Tag: Christianity

I remember standing up in front of the church after every trip and listening to teenagers give basically the same testimony every time (and I participated in it as well).

“It changed my life.”

“I’ve never experienced God like that.”

“You should have seen how God was at work.”

A lot of people cried. Somebody always said they were never going to complain about their own life again after seeing what other people’s living conditions are.

They’d show the slideshow – kids’ faces, a wall that was built, someone handing a child a Bible – and the room would celebrate and the offering for next year’s trip would come in strong.

It took me years to notice that everyone shared almost the exact same testimony every single year, no matter which trip they went on. It is almost like we’d all been handed the same script before we ever got on stage.

And we kind of had been. We just didn’t know it.

a script nobody wrote on purpose

Nobody actually sat down and scripted any of it (I don’t think at least). It just happened, trip after trip, the same way the lock-in and the camp and the youth room did created culture…

People learned what the church wanted to hear, and they gave it to them. They learned that “they had nothing and were happier than us” gets nods and tears, so they said it, whether or not we’d actually spent enough time to know if it was true. They learned that a wall they half-built and a local team finished after they left still counted, on the video, as “what they built.” they learned that a photo of a kid’s face, taken without really knowing his name, was worth more in the recap video than whether any longer term change would happen in that kid’s life or not.

No one set out to do this on purpose. It was just teenagers doing exactly what they were “trained” by the culture around them to do. It’s the same reason the youth pastor and the church started to measure how a good trip was by how good the recap Sunday went over.

In the end, the trip wasn’t really about the place they went or the people they saw.

It was about what they’d come home and say.

“big church” takes the same trip, just bigger

I’ve now watched this same strategy show up in adult mission trips, church-wide disaster response, and local service initiatives – similar testimonies, similar Sunday recaps, similar slideshows and videos – for year after year after year now…

A hurricane hits somewhere, and a church sends a team, and the team comes home with a video.

A trip to build houses in foreign countries turns into content for the fall sermon series on generosity.

The fundraising message is almost always the same. It says “they need us,” whether or not it’s actually true, because “they need us” raises more money than “we’re going to learn how little we understand and how little short-term trips do to impact long-term change.”

Sadly, no one grew out of the youth-trip script. Instead, they scaled it up and gave it better production value.

And underneath the production and the marketing, the same quiet assumption survived: We are the ones with something to give, they are the ones with a need, and the trip exists to let us feel that gap close for one week and chalk it up to doing the Lord’s work.

the cost nobody put in the recap video

One problem with the youth-trip script is that it never realistically evaluated if the impact actually outweighed the cost.

It never had room to say a team of well-meaning teenagers with no construction experience can build something a local contractor would’ve built better, cheaper, and while employing someone from the community who actually needed the work.

It never had room to say the orphanage we visited exists, in part, because Western churches will pay to visit orphanages, and some children get kept in them longer than necessary because a family with means can’t compete with the steady flow of American short-term teams and their donations.

It never had room to say the “relationship” we built over four days was, for the family or the church we visited, one relationship among dozens of teams that came through that same week, that same month, that same year – and for us, it was the whole story we told for the next twelve.

Have we treated the poor as a means to an end for our own feelings of spiritual achievement?
Have we called something “missions” when it mostly serves our desires more than their needs?
Have we created an experience to make us feel like better Christians that actually costs the people we help rather than serves them?

not anti-mission trip

I want to be careful here, same as every post in this series. I’m not arguing to cancel missions trips.

Going somewhere unfamiliar, meeting people whose lives look nothing like yours, having your assumptions about the world quietly rearranged. These are genuinely good things and I don’t want to talk anyone out of it.

The problem is not actually the trip or experience itself. The problem is when we build the mission entirely around what the missionary gets out of it, but just dress it up in language about what the missionary is giving.

Real mission work asks a harder question first: What does this community actually need, and are we the right people to give it, in the right amount, in the right way?

