In Robert Wuthnow’s After the Baby Boomers, three critical (in my estimation) observations are offered. If you missed the first two posts click HERE and HERE. I will summarize Wuthnow’s observations and add additional reflection.

#1 Young adults are bricoleurs. That is, young adults now piece their lives (relationships, experiences, education, reading) from a myriad of places. They have multiple “friendship groups” according to different interests, places lived, and competing values. In many ways, our young adults are growing up in a splintered world in which they have relationships (some meaningful, some not) on facebook, blogging, school, etc. The challenge of the religious leader is to channel these varying sources of influences into some kind of larger narrative shape.

#2 Young adults are microcosms of the larger polarization that exists in the U.S. per politics, religion–sometimes referred to as the culture wars. While it’s sexy to think about American culture as “red states” versus “blue state”–the truth is that we have “purple states” all over. The person, ministry and teachings of Jesus have the powerful potential to tear down the trinitarian walls of class, sex, and gender. Rather than supporting the hostility of RIGHT versus LEFT (and the personalities who get rich and famous from this), local churches can become “communities of argument” (my phrase) where people come to learn, ask big questions, and experience challenging dialog.

#3 Young adults lack institutional support. This observation assumes that institutions (schools, colleges, churches, etc.) play a redemptive role in the life of a human. While all of us could list the negatives of institutions (unhealthy competition, conformity to name a few), the reality is that institutions play a critical role in the development of person’s dreams, hopes, ambition, and skill. Because young adults are now extending adolescence into their late 20’s (because of education, waiting later to get married, general lack of focus), young adults essentially face the temptation of drifting into a nothingness of sorts. Repeating the same relational, familial, and personal cycles without breakthrough into a compelling life. Local churches typically lack intentional focus (staffing, funding, imagination, care) because of a deep passion for the family (particularly “children” and “students”). While I believe churches must creatively work to reach children and students, to do so at the cost of ignoring young adults is a dangerous path to tread.

I pray you will be a risk-taker. If you want to be a concert pianist, be the best concert pianist you can be. If you want to build homes in Trujillo, Honduras, be the best carpenter you can be. If you want to practice medicine, do so with every ounce of energy. Whatever you do, don’t play it safe or give in to the societal pressures to “have it all” and live the “American dream.” Whatever you do, do it as if you are doing it for Jesus himself. I promise to not be the dad who lives my dreams through you . . . Even if that means I give up sports to learn the intricacies of concert pianists.

I pray you will possess a deep humility. You are entering a world under siege. Evil and sin do not reside “out there” among “them.” Rather, the Bible teaches us that evil runs right through the middle of us. As you grow older, you will make mistakes. You will make choices that will hurt yourself and others. The more you own your secrets and scars the less your secrets and scars will own you. Jesus teaches us to be the same person in secret as we are in public. His brother was so moved by this teaching he told a group of Christians that “confessing sins to each other” was vital in the spiritual life (James 5:16). I promise to emulate this by sharing my own shortcomings with you.

I bless you today with every ounce of fiber inside of me. As you grow in God’s big world may you come to know that you will only find rest when you rest in God. May you become the person God dreamed you to be when he gave you to your mother and I. God’s gift to you is your life. What you choose to do with your life is a gift back to him. I will never be the same because of your presence in my life.

Peace,

Dad

From chapter four in The Feast (The Greatest Risk).

Lunch is the most spiritual part of my day. How could I get more spiritual than chips, salsa, and a prophet? On day, I was having lunch with a group, listening to Jeff, who was bringing up everything from preaching to politics, immigration, and evangelism. I just wanted good Mexican food, but I learned that with Jeff you get more than you bargained for.

At one point in the conversation, Jeff asked the group: “Did you know the ten largest churches in the world are not in the West? They are in places like China, South Korea, Peru, and West Africa. In the United States we are impressed if a church can cram a thousand people into a building on a Sunday morning. Some of these churches have tens of thousands meeting several times a week in homes, underground and above.”

Little did I know that the conversation was about to get more interesting.

After I sipped on some (okay, a lot of) Dr. Pepper, Jeff turned to me and said, “Imagine this scenario. A man walks into your office completely at the end of his rope. He’s hit rock bottom. His annual salary, before losing his job, was two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year. In a span of just thirty days, this man spent over one hundred thousand dollars on alcohol, gambling, and food. That’s one hundred thousand dollars . . . . His wife leaves him and takes their children. He’s lost his house, cars, everything. He now lives on the streets and in shelters in Philly sorting rags for twenty- five dollars a week. This guy walks into your office and tells you this information, asking for your help. How would you respond?”

I thought for a minute, cutting through all the weak answers I could offer. One person at the table chimed in, “I’d tell him to call someone who cares.”

I immediately felt something inside saying, “That’s not the best answer.”

