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November 2014 A.D. Millenials Long for Liturgy
Olmstead, Gracy. “Why Millenials Long for
Liturgy.” The American Conservative. 14 Jan 2014.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-millennials-long-for-liturgy/. Accessed 6 Nov 2014.
Why Millennials Long for Liturgy
Is the High Church the Christianity of the future?
America’s
youth are leaving churches in droves. One in four young adults choose
“unaffiliated” when asked about their religion, according to a 2012 Public
Religion Research Institute poll, and 55 percent of those unaffiliated youth
once had a religious identification when they were younger. Yet amidst this exodus,
some church leaders have identified another movement as cause for hope: rather
than abandoning Christianity, some young people are joining more traditional,
liturgical denominations—notably the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Orthodox
branches of the faith. This trend is deeper than denominational waffling: it’s
a search for meaning that goes to the heart of our postmodern age.
For
Bart Gingerich, a fellow with the Institute on Religion and Democracy and a
student at Reformed Episcopal Seminary, becoming Anglican was an intellectual
journey steeped in the thought of ancient church fathers. He spent the first 15
years of his life in the United Methodist Church, where he felt he was taught a
“Precious Moments” version of Christianity: watered down, polite, and unreal.
His family joined a nondenominational evangelical church when Gingerich was 16.
Some of the youth he met were serious about their faith, but others were
apathetic, and many ended up leaving the church later on.
While
attending Patrick Henry College in Virginia, Gingerich joined a reformed
Baptist church in the nearby town of Guilford. Gingerich read St. Augustine and
connected strongly with his thought—in class from Monday to Friday, Gingerich
found himself arguing for ideas that clashed with his method of worship on
Sunday. Protestantism began troubling him on a philosophical level. Could he
really believe that the church “didn’t start getting it right” till the
Reformation?
The
final straw came when a chapel speaker at the college explained the beauty of
the Eucharist in the Anglican service. Gingerich knew this was what he was
looking for. Soon after, he joined the Anglican Church.
For
high-school English teacher Jesse Cone, joining the Orthodox Church fulfilled a
deep yearning for community and sacramental reality. Cone grew up in the
Presbyterian Church of America, heavily involved in youth group and church
activities. While attending Biola University, an evangelical school in southern
California, Cone returned home over the summers to help lead youth-group
activities. He was hired as a youth pastor and “even preached a sermon.” But at
Biola, Cone struggled to find a home church. There were many megachurches in
the area that didn’t have the “organic, everyday substance” Cone was seeking.
He
began attending an Anglican service, drawn to its traditional doctrine. He was
a “perpetual visitor” over the next few years. A Bible study on the Gospel of
John pushed him further towards the high church. Reading through the book with
a group of friends, Cone began to notice the “conversational and sacramental”
way Jesus related to people. “There’s a lot of bread, and wine, and water,” he
says. From Jesus’s first miracle—turning water into wine—to telling his
disciples “I am the True Vine,” the mundane, communal ways in which in which
Jesus connected with people “confirmed in me a sense of sacramentalism—that
everyday aspects of life are important, in a way the modern mindset doesn’t
share,” Cone says. “I started looking at the world with more sacramental eyes.”
Cone
became engaged to a woman who was also raised Presbyterian. In the weeks
leading up to their marriage, they sought a church together, but none seemed to
fit. Fundamental questions lingering in Cone’s mind—about church history, the
importance of doctrine and dogma, what it means to live a full Christian
life—came to a head. He told his wife, “I don’t think I’m comfortable being
Orthodox, but I want to at least see one of their services, see what it’s like
out there.” The next Sunday, they decided to attend an Orthodox Church with
another young couple. By the end of the service, Cone says, “We were just blown
away. Just blown away.” The worship, doctrine, and tradition were exactly what
they had been looking for. “We were shell-shocked. And we haven’t stopped going
since.”