Sometimes the most faithful thing a wealthy church can do is fund a local pastor and local ministry who already knows the community and will be there for the long term, instead of flying in forty people to build what locals could’ve built for a fifth of the cost and would have allowed them to provide for their families.

That’s a much less exciting slideshow. But it’s a much more Biblical missions plan.

everything this series has been trying to say

I still believe in going on mission trips. I still believe in planning fun events for teenagers where you also include sharing the Gospel. I still believe in worship nights, and prayer initiatives, and leadership pipelines, and all sorts of things about the modern American Church that I also critique.

I started this series remembering the youth room, with its own paint colors and furniture. I’ve spent six more posts reminiscing about a lock-in strategy that never ended, mountaintop experiences we keep trying to hold on to, churches sorting people into groups just like them, stages that promote charisma over character, a weekend that slowly became the entire discipleship plan, and missions that benefits the givers more than the receivers.

Every single one of these things started as something good – a real solution to a real problem – but then turned into a permanent church culture I doubt anybody chose on purpose.

Many have built a spiritual life that measures itself by the story it gets told after the spiritual high – the life-changing worship service, the mountaintop weekend, the small group gathering, the compelling preacher, the trip no one wanted to come home from.

Every one of these aspects of church life became optimized for the moment instead of the lifetime. Every one of them ultimately focused on a feeling more than a life changed.

“Big church, same games.”

That’s what I’ve been trying to say for seven posts.

My generation didn’t leave youth group when we grew up. We just kept changing rooms until the whole church was one big youth room, dressed in better production and run by people who never learned any other way.

can it actually be different

I don’t have a simple solution to hand you at the end of this series. Offering one would be doing the exact thing this series has been critiquing anyways: turning the Christian life into a product you can package and sell in six easy steps.

It felt like the right way to end it was to get us looking outward, at our “missions trips,” at how the world actually experiences us and what our impact actually is or isn’t. The only way forward is to be honest about what currently exists.

And I do know what it would look like to actually change course. I’ve written two books about it (shameless plug, go check out my 2-book series on American Christianity on Amazon: https://a.co/d/09fFVvBf)

I can list some things that definitely need to change if we want things to be different.

We need to start measuring maturity instead of attendance. We need to form leaders with decades of pastoral habits, not via stages. We need to have groups where the sixty-year-old and the sixteen-year-old, the person who votes like you and the person who doesn’t, sit across from each other on purpose and are formed into the likeness of Christ together. We need to plan missions around what the world actually needs instead of what makes a good reel on social media. We need to start valuing what faith looks like for an everyday believer on an ordinary Wednesday more than any single Sunday, camp, trip, or moment we could manufacture ever.

Sure, none of that fits nicely on a flyer and none of it fills a room fast. It’s slower, and smaller, and it will definitely never trend.

But I think it’s also the only version of Christianity that has ever actually produced disciples that look more like Jesus than the culture they live in…

That’s the kind of Church I want to help build. Not one that just looks like an adult version of a youth group. But one where we all finally grow up…and start looking like Jesus…

This post is a part of the “Big Church, Same Games” series. Start at the beginning of this series by reading “The Church Became Youth Group.”

I remember how the ride home from retreats or youth camps was almost the same every single time.

A bus full of teenagers who’d spent a weekend or week crying at the altar, writing letters to their future selves, promising God and each other they’d never go back to who they were before.

And then Monday came.

People rarely talked about Monday at camp. Unless it was to state emphatically everything would be different this time around.

And yet, when Monday came, the same friend group that got you in trouble was still your friend group. On Monday, the bedroom you’d promised God you’d clean out spiritually still had the same posters on the wall. On Monday, life was ordinary again and ordinary couldn’t continue the excitement that camp had built up.

By Wednesday night, most of us were already focused on when the next trip was.

Nobody in youth ministry ever really solved the problem. Some of them did talk about it and tried to. But mostly everyone just got better at planning the next mountaintop experience.

the crash wasn’t a bug in the system

Here’s the thing nobody said out loud back then and still almost nobody says out loud now.

