting not just Catholicism but medievalism and premodernism in general.

And 10, it was the age of consumerism, an age when people often quoted the phrase, “Money can’t buy happiness” while pulling out their checkbooks or credit cards and purchasing that impulse buy at the store. The market economy led to freedom from the feudal system of the Medieval age, but it has become a powerful lord in its own right.

You can imagine how a society bathed in those things could reach a state where the people of it would feel the need to transform it into something new. In fact, in a recent conversation, a group of folks were talking about modern and post modern and a young woman said “In looking at it, I’m thoroughly post-modern. In my work and in my daily life I want to move beyond conquest and control, beyond being a machine, overanalyzes, critically viewing everyone who disagrees with me. I am post-modern in every aspect of my life. Except one. When I go to church, I leave behind all that I am becoming, all that I feel God calling me toward, and for an hour we critically analyze how to control our lives and our world. For one hour per week, I am modern.”

[END OF SLIDES. BEGIN Part C]

In my estimation, this is why people in the under 40 generations are not generally coming to Church. The Church in general is out of touch with the world, and has lost its power to speak to the people who are in the world. As such, I can’t tell you how many people I’ve talked to in my age bracket and younger who are surprised that the church has anything to offer to anyone our age.

Now, this is a lot to digest, and my guess is that many of you are good and scared. Here’s the good news. Sermons like this need to end with good news, and I’ve got some great news for you. My estimation is that about four or five churches out of a hundred are close to ready, and are able to faithfully transition into the post-modern world while not turning their backs on the past, the stories, and the traditions that have been part of the fabric of who they are and who God has called them to be. Norcross Presbyterian Church is one of those four or five. As such, I think we could well be on the journey to being trailblazers, and that the capital C Church, the whole Church that spreads across physical walls and denominational walls and theological walls, will look at us, and a small hand full of other churches, and say, “Now that’s how you do it.”

It won’t be easy. But I do think that it will be worthwhile. Amen.