The Millenial Search from a Millenial Perspective
The concerns of my generation are as diverse as the number of my peers. I can only write of the concerns that cause my friends and me to stumble. I’ve heard that today’s teenagers show a resurgence in spiritual belief, but I suspect it means just that: spiritual belief, rather than religious belief. I think it that many in my generation see this as an easier path to follow. It seems we don’t know what to believe anymore.
The answers my Sunday School teachers had given me stopped satisfying me. If this pluralistic postmodern world did anything, it showed me that nothing has ever been as black and white as my church wanted me to believe. It taught me that God doesn’t live in a theological (or even religious) box. But what do I do with that? What does it mean that I’ve started to think that God can speak to and through a Muslim? What does it mean that I think Jesus can take on different names and shapes in cultures that never heard of Christianity, that a native of Remoteland can worship some God named Oobo who leads this native to live just as Christ lived? For me, Christ has started to separate from Christianity; I no longer equate the two. Evolution takes on more credibility everyday, but that causes problems, too. So many answers to life come out of the Creation stories in Genesis; I was taught to think of them as factual accounts. What does it mean when I stop believing in them that way, when I start to think that God can work through evolution, and that it affirms God’s incarnational interaction with the universe?
Spirituality, over religion, helps ease the discomfort because I can simply follow my vision of Christ and can leave behind the constructs of a religious system. Christianity has become a burden much of the time. A friend told me the other day that she struggles to know whether she does enough for God. In culture at large, and especially at this Christian college, we have outcries for our time, our money, our prayers—they come from all sides and after awhile it sounds more like a manic orchestra than a still small voice. One of the drawbacks, it seems, of being globally minded is that we’re so much more aware of the sheer expanse of suffering in this world. And what do we do about it? I feel like I only have so much time, energy, and funds, but it never adds up to enough. Now it’s not just about volunteering at my local soup kitchen, but it’s about concern for AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, genocide in Sudan, starving children in Ethiopia, geographical boundaries in Israel/Palestine, and even nuclear weapons in North Korea or Iran. Letter writing campaigns, service trips, donations, prayer requests, overseas missions, on and on and on. It’s enough to make a modern-day Christian collapse with exhaustion.
When is it enough for God? Why should I feel guilty for devoting my energy to befriending people around me, helping them through their struggles, and quietly spending time with God? I don’t have the energy to be a globetrotting Christian. People ask me where I go to church, and when I say that I don’t go, they quietly say, “Oh,” as if that makes me a heathen. But I think, “Wait a minute. I spend much of my waking moments thinking about God, thinking about how I can help people and speak truth into situations. I have centered my life on trying to know God and follow God’s lead. Does all of that go away just because I don’t enjoy spending my Sunday mornings in a church service?” Everything I would get from church, I get in my daily life. And yet, it still feels wrong. Sometimes I wonder if we really have advanced in our faith, because it seems like much of our ideas still have the patina of the Middle Ages: God as a demanding tyrant who is just looking for us to mess up. I can’t worship a God like that anymore. It exhausts me. And considering how many of my friends have started to feel agnostic or atheistic, I think it’s exhausting more of us than we realize.
We hear about a God of grace, but we experience a god of rules in our religions. It turns me off, and it looks like it turns off my peers as well. We need a God that is more than our nitpicking of the Bible; we need a God who transcends our Scriptures, that the Bible points to, but doesn’t contain. This global society is anxiety-inducing enough; we don’t need a God who makes it worse. “He leads me beside quiet waters, he restores my soul.” Now that’s a God I’ll die for, a God who doesn’t just shake my hand and “pass the peace,” but who actually cares for my well-being.
Monday 23 Apr 2007 | efry | Uncategorized