So I attempted to craft a response to my prophetic peer. “I would ask him if he wants to stop drinking.” I come from a family where alcohol addiction is talked about openly. I know the first rule to addiction is that the addict has to desire change. “If he’s serious about changing, then I can help him.” I was quite satisfied with my answer.

The third person at the table declined to speculate. “I don’t even know what I’d say . . .” All the votes were in. I had a feeling Jeff was not impressed with his lunch company.

Jeff abruptly responded, “You are true Americans. I asked my friend from Africa, a pastor, what he would do, and he said he’d grab the man right then and there in the office and start praying that God would release his soul from the bondage and captivity that was oppressing him. I don’t care if he wanted me to or not. I’m a Christian and I believe in the power and authority of Jesus. Sure there’s room for psychology and practical treatment for addiction. First and foremost, Christians believe in the power of God.”
He continued, much to my dismay.

“So, the next time this guy came into my office, that’s what I did.”

Apparently this case study was a real situation! “I grabbed him and started praying for the Holy Spirit to invade his life and create transformation, real change.”

“What happened?”

“I grabbed the guy as hard as I could, hanging on to him, praying with passion and fervor.”

“Then what?” I was quite the reporter.

“He ran screaming into the night,” Jeff said with some amount of enthusiasm.

“Oh,” was all I could muster. In that moment, I thought to myself, “Is this how Christian counselors are trained these days?”

Jeff seemed to be aware of my inner monologue: “But you see, Josh . . . it’s not always about being successful. Oftentimes it’s about being faithful.”¹

Over guacamole and Dr. Pepper, Jeff taught me that risk and foolishness are essential in the life of following Jesus. All of a sudden, I felt like one of the disciples, reclining at a table with Jesus, trying to comprehend the word of God in my midst. Grace calls us to discipleship.

Discipleship requires risk.

This is an excerpt from my book, THE FEAST (chapter three, WRESTLING WITH THE REAL JESUS):

I wrestle with whether I’m an admirer of Jesus in that dream crowd or whether I’m truly following his radical teachings. I feel like Robert Jordan, the brother of the influential writer and activist Clarence Jordan. Clarence approached his powerful brother, a lawyer in Georgia, to help provide some protection for Clarence’s demonstration plot, the Koinonia Farm, which was created to be a visible sign that blacks and whites, poor and rich could live in solidarity. A radical project, especially in the early 1950s.

Clarence believed his brother might be able to provide some legal advice or protection to ensure the continuation of the vision that birthed the Koinonia Farm. Here’s one recollection of the conversation. Upon being asked for assistance by Clarence, Robert responded:

“Clarence, I can’t do that. You know my political aspirations. Why, if I represented you, I might lose my job, my house, everything I’ve got.”

“We might lose everything too, Bob.”

“It’s different for you.”

“Why is it different? I remember, it seems to me, that you and I joined the same church the same Sunday, as boys. I expect when we came forward the same preacher asked me about the same question he did you. He asked me, ‘Do you accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ What did you say?”

“I follow Jesus, Clarence, up to a point.”

“Could that point by any chance be—the cross?”

“That’s right. I follow him to the cross, but not on the cross. I’m not getting myself crucified.”

“Then I don’t believe you’re a disciple. You’re an admirer of Jesus, but not a disciple of his. I think you ought to go back to the church you belong to, and tell them you’re an admirer not a disciple.”

“Well now, if everyone who felt like I do did that, we wouldn’t have a church, would we?”

“The question is,” Clarence said, “do you have a church?”*

The chief antagonists in this mini-drama were not the conventional bogeymen constructed so often in contemporary religious polemics: the “liberals,” “atheists,” and “homosexuals.” Christians were the ones who physically assaulted, shunned, and imposed economic difficulties on the Koinonia Farm. Baptist. Methodist. Presbyterian. Churches of Christ. It was the “Christians” who prevented the gospel from having its way in the Jim Crow South.

Every day I wrestle with my identity: am I a merely a spectator, or am I truly following? I stand somewhere between these two brothers—at times willing to lay down everything for the kingdom, at other times, doing everything in my power to preserve my comfortable life, career, and positions. I firmly believe that more than understanding Christianity as a “set of beliefs,” ours is a faith that demands to be seen as a “way of life.”

*I first encountered this story in Lee Camp’s Mere Discipleship.

During a Columbia class lecture a few weeks back, I jotted down the following as the big challenges local churches face in the coming ten years: consumerism, sexuality, sacred/secular, tribalism, technology, beliefs (epistemology), nationalism (not the same as patriotism), and busyness. Of course, there are other ways to say what I’m saying but sometimes I trust what pours out, then I critique it at a later point.

By “challenges” I mean, realities in American life that can either help the church embody the story of Jesus or significantly hurt the church’s mission.

I like these words from Lauren Winner.