The crash wasn’t a flaw in the system. The crash was the expected outcome.

A camp, a retreat, a worship night – all these things run on emotional highs. You pull people out of ordinary life, strip away distraction, turn up the volume, and the peak feels enormous precisely because everything around it was flattened first.

That’s not a spiritual phenomenon. That’s just how contrast works on a nervous system.

And it’s not evil.

God can absolutely meet someone in a mountaintop experience. He met Moses on one. But Moses came down the mountain and had to lead a people through forty years of wilderness that was not, in any way, a mountaintop.

Most of Scripture doesn’t happen on the mountain. Most of Scripture happens in the wilderness, in exile, in a boat, at a well, in a prison cell.

The mountaintop is rare on purpose. And yet we built entire youth ministries as if the mountaintop was the goal.

the church learned the same operating system

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that entire churches now run on the exact same operating system as the youth retreat format.

The worship set builds the same way. Slow song, quiet down, a moment of stillness engineered into the setlist, a swell, a peak, an altar call or a “response time” while the band plays underneath at exactly the right volume to keep the moment from breaking.

We didn’t invent this by accident. We learned it from youth events, and it worked, so we kept doing it – every Sunday, on a stage, for adults, using the same tactics made popular for teenagers at winter camp.

The church conference circuit definitely runs the same way as youth camps if you haven’t noticed. Three days, tight production, a lineup of speakers each building on the last, a closing time engineered to be the emotional peak of the whole conference.

People leave “changed.”

Well, for maybe about a weekend. Then Monday comes for adults too, the same way it did for teens.

we started confusing feeling with formation

We have to be honest about what got traded here.

We started measuring people’s spirituality by intensity instead of consistency.

We started treating the size of the feeling as evidence of the presence of God, instead of asking whether anything about a person’s actual life was different in six to nine months.

We started building whole churches around the producing of peak experiences, because peak experiences are exciting, and exciting things grow attendance, and attendance is what we decided to measure.

Have we mistaken a good cry at the altar for actual repentance?
Have we told people the mountaintop is where God lives, when Scripture keeps insisting He’s normally present in the valley?
Have we built spiritual lives that can only sustain themselves by getting out next hit at the next scheduled high?

building the muscle that actually holds

There’s now a vital shift churches have to make.

The primary rhythm of the church can’t be the retreat, the conference, the big upcoming sermon series, the month of prayer, or even the next important Sunday.

It has to be the ordinary week – the same small group of disciples meeting on the same Tuesday, month after month, with nothing building toward a climax. If that’s not the actual backbone of the church calendar, the mountaintop will keep being the focus.

It means teaching people to pray and read Scripture in a way that doesn’t need a worship set to be meaningful. A Christian that can only spend time in God’s presence with a band leading them hasn’t been taught to be with God at all.

It means creating different metrics on purpose – not “how did the retreat go,” but “who is still praying, still showing up, still being formed, six months later, with no event on the calendar.” If a church can’t answer that, it’s still living off the mountaintop.

And it means being honest from the stage that the high will fade. Saying it out loud before Mondaygets the chance to say it first, so people aren’t left thinking their faith failed when the feelings went away.

what actually holds up

The people I know who are still following Jesus decades after their own youth group years are almost never the ones who chased the next mountaintop the hardest.

They’re the ones who learned to pray in the midst of their ordinary lives and busy schedule.

Who kept showing up to a small, unglamorous group of people who knew them long after the retreat high wore off.

Who learned that faithfulness on Monday matters more than the tears on Friday night. Not because the tears were fake, but because the tears were never meant to be the point.

The mountaintop is real. God does meet us there.

But He doesn’t need us to meet Him there. He never has.

And a church that only knows how to build mountaintop experiences has never actually taught anyone how to walk in the ordinariness of life…which, it turns out, is where all of us actually live and Jesus wants to be the most present to us…

This post is a part of the “Big Church, Same Games” series. The next post is “Find Your People.”

