Pastors, Sermons and the Young Adult Life
Picture for a moment, a young adult walking out the backdoor of a church to their car — head down, keys dangling in midair — having spent the last 30 minutes of his life listening to a sermon that the pastor crafted on friday night which was basically filled with cat-poster Adventist cliches or pulpit-pounding guilt trips all subdivided in three bullet-points for maximum impact.
At the moment, this young person is about re-enter the real world, the nine-to-five, to family turmoils, bills to pay, and demands/deadlines to meet.
All he’s ever wanted, by coming to church, was a theology that would endure the heat of the moment, that would makes it past sundown, persist and breathe life in to his busy schedule, in rush hour traffic, in between the panic of bills and conflicts and broken relationships.
In short, he wanted to be introduced to a theology for the raw, gritty, everyday lived-out faith.
But all he’s received from church was cliches, guilt trips or self-improvement techniques.
Disappointed by the church’s avoidance of tough topics, he concludes that much of Adventism only works in theoretical abstracts or within the safe confines of the Adventist church subculture.
Young people, neck-deep in the reality of life, find it hard to pull “this kind of Adventism” into their everyday heartache and life. They find that in the throes of anger or despair, our carefully constructed theology goes out the window. They see that it only takes a single emergency to expose the shallowness of our propped-up faith.
It’s much easier to go for quick formulas and neat three-point sermons. We can offer our sugary ocean-wallpaper Instagram slogans and Jeremiah 29:11 (but not verses 12–13). But they fall apart just as fast as we do, because our seams cannot be held by sound-bites and surface-level confessions.
We need to understand that our young people can’t help but live a double-life because they’re not quite sure how faith fits into daily living. And therefore they find Adventism to be more distant and irrelevant.
The church at large has for quite some time experienced difficulty in being thoughtful and articulate about what really matters. It has continued to live inside a suffocating bubble (i.e comfort zone) of secret keywords and snobby hierarchy.
In regards to theology, we’ve either watered it down to pop-psychology or we’ve weaponized it into a sledgehammer.
And it’s hard to imagine anyone becoming an Adventist when a handful of Adventists on facebook or down the street are so red-faced angry and too busy fighting each other — or when you’re offered nothing more than a spiritual cotton candy.
So, what do we do? Where do we go from here?
I believe it’s high time for all of us to trace our thirst (and thus lead our young people) to the Fountain of Life, Jesus, the Word, that became flesh and dwelt among us.
For in Him, all things were made (Col. 1:16), hold together (1:17) and are possible (Matt. 19:26).
And in Jesus we find wisdom for issues big and small, hairy and tall, today and tomorrow.
And when the Word is funneled through the Word in life, experience and sound interpretation (as opposed, cliches, guilt trips, and bullet-points) — it revives the heart and rejuvenates the soul for the raw, gritty, daily living.
As we craft our sermons and prepare the Sabbath experience, let us keep that back door, that car and that young adult in our minds.
And let us take the road less traveled by — by not succomb-ing into the lazy tactics (guilt, fear, shame, pop-psychology, etc) that cannot feed a sustainable faith.
As G. K. Chesterton once noted:
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.
