April 15, 2012 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m. | Confirmation Sunday

Generation to Generation

John W. Vest
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 119:105–112
Deuteronomy 6:4–9
1 John 1:1–4

Too many Christians have bought into the modernist valorization of scientific facts and end up reducing Christianity to just another collection of propositions. Our beliefs are encapsulated in “statements of faith” that simply catalog a collection of statements about God, Jesus, the Spirit, sin, redemption, and so on. Knowledge is reduced to biblical information that can be encapsulated and encoded. . . . But isn’t it curious that God’s revelation to humanity is given not as a collection of propositions or fact but rather within a narrative—a grand, sweeping story from Genesis to Revelation?

James K. A. Smith
Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?

This is an unprecedented time in the history of Fourth Presbyterian Church.

I realize, of course, that you will hear this a lot during this time of transition and change. But let me take a moment to put my spin on it.

In 1986, this church baptized 31 newborn children. Last year, we baptized 140.

In the nearly six years that I have served this church as the Associate Pastor for Youth Ministry, I have heard it said countless times that twenty-five years ago Fourth Church was not a place that welcomed children and youth. This has clearly changed.

Now, children and youth—and the families that bring them—represent the fastest growing segment of our congregation. The need for space that will allow this population to grow and thrive was a major driver of Project Second Century and the construction of the Gratz Center. Over the last quarter of a century, Fourth Church has become a downtown, urban church for children, youth, and families.

To be sure, in a church this size, numerous populations are attracted and served. This is still a church that appeals to younger adults and older adults, young couples and empty nesters, singles of all ages, and couples of various configurations. But never before in the history of this church have children, youth, and families been so prominent or so central to our identity and our mission.

A major challenge for this congregation as we move into our second century at this fortuitous corner of Michigan Avenue—and a major opportunity as we look for a new pastor—is the potential we have to become a truly multigenerational congregation.

Of course, in a superficial way we already are a multigenerational congregation. On any given Sunday, we have at least four generations represented in this church. But for the most part, these generations are essentially segregated from each other. Our oldest adults and youngest children rarely cross paths. Even our youth and young adults, who really aren’t so far apart in age or culture, don’t have many points of contact.

At some level, this kind of age-appropriate programming makes good sense and is even necessary. For a variety of developmental and sociological reasons, age differentiation is important. But if the boundaries between generations are never permeable, we miss a real opportunity to be the kind of community that is so rare in today’s world. More than that, we miss the opportunity to reflect the diversity of experience that I believe God desires for us all. In God’s emerging kingdom, God’s children of all ages will live together in bonds of love and mutual support.

To do this, we must begin to remember what our faith tradition has always known: religion is not an individual endeavor. This is counterintuitive for contemporary Americans, raised as we have been in a culture of rugged individualism. This is counterintuitive for those who profess to be “spiritual but not religious.” But if this church, or any church, is going to make it in the twenty-first century, we must remember what has kept us going, generation to generation.

The short New Testament book we know as 1 John was written for a community that already lived a few generations after Jesus. It gives us a snapshot of what the church looked like at the turn of the second century. It is a church concerned about passing on the traditions it has cherished, the traditions that shaped it and sustained it.

“We announce to you what existed from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have seen and our hands handled, about the word of life.”

Given what scholars think they know about when this book was written, it is unlikely that the person who wrote this or the people for whom it was written were actually alive during the time of Jesus. In this respect, even though a gap of nineteen centuries separates us, they are not that different from us. What they are passing on—what they talk about as a tangible reality that they have seen and touched—are not eyewitness accounts of Jesus and his disciples. Rather, like us, what they are sharing with each other are the faith experiences of people removed from those foundational times yet nonetheless moved by the living Spirit of God in their midst. They have experienced something real, and they want to share it with others.

Likewise, the passage we heard from Deuteronomy is a foundational text for Judaism. It forms the core of the Jewish prayer known as the Shema. It was identified by Jesus as one of the greatest commandments in the entire Bible. And like our text from 1 John, it envisions a situation in which the traditions of the community are passed down from generation to generation, le-dor va-dor as it is said in Hebrew. Le-dor va-dor. Generation to generation.

Of course, the world operates a lot differently now than it did during the simpler days that gave rise to these ancient encouragements, when the primary modes of communication were talking around campfires and in homes and gathering together to read sacred scriptures out loud.

A few weeks ago, computer chip manufacturer Intel circulated a graphic that describes what happens in a single minute on the Internet: 204 million emails are sent; 3,000 photos are uploaded, and 20 million photos are viewed on Flickr; 100,000 tweets are published on Twitter. There are 277,000 logins to Facebook and 6 million views. There are more than 2 million search queries on Google. There are 1.3 million video views on YouTube. All of this happens in one minute—sixty seconds.

In this context, what does it mean to “announce what existed from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have seen and our hands handled”? Certainly the possibilities are staggering.

Yet,we all know that a significant portion of all that data streaming around the world in a given minute is total junk. Advancements in communication technologies do not guarantee quality content. Actually, it’s probably the case that the exact opposite is true—the better we get at sharing information quickly and efficiently, the easier it is to share the worthless and superficial things that distract us from what really matters.

This is why we need a truly multigenerational church. We need to be a community that passes on to emerging generations what we have heard, what we have seen, what we have touched.

Today we celebrate the confirmation of another class of eighth graders. Over the course of eight months, our youth ministry staff and volunteer leaders have shared with them what we know and trust—what we have heard, what we have seen, what we have touched.