I still remember my first lock in.

Pizza and sodas all night. A prize if you brought a friend. Games till 11 pm, worship at midnight, a movie at 2 am. Somebody playing music thru the sound system in the gym like it was a concert. Lots of kids, lots of energy.

And sure, Jesus was in there. Usually around the time everyone was tired enough to sit still.

That was the deal, and nobody hid it.

Get them in the door with the fun. Slip in the gospel once you had their attention.

It worked. I know it worked, because it worked on me and my friends.

And since then, I’ve watched that exact strategy walk straight out of the youth room and onto the main stage of churches.

Come be entertained. Jesus is there somewhere.

Except now it’s not a strategy for a lock-in once a semester. It’s a plan used for one hour, every single week. It’s a plan to grow churches and build more campuses.

bait and switch faith

Nobody sat in a meeting and decided to model church off of a lock-in strategy.

It happened one decision at a time, and every decision probably made sense on its own.

The band got better musicians because a great band honors God (oh, and draws a bigger crowd).

The lighting and screens were upgraded to provide an easier way for the congregation to sing along (oh, and a more exciting experience).

Someone noticed attendance always spikes for the series with the movie-trailer-style promo video which means more people could hear the Gospel (so they started making more of those to draw more people).

The greeters got a script. The coffee became fair trade. The lobby got re-named and re-modeled as a “gathering space.” And whether anyone said it out loud or not, churches started modeling themselves after lock-ins…

Every single one of those moves made sense at the time. And yet together, they built a machine. A machine built to get people in the door and keep them coming back.

A bigger version of the same machine youth ministry leaders began building prototypes for decades ago.

we traded formation for attraction

We didn’t set out to replace discipleship with entertainment. We set out to remove barriers. And somewhere the barrier-removing became the whole job.

We started asking “how many people showed up” instead of “how did that form them.”

We started measuring the wrong things because they were the things we could quickly and easily measure.

Attendance.

Salvations.

Baptisms.

How many people volunteered for the second service.

We stopped asking harder questions because they didn’t show up on the scorecard.

Did anyone repent of anything significant this year?
Did anyone learn to actually pray or read the Scriptures for themselves?
Did anyone get discipled by a person, instead of only by a stage and a public speaker?

A lock-in never had to answer those questions. It had one job: keep a hundred teenagers occupied and safe until their parents came back in the morning, and try to sneak in Jesus. Fun was really the main assignment, not discipleship.

“Big church” was never supposed to copy that assignment.

the add-on became optional

Unfortunately, what happens when Jesus is the add-on instead of the whole point is eventually you don’t actually need Him at all.

You can run an excellent Sunday morning service – moving music, an impactful communicator, a well-produced series with a good hook – and never actually lead anyone to repentance, confession, or a lifetime relationship with Jesus. You can hold a packed room’s attention for ninety minutes purely on production value.

We know this is true because plenty of arenas do it every weekend for sports or music with no gospel in the building at all.

If the thing that makes your church different from a well-run concert or sporting event is a forty-minute public speaker and a response time at the end, you haven’t built a church. You’ve built a very good show, with a chaplain.

not anti-excellence

I want to be careful here too, because it would be easy to hear this as turn off the lights, kill the band, sing four hymns off key and call it holy.

That’s not it.

Excellence isn’t the problem. A great band isn’t the problem. A technology-filled room isn’t the problem.

The problem is what this version of excellence that is being celebrated actually results in.

A lock-in’s excellence was in service of getting as many teenagers to show up as possible, helping them to think youth group is fun and cool, and keeping them busy till morning.

If a church’s excellence is in service of the exact same kind of thing — getting people to show up, keeping them spiritually entertained, and getting them to come back — then it doesn’t matter if Jesus is included or not, the results will never be about Him.