For
CreedCodeCult.com blogger Jason Stellman, joining the Catholic Church was an
act of religious and intellectual honesty. Brought up in a Baptist church,
Stellman became a missionary in Europe for Calvary Chapel after college. When
he began studying and accepting Calvinistic theology, he was dismissed from
Calvary’s ministry and moved back to the U.S. He joined the Presbyterian Church
of America and enrolled in Westminster Seminary in 2000. He and his wife helped
start a Presbyterian Church in Southern California some time later.
In
2008, Stellman was introduced to serious arguments for the Catholic
faith. He studied scriptural passages on church authority, the early
church fathers, and St. Augustine’s writings on justification. The more
Stellman read, the more he was drawn to the Catholic Church. While in Europe,
he had attended mass at a cathedral in Brussels and discovered it possessed a
liturgical beauty he hadn’t encountered before. Last year, he announced to his
church that he was leaving to become Catholic.
Leaving
one church for another is not easy. For Gingerich and Cone, the decision was
difficult on a family and community level. Many in their old churches expressed
confusion and hurt, and some asked rather ignorant, if well-intentioned,
questions: “Do you worship Mary?” or “Do you still believe in Jesus?” There
began a process of rebuilding trust that continues to this day. Stellman had to
tell his church—a church he planted and ministered, and which his family still
attends—that he could no longer serve as their pastor.
Yet
all three say the high church has presented them with a sense of community they
would not have experienced otherwise. For Gingerich, the seasons of feasting
and fasting taught him to suffer and celebrate with the church in a way he had
never experienced. “I was re-taught compassion,” he says. Cone’s Orthodox
family now stretches from coast to coast and has supported him and his wife as
they raise their three children. Their priest drives an hour to their house for
confession, knowing how difficult it is for them to make the drive. “He leaves
the 99 to get the one,” Cone says.
Many
Protestant churches have noticed these congregational trends and their loss of
numbers. Some are adopting a more liturgical style to draw in younger
audiences: the new book Gathering Together, by Christian theology
professor Steve Harmon, describes a Baptist denominational move towards a
greater liturgical focus. “It represents an increasingly widespread Baptist
recognition that our tradition by itself is not sufficient,” Harmon told ABP
News.
Gingerich
argues that such stylistic treatments dodge the real question: the issues of
church authority behind the traditional liturgy. Cone says he sees “a sincere
expression of gratitude and study” from his Protestant friends. But, he adds,
“When I look at a Protestant service, it lacks the mystery and power of the
body of Christ. … The whole life of the church, the prayers of the desert
fathers, the blood of the martyrs, is more intimately connected in the Orthodox
life than a mere stylistic change that a Protestant church can do.”
Yet Lee Nelson,
Co-Chair of the Catechesis Taskforce of the Anglican Church of North America,
is hopeful that if evangelical churches begin adopting elements of liturgical
worship, some of the Christianity’s larger schisms might dissipate. One must
wonder, he admits: are churches becoming liturgical because it’s cool or
because it’s right? But when a church’s intention is truly worship-motivated,
Nelson thinks such changes can lead “closer and closer to Christian unity, and
that’s the best part.”
Nelson
believes a sacramental hunger lies at the heart of what many millennials feel.
“We are highly wired to be experiential,” he says. In the midst of our consumer
culture, young people “ache for sacramentality.”
“If
you ask me why kids are going high church, I’d say it’s because the single
greatest threat to our generation and to young people nowadays is the
deprivation of meaning in our lives,” Cone says. “In the liturgical space,
everything becomes meaningful. In the offering up of the bread and wine, we see
the offering up of the wheat and grain and fruits of the earth, and God gives
them back in a sanctified form. … We’re so thirsty for meaning that goes
deeper, that can speak to our entire lives, hearts, and wallets, that we’re
really thirsty to be attached to the earth and to each other and to God. The
liturgy is a historical way in which that happens.”
The
millennial generation is seeking a holistic, honest, yet mysterious truth that
their current churches cannot provide. Where they search will have large
implications for the future of Christianity. Protestant churches that want to
preserve their youth membership may have to develop a greater openness toward
the treasures of the past. One thing seems certain: this “sacramental yearning”
will not go away.
Gracy
Olmstead is associate editor of The American Conservative.
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