Labels

What confuses me is how to label myself. Although I was raised and confirmed in the Reformed Church in America, at twenty-two, I'm not sure the label fits as well as it once did. In high school, I went to parachurch summer camps, and my best friends were Baptist and Catholic. When it came time to choose a college, I attended an Evangelical Covenant university in Chicago, where I worshiped in Ukranian Orthodox and Mennonite congregations. I studied abroad in France, and joined a Baptist Bible study there. The summer after my freshman year I lived with a missionary family of the Evangelical Church in Niger, West Africa, and I am currently a youth ministry intern for the Lutheran Church in Esslingen, Germany. Sometimes, people here ask me what denomination I am. I normally stutter for a while before spitting out, "I'm a Christian. Does it matter what else?"

Increasingly, within my generation, I have the impression that no, it doesn't so much. Raised on the border of postmodernism, we are a generation comfortable with contradictions and uncomfortable with labels that sound exclusive to us. I'd be telling you something you already knew if I tried to illustrate how few young people attend church "these days." The movement of young people away from the church in America has been happening at least since the 1960s, when rebellion against authority and distaste for conventional values led young people elsewhere in the search for meaning and purpose. It's been forty years since Woodstock, though, and there is still a gap in the pews where young adults should be sitting. But this isn't baby boomer rebellion; today our absence means something else.

Christians in my generation crave community, but we are faced with the dilemmas both of defining those communities and of defining ourselves within them. We want to partake in inclusive community--we desire the intense experiences this entails. At the same time, however, we want to explore the world, to experience it before settling into a particular location.

One of the churches I frequent when I am in Chicago has a weekly attendance of over 500 (almost exclusively twentysomethings). Membership, however, stays around 90, despite a passionate and visionary pastoral staff, lively worship, vibrant small groups, wonderful missions programs, and lots of visitors. The number one excuse for not joining? "I'm not sure how long I'll be in Chicago...I don't want to commit to a community I have to leave." We are a generation in motion, and we are hesitant to settle down too quickly. Often this translates to dropping in and out of church anonymously, rather than dedicating ourselves to one place.

Sometimes, what we see in traditional churches discourages us. We see the impact of contemporary American society on the church, a culture that discourages authentic community in favor of individualization. The commuter lifestyle, which compartmentalizes life into boxes of work, home, school, and church, has made us fragmented, individualized people who look at church as we look at the rest of life: as anonymous, individual consumers. Going to church is like going to Starbucks: I walk in, see a lot of tall, skinny vanilla lattes like myself, say something nice to the barista over a blueberry muffin and walk out, perked up for the day. Communities in which people are truly dependent on one another seem to have been lost in the championing of an exchange- based society.

Meanwhile, religious surveys repeatedly announce the decline of mainline Protestant denominations. Churches with older populations are dwindling and dying, and young people are either going elsewhere or leaving the church entirely.

The answer is clear, right? Young Christians need to deal with their transient and consumerist ways, and settle down to engage in real Christian community where they are. Agreed! Like many other twentysomething Christians,   We want to partake in inclusive community--we desire the intense experiences this entails. At the same time, however, we want to explore the world, to experience it before settling into a particular location.   it hurts me that our face is so inconsistent in the church today. I feel charged to change the nature of this consumer church, to contribute to a diverse community, to save the denomination from dying out with its founding immigrants. A few of my good friends are doing this, and it is both hard and good work. Truly, ignited by this call and protective of my home church, part of me is pulled to join them, to change the status quo and be present where so many young people are not.

Enter the dilemma: at the same time that I am being pulled to stay, I'm being pushed to leave. As international travel becomes easier, knowledge of foreign languages no longer a luxury but a necessity, and big cities boast job opportunities, young adults are constantly hearing and responding to the following call: "You're young, you're unattached--it's time to see and serve the world--grab as many experiences as you can!"

Leaving for Germany after college was own my attempt to answer both calls: I'd try to see another corner of the world, but I'd do it by committing a year of my life to youth work within a Christian community. Faced with smaller surroundings, I figured, I would be able to participate in intense relationships, to depend on and be depended upon by others. There was a fatal flaw in my plan, however: namely, the relationships I first formed in my German community were with young people. And this fall, the five friends I've grown closest with will be leaving to study abroad or work elsewhere. Ironic, I thought. I came here to be in community with them, and now they're leaving home just as I did.

The fact is that young people are not going to stay put, and they probably shouldn't entirely. It is important, especially in an increasingly globalized society, for us to see and experience the world, and to bring back what we've learned in order to help the church grow. Whether it's because we're "unattached"--a label that can make one feel as lonely as one does liberated--or for a host of other reasons, this transition period seems to be happening more often and lasting longer in my generation than it did in my parents' generation.

