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Posted on June 26th, 2008 by Brian Sparks.
Categories: unchristian.
“Everyone in my church gave me advice about how to raise my son, but a lot of the time they seemed to be reminding me that I have no husband-and besides, most of them were not following their own advice. It made it hard to care what they said. They were not practicing what they preached” (page. 41).
“Part of this stems from immersion in a mean-spirited and fault-finding society. Having been the target of countless advertisements and thousands of messages and lectures, Mosaics and Busters recognize word games and are sensitive to inconsistent lifestyles. They are skeptical of what others say-even if they have little reason to be wary” (page 42).
“Eighty-five percent of young outsiders have had sufficient exposure to Christians and churches that they conclude present-day Chrsitianity is hypocritical. And as I have pointed out, negative perceptions also bleed into the perspectives of young churchgoers-half agreed that Christianity is hypocritical (47 percent)” (page 42).
“By a wide margin, the top life priorities of eighteen to twenty-five-year-olds are wealth and personal fame” (page 44).
“They see Christianity through the same protect-your-image-at-all-costs lens. Like their own choices and priorities, they believe that everyone says and does whatever is necessary to get ahead” (page 44).
“Yet they have become so jaded by the holes in people’s lifestyles that they are no longer shocked to find incongruence between words and actions.
“This gives the critique that Christianity is hypocritical even more potency. We are not known for the depth of our transparency, for digging in and solving deep-seated problems, but for trying to project an unChristian picture of haing it all together. Youg outsiders believe that rather than being able to help them sort through the image-is-everything world, followers of Christ are playing the very same mind games that they are” (page 44).
“Based on a study released in 2007, we found that most of the lifestyle activities of born-again Christians were statistically equivalent to those of non-born-again Christians. When asked to identify their activities over the last thirty days, born-again believers were just as likely to bet or gamble, to visit a pornographic website, to take something that did not belong to them, to consult a medium or psychic, to physically fight or abuse someone, to have consumed enough alcohol to be considered legally drunk, to have used an illegal, nonprescription drug, to have said something to someone that was not true, to have gotten back at someone for something he or she did, and to have said mean things behind another person’s back.
“NO DIFFERENCE.” (page 47.)
“If these groups of people were in two separate rooms, and you were asked to determine, based on their lifestyles alone,which room contained the Christians, you would be hard-pressed to find much difference” (page 47).
“There is a twist-a deeper reason why the perception of hypocrisy exists. It’s not just our lifestyles that have gotten us in trouble; it’s the very way in which we convey the priorities of being a Christian. The most common message people hear from us is that Chritianity is a religion of rules and regulations. They think of us as hypocritical because they are measuring us by our own standards” (page 48).
“Two-thirds of churchgoers said, ‘Rigid rules and strict standards are an important part of the life and teaching of my church.’ Three out of every frive churchgoers in America feel that they ‘do not measure up to God’s standards.’ And one-quarter admitted that they serve God out of a sense of ‘guilt and obligation rather than joy and gratitude’”(page 51).
“Our passion for Jesus should result in God-honoring, moreal lifestyles, not the other way around” (page 51).
“Our research shows that Christians believe the primary reason outsiders have rejected Christ is that they cannot handle the rigorous standards of following Christ. There is a nuance here that allows Christians to feel like they’re better than other people, more capable of being holy and sinless. We rationalize that outsiders don’t want to become Christ followers because they can’t really cut it” (page 51).
“Outsiders said they have never become a Christ follower for a number of other reasons: because they have never thought about it, because they are not particularly interested in spirituality, because they are already committed to another faith, or because they are repelled by Christians.
“When the primary way we measure our faith is based on liefstyle, it is easy to assume that the missing ingredient for outsiders is virtuous, moral living. Again, moral issues are not inherently wrong priorities. God deeply cares about our ations, asshould we. Yet don’t our priorities seem backward?
“The gospel-the Good News of Jesus-is that God has released us from the endless striving to measure up to God’s standards, let alone the expectations of other human beings” (page 52).
“Spirituality is not measure just by the number of sermons we hear, the piety of our lives, or the goodness of our actions”(page 59).
“The problem is not fundamentally hypocrisy. We’re all hypocrites at some level. The problem is the air of moral superiority many of us carry around. We stop acknowledging the imperfections in our lives. We forget where we came from and all God has done in our lives” (page 61).
