"Distant dad. I will be different."

“My whole life could be wrapped up in those few words,” he said. A friend of mine was introducing me to the idea of a “Six Word Autobiography” and this was his – Distant dad. I will be different. When he really thought about the story of his life, when he really reflected on his hopes and dreams, his anxieties and motivations, it all came down to this definitive experience - a distant father and his life-long resolve to be different.

This year, in a peculiar coincidence, most of the world honored their fathers on the same day that the Church celebrated her most fundamental doctrine of God in the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. This week, the universal Church ponders the deepest mystery of God as a Trinity of Persons, one God expressed in a triune community of Being.  For Christians, this represents the most essential truth of our faith and the “source of all the other mysteries.”[1] 

“So what does Father’s Day have to do with Trinity Sunday?” you may be asking. As I thought about that question, my friend’s six-word autobiography came to mind.

“Distant dad. I will be different.”

This isn’t just the bracing testimony of one person. It is the spiritual autobiography of an entire generation. When only 60% of Catholics believe in a personal God, the idea of a “distant dad” is all too real.[2] When less than half of Catholics are confident that they could even have a personal relationship with God, “distant dads” are more the norm than the exception.[3] Our image of God the Father is distant, non-present, dispassionate, and the contemporary lacuna of Catholic spirit and practice is a fateful result.

“Distant dad. I will be different.”

Those six words were powerful for me, not simply because of my own struggles with a distant dad, but because they tell the story of the Church’s failure to convey the most crucial reality of Christian faith – God is relationship. Our God is a personal God. Our God is a relational God. Our God does not simply use relationships to communicate the Gospel, our Trinitarian God is relationship and the Good News has everything to do with the deeply personal relationship with the Father that is available to us in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit.

The doctrine of the Trinity is not some impractically ethereal concept of God that never touches the daily reality of our lives. It is the very essence of God’s life breaking into our fallen world when we engage in personal, intentional relationships with those we love and serve.

“Distant dad. I will be different.”

Reflecting on the importance of loving fathers, I pray that this generation will truly be different. It is time to reclaim the truth of a heavenly Father who “comes lovingly to speak to his children,”[4] a God-in-relationship who invites us to share in the divine life through a deeply personal relationship with Him.

God is personal. God is relationship. This changes everything.

---

[1] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2^nd ed., 234.

[2] Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey,” 2008.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Dei Verbum (Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation), 21.

You Lost Me

If the church has become a clearinghouse for programs and events, the question becomes, “What are we to do about it?” Many of you have asked, “So what do you propose?” Fair question. If I’m going to level a critique of the church and its pastoral practices, then I’d better be prepared to put some skin in the game.

It was probably no small coincidence that in preparing for my trip last week I threw David Kinnaman’s new book in my bag. Kinnaman is the president of the Barna Group, (as most of you well know) a research organization focused on the intersection of faith and culture. He also co-authored the 2007 best-seller unChristian, a somber and intriguing examination of how “outsiders” view Christianity, a YL staple and a must-read for anyone interested in reaching the unreached.[1]

Kinnaman’s latest book explores the other side of the coin: What do “insiders” think about Christianity, those that were brought up in the Christian faith, those who, in increasing numbers, are leaving the church today?  The title borrows from the sentiments of hundreds of thousands of Christians surveyed:

You Lost Me.

·      59% of young adults raised Christian have completely “dropped out” of the church.[2]

·      There’s a 43% drop in church engagement between the teen and young adult years.[3]

·      While teenagers are some of the most religiously active Americans, twentysomethings are the least religiously active.[4]

Why? Well, that’s the million-dollar question. There’s not a single answer or even a set of nice-n-neat bullet points on the matter. As Barna researchers regularly reiterated, “every story matters,” and every story is different.

But there are some themes and they’re worth our reflection. Why are Christians leaving the church? Here’s a start:

•        Easy platitudes, proof texting and formulaic slogans (the church is shallow)
•        Defensive attitudes toward culture, innovation and “the other” (the church is entrenched, naval-gazing and fixated on differences)
•        Faith in a silo, disconnected from the world around us and God’s personal call within us (the church is anti-science and dis-integrated from my vocation)
•        No room for doubt and questions (the church is not a nurturing environment for the long journey through life’s deepest questions)

Christian young people feel stifled, ignored, dumbed-down, disintegrated and mass-produced. They’re caught in a mechanistic and over-programmed paradigm that treats them like a number and misses their story altogether. We’ve got a massive, well-documented dropout problem here and the church is struggling to respond.

So What’s the Answer?

The thing that’s interesting about the diagnosis (feel free to examine Barna’s research yourself if you like) is that the prescription is the same. I’m not one for simplistic answers but the “simplicity on the far side of complexity” is remarkably constant. The answer to the problem is RELATIONSHIP.