In short, a traditional community is not going to work for those of us in transition, either because we will not be present long enough or because the people we connect with "abroad" will not. The question confronting our generation, then, is how a person in transition chooses to define her or his Christian community: Is my community the church that I was confirmed in, even though I haven't acquired all my spiritual formation there? Or is it the place where I happen to be right now? And what am I to make of my virtual community, those people I have contact with regularly with via e-mail, video chat, or social networking sites? According to Facebook, I am currently "friends" with 718 people, from the girls I grew up playing dolls with to my parents peers and co-workers. And though my desire for real, authentic community makes me want to shrug off the idea that virtual connection could have any lasting effect on one's life, it is undeniable that sites like Facebook and Twitter enable globetrotters like myself to retain lasting relationships with people we would have otherwise lost touch with because of distance and time.

This dilemma is vexing not only because defining community is so difficult with so many to choose from, but because defining one's own community offers the tools that define one's self. When I shared this opinion with a friend of mine, she agreed. "How we choose to define community, and what our communities actually look like," she said, "matters. It matters because, even as we define our communities, our communities are defining us."

As I work at my own definition of community, I've constructed a piecemeal group of people all over the world with whom I regularly maintain contact. These individuals know where I am and how I am doing. But because I can't "go deep" with all of them all the time, I have to know and accept that the face of Christ's body is most strongly represented by the Christians I live with in the present.

During my college church search, I remember asking my parents how they had found a church when they first lived away from home. Both of them replied, "Well, I grew up Presbyterian, so I looked for the closest thing to a Presbyterian church in the area." For my parents, who became West Michiganders when they were married, that meant joining the RCA. Compare what my parents said to the answer a friend gave me when I posed the same question to him: "I don't care if the church has infant baptism or not. What's important to me is not the church's name, it's what they do.   As young people move and create relationships with different sorts of people and places, we naturally find it difficult to identify with one tradition exclusively. Unlike my parents, it's not easy for me to say I’m Reformed.   Are they caring for the poor? Are they looking after the underprivileged, or are they spending their money on a new gym facility?" Eric isn't the first person I've heard complain about churches promoting renovation while poverty exists in their own back yards. Social engagement, validation of experience, and a commitment to diversity are higher on young peoples' lists today than doctrine or denominational tradition. Doctrine and denomination are usually perceived as old rules and regulations that can prevent real ministry and authentic community from happening. It's not that we are flippantly disregarding heritage and theology, or that we want to rebel against rules. It is that experience and living out biblical values are of primary importance to us. We want to see the fruit of this doctrine before we explore it more deeply. Labels, and the schisms that surround them, are unattractive to us in their propensity to divide. Young Christians find it difficult to label ourselves, much less our churches. The wealth of experiences we have collected as people in transition add weight to our cultural feeling: we do not need to be exclusive in church, nor do we want to be.

Postmodernism has no doubt played a role in shaping this perspective on faith. A philosophical phenomenon that is now a cultural construction, the underlying assumption of postmodernism is that absolute truth does not exist. Rather, personal experience dictates truth for each individual, and a wealth of exposure to different experiences is therefore naturally desirable. For my generation, right and wrong and black and white have been taught as "that's his opinion," and "it's not wrong, it's just different," and "that's a gray area." In terms of faith, this philosophy translates to a mainstream youth culture that is more likely to voice its desire for each expression of faith to be equally heard than its desire to prove one right or wrong.

Though most postmodern Christians would not go so far as to deny the existence of absolute truth--indeed, we would stress our experience with the living Christ as the source of ultimate truth--postmodern culture as manifested in the church leads many young adults to shy away from traditional denominations. Denominational labels, by virtue of their schismatic history and rootedness in "black and white" doctrine, are founded on exclusion and inclusion--what (or who) is in and what (or who) is out. As young people move and create relationships with different sorts of people and places, we naturally find it difficult to identify with one tradition exclusively. Unlike my parents, it's not easy for me to say I'm Reformed--I've taken part in too many manifestations of church to honestly say that. And in contrast to the founding immigrants of American denominations, our generation doesn't look to church as a place that distinguishes us from other ethnic groups. Because we are searching for a place where many different voices are acknowledged, we are hesitant to decide on or even desire a "set of rules" for church. We prefer to pull from the multitude of our experiences in worship--indeed, we are looking for places that stress welcome over exclusivity.

My aim here is not to disparage denominational doctrine or to chastise Christian congregations as unwelcoming perpetrators of dogmatic exclusion. If that were true, I would have turned away from the church a long time ago, and it would have been impossible for me to see and taste the many rich expressions of God's Kingdom that I have been a part of in Christian congregations all over the world. Instead, what I hope I have offered is an explanation for my age group's marked absence from, or only short-term presence in, the church's pews. In a culture that preaches consumerism and artificiality, I believe that Christ speaks truth and that the community of faith is real. Faith is not something I take lightly; it is my anchor, my stability in the midst of transition. But I am not looking to church as a shelter from the cultural storm. Rather, I'm looking for a place that actively engages the many voices I am hearing. We, the ones in transition, do desire to be in church, not only to consume but also to participate. The thrilling unknown is what church will look like once we bring our experiences to the table and attempt to find our place.