Maybe it was when church began to resemble a movie theatre or concert experience, serving Starbucks in multi-million dollar sanctuaries. Or maybe it was the incredible amount of pain and abuse countless individuals experienced within a community of people who claimed to follow the message of the love of Christ.
It’s no secret that Christianity is declining as a claimed religion amongst “millennials,” all of us born between 1980 and 2000. As a millennial born and bred in the heart of the Bible Belt of the United States, I was a preacher’s kid short of being the poster child for Evangelicals. From Junior Bible Quiz to leading worship services and performing in Easter dramas, I was fully immersed in Christian culture. Then college came and everything changed.
I can’t mark the exact moment when I decided I was fed up with everything that encompassed my belief system; it was more of a slow development than one occurrence, which caused for my change of mind and heart. It was my junior year of college, I was freshly 21-years-old and thoroughly unimpressed with any form of Christianity I had been shown up to this point of in my life. I made up my mind that I no longer desired to follow a set of rules and regulations, pretend I was perfect, and tell my unbelieving friends they were going to hell. If being a Christian meant being close-minded, judgmental and most of all hypocritical, then I wanted absolutely nothing to do with it.
I was angry. I was frustrated. And I wasn’t alone.
According to a 2012 poll by Pew Research, one-fifth of adults living in the United States, a third being under the age of 30, are religiously unaffiliated. Agnosticism, atheism, and — the highest of the charts —no religion in particular, are all on the rise. And of the 46 million individuals who are religiously unaffiliated, many are in fact spiritual in some way. They’re still searching for answers and significance.
I didn’t want to identify myself with any particular denomination or belief system, but I couldn’t deny the existence of something greater than me, something I still called, God. I still wanted to believe He was real, just not in the ways I had seen portrayed.
The desire for spiritual understanding is there: we hunger for knowledge, for a reason behind the complexity of life. We want to get an explanation for the supernatural. When people in my generation (and beyond) reject the staleness of religion, a road is paved to finding a new sense of belief and oneness with God.
The moral checklists and the old ways of “doing church” are no longer satisfactory. My own rejection of Christianity stemmed from an anger and pain that came from being tormented, rejected and belittled by individuals who sat in the front row every Sunday, who never missed choir practice. I didn’t exactly reject the gospel itself. I knew there was something greater than human power holding the universe in place, giving me purpose, and breathing life into my lungs. I refused to accept that a blond, blue-eyed Jesus brought the rod of correction down on all of humanity, but there was someone or something out there controlling all of this.
My personal realization of Christ’s existence didn’t come from an astounding sermon. I didn’t have my come-to-Jesus moment on the altar of an embellished, well-decorated sanctuary. It came when I admitted my anger, when I acknowledged my pain and the individuals who caused it. When I realized that maybe instead of hating everyone who claimed to be a Christian, that maybe I should live the way I so desperately wanted everyone else to live.
Instead of continuing the problem of promoting a self-made gospel — skipping over the primary message of the Bible that talks about the love for all souls, and that we must help the needy and give justice to the oppressed — maybe I should begin to reflect the Jesus I knew was real.
Today I’m 25-years-old, and no longer call myself a Christian, but a follower of Christ. Each day I strive to better understand what it means to reflect Christ, to show His love and spread His message, living church rather than doing church. Church isn’t a building or a high-tech, well-choreographed service. It is a body of believers, who together strive to walk in the footsteps of the Master and Creator who died for an ugly, dirty, broken and lost world.
The problem isn’t church; the problem is us.
Flickr photo (cc) by slworking2