Evangelical friends of mine are always trying to trim the corners and smooth the rough edges of what they call My Witness in order to shove it into a tidy, born-again conversion narrative. They want an exact date, even an hour, and I never know what to tell them. The datable conversion story has a venerable history. Paul, the most famous Jew to embrace Jesus, established the prototype of the dramatic, datable rebirth. He was walking on the road to Damascus, Luke tells us, off to persecute the zealous disciples of the newly dead carpenter when Jesus appeared to him, and Paul became his follower instead of his foe. Centuries later, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, was attending a meeting in Aldersgate Street; listening to Luther’s Preface to the Epistle to the Romans, his heart was “strangely warmed.” At that instant, Wesley later wrote in his journal, he felt that he “did trust in Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.” Less notable personages have dramatic conversion stories, too. My high school physics teacher sat in her kitchen reading the Gospel of Mark one day when, in an instant, she knew that Jesus was God and had died for her sins. My friend Tim dedicated his life to Christ when he was four at a mission’s conference at Bibletown, in Boca Raton, Florida. He had seen a puppet show about Jesus knocking on your heart. So he opened it and asked Him to come in.

My story doesn’t fit very well with this conversion archetype. A literature scholar would say there are too many “ruptures” in the “narrative.” But she might also say that ruptures are the most interesting part of any text, that in the ruptures we learn something new. I had no epiphanic on-the-road-to-Damascus experience. I can’t tell my friends that I became a Christian January 8, 1993, or on my twentieth birthday. What I can tell them is that I grew up Jewish. I can tell them about the time I dreamed of Jesus rescuing me from a kidnapping; I can tell them I woke up certain, as certain as I have ever been about anything, that the dream was from God and the dream was about Jesus, about how He was real and true and sure. I can tell them about reading At Home in Mitford, a charming if somewhat saccharine novel about an Episcopal priest in North Carolina, a novel that left me wanting something Christians seemed to have. I can tell them about my baptism.

My close friend, Jonathan Storment, wrote this on his blog recently. I’ve heard about what Mark Moore is doing through mutual friends and I am excited to partner with him and this BIG DREAM.

For the longest time I’ve heard about a guy named Mark Moore. We had both graduated from the same school in Arkansas (although he did a few years earlier than me). We both had been mentored by similar people, and had a lot of mutual friends. And everyone who I spoke to about Mark said the same thing, “there’s a guy who’s going to change the world.”

And they were right.

I met Mark for the first time a couple of months ago. Since then we’ve met a few more times and after each conversation I walk away thinking, “This is possible. We can do something about the state of current world affairs.” And so can you.

Here’s how.

About a sixth of the global population deal with poverty and malnutrition. And the worst form of that is severe acute malnutrition. Now you’ve probably heard the statistics about this before. Every 3-4 seconds someone dies of starvation, and the overwhelming majority are children.

But I’ve never heard anyone say before that it doesn’t have to be like this.

Mark is spearheading a non-profit called MANA, or Mother’s Administered Nutritive Aid and the main goal of MANA is to stop people dying from severe acute malnutrition. And it’s got a chance to work. See MANA is a low cost peanut based paste that is high in calories and low in cost. It’s like Peanut Butter on steroids. It’s filled with vitamins and nutrients that can help back a starving child off of the cliff. It’s been called by experts a miracle food. Which is to say this is a bit more potent than JIF.

See before this paste the way that people helped starving kids was by putting them in a hospital, pumping them full with all the vitamins and food their body could handle. But it would take weeks to get their bodies back to some normal state, which took precious resources like hospital beds and medicine. And everyone knew in no time at all they would probably be back.

But with MANA it’s different. If a child eats MANA for 4-6 weeks, studies have shown that not only will they be helped immediately, but for the most part their bodies are in a place that can help them fend of starvation in the future.

It works like this. Since most of the malnutrition deaths occur among children, Field Doctors diagnose whether or not a kid is in trouble and then we distribute this miracle food to the mothers. Operating on the basic human reality that Mothers love their children, MANA gives the food to the moms of the malnourished kids, allowing them to care for their children with resources that can actually save their lives.

There are a couple of other similar products out there. But MANA is the only one that is a non-profit. They’re not trying to make money, their sole goal is to try and save lives. But since it’s not a business it operates off of donations. MANA has been working with UNICEF and several of the most influential church leaders in America to get this project off the ground. And that’s where you come in.

This is a great resource that can actually change things, but it needs money. It needs people with influence to talk about it to people with influence. Maybe you’re a church leader, a deacon, a shepherd or a church member who cares deeply about social justice and just don’t know where to start. Check out their website or their facebook page then get the word out. Donate your Facebook or Twitter status, write a blog or make a phone call.

This thing has got a real chance to make a difference, it just needs a tipping point.

If there’s one thing we know about God, it’s that He cares for the least of these, the people who are on the margins, the ones without any resources, and in the words of James’ this is the kind of stuff true religion always points toward. The truth is, I think God’s doing something here. I don’t think it was ever his intention for children to die from lack of food, and one way or another God is going to be active in feeding these children.

But the question is will we partner with Him in doing it.