Jason Clark

Trying to make safe spaces for diverse and healthy conversations about church, culture, mission, theology and motorbikes

More teens becoming 'fake' Christians?

via edition.cnn.com

I got sent this by a few people, and it's been picked up online in a lot of places.

I know it's a US survey, and mostly about the experience of young people in christian families in the US, but it has a lot in common with faith practices here.

Two areas the article picks out from research that have a connection in all western contexts:

1. Families: Unless parents are living 'radically', which the article suggests might be letting your kids see you not choose a job just because it pays the most money. Our western consumer dream is the 'vision and mission' for most Christians.

Great job, great house in a great location, and relationships that support 'me' in that is what life is often reduced to.  No wonder when Christian parents order life around that reality their kids do too. And Christianity becomes about therapy and support for that reality.

2. Church: Unsurprisingly and related, what are churches (traditional and emerging) modelling and ordering life around. A radical commitment to the Gospel or support for a way of life in consumer society. Families located in radical communities, helping each other live radically, is what we need.

And again that radical is so unglamorous, putting others first, placing our work and where we live in service of a life together for mission. Is our form of faith and mission, still all about us, our happiness, or the transformation of the world? What are our kids seeing our lives ordered around?

Evangelicalism: Dispensing religious goods and services?

I have a short blog piece/article on the Fuller Seminary blog, about a new D.Min course they have asked me to teach.  Text is also below, FYI.

Thomas Taylor (1738–1816) was appointed by John Wesley in 1761 (and is one of the few people who had an itinerant career longer than Wesley), travelling extensively over several decades, throughout Wales, Scotland, and England. He was able to observe evangelical faith in relation to a myriad of engagements, physical, cultural, political, psychological, ecclesial, within the emerging middles classes and the birth of market society. In all those engagements with faith, Taylor observed that ‘evangelical religion spread best where trade was growing’.

Taylor was able to observe not only the beginnings of the evangelical tradition, but also its nascent relationship to the rise and development of the market society. He was also well placed to discern the possibilities and captivities of that relationship in its intrinsic nature.

More recently, John Milbank has diagnosed the current relationship of evangelicalism to the market as being ‘quite simply a new mutation of Protestantism in its mutually constitutive relationship with capitalism’. Or, perhaps more crudely, we might combine and paraphrase Thomas Taylor and John Milbank using the words of Dan Kimball that the modern Protestant evangelical church has all too often become about the ‘dispensing of religious goods and services’ to Christian consumers.

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