The relational element is so strong because relationship is central to disciple-making – and, as we’ve said, the dropout problem is, at its core, a disciple-making problem. . . God-centered relationships create faithful, mature disciples.[5]

For every symptom of the dropout problem, there is a relational antidote:

• Our overprotective and exclusive tendencies must be mediated by relational engagement and participative discernment of “the other” in a diverse and ever-changing world.
• Our shallow and simplistic slogans must be grounded in authentic encounters with Jesus Christ and transformative religious experience of the faithful community.
• Our formulas must give way to the faithful pursuit of questions sought together with wise and caring adults.
• Our mass-produced, one-size-fits-all approach must be remedied by personalized, attentive apprenticeship in the fine art of following Jesus.

“Disciples cannot be mass-produced.

Disciples are hand-made, one relationship at a time.”[6]

I will continue to unpack the pastoral implications of a fully relational and incarnational model of discipleship in future posts but I think Kinnaman is onto something. If there’s one thing that I’m convinced of about the future of the church it is the centrality of dedicated, intentional relationships between young Christians and their elders. It is spending time, and big chunks of it, with the next generation, passing down the faith like Jesus did, one relationship and one story at a time.

“The church’s ministers must be merciful, take responsibility for the people and accompany them like the good Samaritan, who washes, cleans

and raises up his neighbor. This is pure Gospel.”

~ Pope Francis

---

[1] See David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons, unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity . . . And Why It Matters (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2007). Their findings? Outsiders most readily viewed Christians as hypocritical, sheltered, antihomosexual, judgmental, too political and fixated on personal salvation.

[2] David Kinnaman, You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church. . . And Rethinking Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2011), 23.

[3] Ibid, 22.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid, 206.

[6] Ibid, 13.

Nearness and Encounter

There are two things that define the people of God as we respond to the call of Jesus and assume the full mantle of the Great Commission to “make disciples of all nations”: nearness and encounter.  That’s how Pope Francis sees it anyway.

Surely we can draw up strategic plans and organizational grids (many of us may be doing just that as we gear up for another year of ministry/life/work/parenthood). But it is not the efficiencies of Modernity that have broken through the busyness of our age and the distraction of our hearts. It is God’s intimacy, revealed in a humble babe. It is a lowly servant that has transformed us. “He is the ‘God who is near’ to his people,” Pope Francis proclaimed in a recent address to the South American episcopate, “a nearness which culminates in the Incarnation.  He is the God who goes forth to meet his people.”[1]

People aren’t reached by programs. Kids (and adults alike) are reached by people. It’s being there. It’s showing up. It’s a phone call in a sea of emails. It’s a hand-written note in a world of texts. It’s a hug when only a hug will do. It’s going out and taking risks. It’s being shot down a time or two. It’s offering your heart with all the vulnerability of Jesus on the Cross. It’s laying your life down for the sake of a friend.

All too often we exchange the mission for the institution of the Church today. No doubt, a natural process of institutionalization is necessary to make universally accessible the life-giving kernel of God’s transformative power. The institution preserves and magnifies the mission. Yet when maintenance overtakes mission as the sole priority of the Church, our message becomes stale and our witness empty. To borrow Francis’ words, the Church “stops being a bride and ends up being an administrator; from being a servant, she becomes an ‘inspector’.”[2] All the while, kids, oblivious to all of our plans and procedures, councils and commissions, stand at the fray waiting for someone to step in and be the body of Christ, to draw near as a sacramental embodiment of God, to sanctify their existence by actually saying “hello.”

It’s not a business plan, it's an abiding presence. We are not “keepers of the aquarium” but “fishers of men [and women].”[3] We are lights unto the world, icons of the living God. And when we draw near to others in tenderness, mercy and personal friendship, we not only imitate God but we participate in the tender, merciful and thoroughly personal being-in-action, being-in-relation, triune reality we call God. The Incarnation has brought a “revolution of tenderness,” Pope Francis reminds us, one that can reach the lonely and the neglected, the rebellious and the reticent, the broken and the proud.

It is this nearness, this personal encounter with our fellow brothers and sojourning sisters, that makes room for an encounter with God. It is often the tangible love of another human being that opens the door to the eternal love of God. That’s why relationships of nearness are so important in the Church today. We see it in the life of Pope Francis and know it to be true in our own lives. Isn’t it time we go out, draw near and reveal the God whose love draws all of us into nearness and encounter?

“We loved you so much that we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well, because you had become so dear to us.”

1 Thessalonians 2:8

---

[1] Pope Francis, “Address to the Coordinating Committee of CELAM,” Sumare Study Center: Rio de Janiero, July 28, 2013.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Mt 4:19.