We will have built a very well-run version of the wrong version of excellence.

what it would actually take to fix this

We are at the point that it would take an major shift, not just a slight modification, to correct course.

It would mean the “invitation” isn’t the last thing you do as a part of a well-produced religious hour. It has to be built into the structure of the service itself — real space for confession, for actual response, not a swelling instrumental track cueing people toward a decision they’ll forget by lunch.

It means whoever plans the service asks a different first question. Not “how do we hook people,” but “what would actually need to happen in this hour for someone to walk out more formed than they walked in.” Sometimes that still means a great band. It just stops being the whole strategy.

It means real follow-up when someone does respond — a person calling them that week, not a name added to a database. A lock-in never had to follow up with anyone after Saturday morning. A church does.

And it means being willing to measure something harder than attendance: are the people who’ve been here five years actually more like Jesus than they were five years ago? If nobody can answer that question, the production was working. The church wasn’t.

questions worth sitting with

• Have we confused a full room with a formed people?
• Have we made actual relationship with Jesus the smallest, quietest part of the hour?
• Would this Sunday still be worth it if the lights never came up, the band never played, the world-class communicator never spoke, and you weren’t served good coffee?

I don’t know a pastor who set out to build a lock-in that never ends. But I know a lot of them who have unfortunately inherited and perpetuated a system originally built for attracting teenagers and never asked whether it was unfortunately built for the wrong job all along.

The add-on was never supposed to be the add-on. He was always supposed to be the whole point.

This post is a part of the “Big Church, Same Games” series. The next post is “Mountaintop Worship.”

I grew up in church. Sunday school, VBS, children’s choir and musicals, and of course eventually youth group.

In fact, I still remember how big of a deal it was when our church started allowing 6th graders to join the youth group instead of having them wait until 7th grade (what used to be called Jr High). And it was my grade level that was the first to make this transition…

I still remember being so excited to join my older brothers at youth group, and yet so nervous about all the big teenagers I now had to be around.

I remember the games, the food, the lessons on puberty and purity, the looking up to older teenagers and wanting to be like them, and of course the big events and trips — 5th quarters after Friday night football being some of the best.

And I especially remember my first youth pastor who always made sure we knew he cared. Still to this day I can hear him say what he always said at the end of every youth group gathering: “Even if no one else tells you today, I want you to know I love you.” And he meant it. He is still one of the “good ones.”

I actually have very little bad things to say about my time in youth group.

My reason for writing isn’t some sort of negative experience that now I want to project onto church in general. Even though I certainly have my share of stories that I can’t believe happened…

But my goal in writing these reflections is to look at how what was meant to be a transitionary version of ministry for teenagers (youth group culture) actually became a permanent framework for ministry for many churches today (church growth strategy and megachurch or contemporary culture).

And that because this has happened, that is why I think we now have a very immature (and sometimes heretical) version of American Christianity that has been popularized today.

lock-ins and lights down low

Lock-ins. Summer camps. Worship nights with the lights down low. Altar calls that felt like the most important fifteen to thirty minutes of the week.

I won’t say I didn’t enjoy it. I did. I was swept up in it all.

Early on I learned how to be a “leader” by fully engaging in whatever it was we were doing — from the “innocent” pranks on trips to the serious prayer times during worship nights.

I don’t regret being fully “in” on youth group. But somewhere along the way, as I grew up and engaged in college ministry and then eventually became a leader in church ministry as an adult (especially church planting or large church ministry), I started noticing something.

It felt familiar. It no longer felt like “big church” used to when I was a kid. It felt much more like youth group did.

The songs had the same emotional arcs.

The sermons had the same focuses, stories, and calls for response.

The “big moments” were engineered the same way my youth pastor used to engineer a Wednesday night: build the energy in the room and then land the ask.

As I grew up, it turns out church didn’t grow up with me. Church just became an adult version of youth group, with a bigger budget.

a transition became a destination

Youth ministry, at its best, was never meant to be the model for the whole church.