This is some of the most important work the church does. Did you know that the median age of Presbyterians in the United States is 61? Though we trend about a decade younger here at Fourth Church, this overall reality is simply not sustainable. By contrast, the median age of Chicago is 32. The median age of the United States is 35.6. That’s quite a gap.

It is also the case that our denomination, like every mainline Protestant denomination, is gradually dwindling. The Presbyterian Church (USA) has lost more than 1 million members since our predecessor denominations reunited in 1983. I think that the primary reasons for this substantial decline is our poor record of planting new faith communities and our inability to retain young people after they leave high school. In fact, our own statistics suggest that we won’t see 60 to 70 percent of these eighth graders after today.

Sociologists of religion are in almost universal agreement that the greatest indicator of whether or not adults participate in a faith community is whether or not they participated as youth. And the number-one influence on the spiritual development of young people is not their totally cool youth pastor, as hard as that may be to believe; it’s their parents first and the adults they interact with in the congregation second. We must be a multigenerational church.

As a leading congregation in the Presbyterian Church (USA), if we want to offer something to our declining denomination, we need to get this right.

As a public church right in the middle of a rapidly changing city, if we want to offer something to the families of our community, we need to get this right.

Census reports show that the average household size in the city of Chicago continues to grow. And my hunch is that most of us raising families in the city today were not raised in a city like this ourselves. At some level, we are charting new territory together. For all of the amazing benefits of raising children in a diverse and culturally rich city like Chicago, there are also significant challenges. Single parents and couples must work incredibly hard to afford to live here, which cuts into valuable family time. Navigating the Chicago school system is one of the most complicated and stressful endeavors I have ever witnessed.

For families today, church is one of many activities vying for time and resources. Church is no longer at the center of American culture, and there’s not much we can do about that. In our post-Christendom age, relevancy is no longer assumed; rather, it must be earned. We must offer people what they cannot get anywhere else.

So what is that exactly? What are we offering? What are we passing on, generation to generation, le-dor va-dor?

If the statements of faith written by our confirmands are a reflection of our wider congregation—which I believe they are—then it is clear that we are not a community that insists on strict adherence to traditional or orthodox doctrines. We have core beliefs and practices, to be sure, but we are very much a “big tent” kind of church that makes room for people of all kinds of faith, all kinds of uncertainties, all kinds of incredulities. Our way forward into the emerging future of faith in a postmodern, post-denominational, post-Christendom, pluralistic world is not to retreat into fundamentalism. Rather, our way is to tell, in fresh, new, and relevant ways, the story we have heard.

Every single person has a worldview that shapes the way they interpret and engage the world around them. More than anything else, these worldviews are shaped by the stories we tell.

Many times from this pulpit you have heard me talk about superheroes. Clearly, these stories have shaped my worldview. Generation to generation, I’m learning how quickly I’m passing this on to my son.

Superhero movies are so good now, it’s easier than ever to teach him the stories that have meant so much to me. But I’ve noticed some interesting side-effects. When we’re at home, it’s cute when he pretends to be Spider-Man or the Hulk. In fact, I usually encourage him by playing right along. But it gets a little awkward when we’re walking down the street and he starts shooting webs at total strangers or contorts his little cherub face and yells, “Hulk smash!” I suppose it’s all part of internalizing the cultural stories that will shape his worldview.

At some point, I’ll be able to move him beyond this stage of pre-critical naiveté and start engaging these stories on a different level. We’ll talk about how with great power comes great responsibility. We’ll talk about how each of us has a monster inside that we struggle to control.

And at some point, he’ll grow up and start to deconstruct these stories. And his generation will tell these archetypal stories in new ways that are relevant and meaningful for them.

Throughout this entire process, generation to generation, he is making these stories his own.

Emerging church pastor Doug Pagitt calls our time the Inventive Age, and contrasts it to what came before, what has been called the Information Age (Doug Pagitt, Church in the Inventive Age). In today’s world, people are no longer content to be consumers of culture; rather, we want to be participants. We want to engage; we want to interact. This is why Web 2.0 and social media have exploded in recent years.

And this is what our confirmands have done this year. They have not simply absorbed some ancient creeds and old doctrines and regurgitated them back to us. Rather, they have expressed their faith—and their doubts—in their own words. We have signaled to them how important this is by empowering them to make this decision their own. Some of them have owned it; some of them have said “thanks, but no thanks.”

But none of them can do it on their own. Faith doesn’t work that way. They need a multigenerational church.

Yesterday we brought our son to C2E2, the Chicago Comics and Entertainment Expo. Like all conventions of this type, it was filled with people dressed up in elaborate costumes, embodying the heroes of the stories that shape their worldviews. Indeed, it was a gathering of people whose lives have been profoundly shaped by a collection of shared stories. My web-slinging, Hulk-smashing son fit right in.

It may sound silly to you, but I think church should be a lot like that. I’m not saying we need to dress up in costumes—though maybe that sounds odd coming from a guy dressed like it’s the sixteenth century. But what I really have in mind is people of all ages, gathered together to be shaped by a story that is told and retold, generation to generation. The story is a little different each time it is told, but the essence is always the same.

Our story is one of exile and redemption, estrangement and reconciliation, death and resurrection. Our story gives us hope for rebirth in our lives and the re-creation of the whole world. This story shapes who we are and how we live in the world, a world that we have come to know is loved beyond measure.
“We announce to you what existed from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have seen and our hands handled, about the word of life.”

Amen.