It was created to be transitional.

A way to meet teenagers where they are – because teenagers many times need novelty and energy and belonging – and to point them toward something deeper. Toward a lifetime of ordinary, unglamorous discipleship among people of every age.

Well, that was the theory when it started anyway.

Somewhere in the last few decades, that transitional version of ministry became the destination.

The methods people built for us as teenagers, followed us as we grew and got implemented into “big church.”

Nobody voted on this. Nobody announced it from a stage. It just happened.

Partly because the youth pastors of old worked their way up to become lead pastors or church planters. Partly because the youth group kids of old became the adults churches were then looking to attract to “come back” to church with their kids.

Either way, churches becoming adult youth groups started to “work.”

Attendance went up. Energy went up. Budgets went up.

And slowly, without a single decision anyone could point to, many American Churches became larger versions of the youth groups a lot of us grew up in.

Adult mission trips started looking a lot like youth summer trips. Church events started looking identical to youth conferences. And lead pastors starting dressing and acting just like youth pastors used to.

The youth group didn’t transition us to “big church.” The church transitioned to becoming a youth group. And almost no one seemed to see it happening, or seemed to care.

three things we traded in the process

I’ll spend the rest of this series unpacking what this has meant for what the church is today. But here is an overview of what we’ve traded in this transition:

We replaced discipleship with spiritual entertainment.
We embraced emotional highs as if it equates to spiritual growth.
We created groups based off ages, stages, and preferences instead of forming a spiritual family.

Somewhere we decided the goal of a gathering was to keep someone’s attention rather than to form them.

We started measuring whether people encountered God by whether they felt something.

And we got very good at manufacturing experiences instead of developing spiritual awareness.

The mountaintop experience became the metric.

Just like youth camp was always followed by a crash (and nobody in youth ministry ever seemed to solve that problem but just planned the next thing) now churches just run on the same roller coaster spirituality:

The worship night. The mission trip. The men’s or women’s event. The sermon series built to climb toward a climax. The next Sunday you just don’t want to miss.

The crash still comes every time. We’ve just gotten better at scheduling the next experience or emotional high before anyone asks questions.

not nostalgia

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to write this as things were better in the old days.

They weren’t.

The pre “youth-groupification” of the American Church had its own problems. Formality without formation. Moralism without mercy. Communities that pushed people into cultural conformity as easily as into Christ.

I’m not asking us to go back.

I’m encouraging us to notice what we’ve actually built. And to ask honestly whether it forms the kind of people the New Testament describes, or whether it’s just really good at getting people to show up, show out, and shell out money.

Because those are not the same thing.

A youth group can be full every Wednesday and still fail to produce a single disciple that will follow Jesus in their twenties and thirties.

A church can be full every Sunday, with all the same slick production, gifted communicator, and talented band, and also be producing the exact same result.

Just with better marketing and more expensive equipment.

built for a stage nobody was meant to stay in

I don’t think most pastors have created the problems we are now seeing on purpose.

I simply think they were taught (or caught) a style of ministry built for a specific, temporary developmental stage of life, and then they just kept doing that kind of ministry when everyone grew up because it seemed to “work” and it’s what they knew.

But it doesn’t mean we should just accept it as normative for the Church.

We must ask difficult questions:

• Have we mistaken entertainment for formation?
• Have we trained pastors to know how to fill a room but not how to sit with someone in their real relationship with God?
• Have we built churches that feel exciting over churches that make ordinary disciples?

It’s worth asking what the church should look like if we formed it to make mature disciples. Not just grown-ups performing a polished, entertaining, emotionally-cued version of a group of teenagers at youth camp.

Mature disciples. Formed slowly. Known deeply. Led by people who have done more than survive their own adolescence.

That’s the church we should want to attend. That’s what we should want to lead.

And this series is my attempt to identify what we have allowed to be built instead…

 

This post is a part of the “Big Church, Same Games” series. The next post is “Lock-In Gospel.”