“The perception of hypocrisy also emerges when we start fighting the ‘culture war’-meaning we attack people’s behavioral patterns rather than love them as people”(page 61).
“Young peple will not communicate with and seek help from parents, pastors, and teachers whose lifestyles and passions do not match their words and faith. They will go to those who will embrace relationship with them; those who are also hurting and who are willing to share it”(page 64-65).
Posted on June 26th, 2008 by Brian Sparks.
Categories: unchristian.
“Young adults enjoy challenging the rules. They are extremely-you might say innately-skeptical. Today’s young people are the target of more advertising, media, and marketing than any generation before. And their mindset is both incredibly savvy and unusually jaded” (page 21-22).
“The lifestyles of Mosaics and Busters are more diverse than those of their parents’ generation, including education, career, family, values, and leisure. Young people do not want to be defined by a “normal” lifestyle. They favor a unique and personal journey. Many young people do not expect to be married or to begin a family as a young adult (if at all), though this may have been the expectation in the past.
“For both Mosaics and Busters, relationships are the driving force. Being loyal to friends is one of their highest values. They have a strong need to belong, usually to a tribe of other loyal people who know them well and appreciate them. Still, under their relational connectedness lies fierce individualism” (page 22).
“Being skeptical of leaders, products, and institutions is part of their generational coding… They do not trust things that seem too perfect, accepting that life comes with is share of messiness and off-the-wall experiences and people” (page 23).
“If something doesn’t work for them, or if they are not permitted to participate in the process, they quickly move on to something that grabs them. They prefer casual and comfortable to stuffy and stilted” (page 23).
“Spirituality is important to young adults, but many consider it just one element of a successful, eclectic life. Fewer than one out of ten young adults mention faith as their top priority, despite the fact that the vast majority of Busters and Mosaics attended a Christian church during their high school years. Most young people who were involved in a church as a teenage disengage from church life and often from Christianity at some point during early adulthood, creating a deficit of young talent, energy, and leadership in many congregations” (page 23).
“The image of the Christian faith has suffered a major setback. Our most recent data show that young outsiders have lost much of their respect for the Chrsitian faith. These days nearly two out of every five young outsiders (38 percent) claim to have a “bad impression of present-day Christianity” (page 24).
“They are morelikely than previous generations to believe he committed sings; they are also more liely to believe that people can live a meaningful life without him” (page 24).
“Most people I meet assume that Christian means very conservative, entrenched in their thinking, antigay, antichoice, angry, violent, illogical, empire builders; they want to convert everyone, and they generally cannot live peacefully with anyone who doesn’t believe what they believe” (page 26).
“One crucial insight kept popping up in our exploration. In studying thousands of outsiders’ impressions, it is clear that Christians are primarily perceived for what they stand against. We have become famous for what we oppose, rather than who we are for” (page 26).
“In our national surveys with young people, we found the three most common perceptions of present-day Christianity are antihomosexual (an image held by 91 percent of young outsiders), judgmental (87 percent), and hypocritical (85 percent). These “big three” are followed by the following negative perceptions, embraced by a majority of young adults: old-fashioned, too involved in politics, out of touch with reality, insensitive to others, boring, not accepting of other faiths, and confusing” (page 27).
SIX BROAD THEMES
“Being hurt by Christianity is far mare common among the young than amoung older outsiders. Three out of every ten young outsiders said they have undergone negative experiences in churches and with Christians” (page 32).
“Some Christians respond to outsiders’ negativity by promoting a less offensive faith. The unpopular parts of Christian teaching are omitted or deemphasized. They hijack the image of Jesus by portaying him as an open-minded, big-hearted, and never-offended-anyone moral teacher. That is an entirely wrong idea of Jesus” (page 33).
“Young outsiders want to have discussions, but they perceive Christians as unwilling to engage in genuine dialogue. They think of conversations as “persuasion” sessions, in which the Christians downloads as many arguments as possible.
“Outsiders told us that the underlying concern of Christians often seems more about being right than about listening. There is an undercurrent of arrogance that outsiders perceive. This raises the implication that even the “correct” answers, if expressed in an unChristian way, are totally out of tune with the skeptical generation. If Christians are perceived as difficult to live with-and if they do not respond in godly, appropriate, and humble ways to people’s questions and doubts-we permit the hijacking of Jesus, simply by leaving our voice out of the conversation” (page 33).
“One thirty-five-year-old believer from California put it this way: ‘Christians have become political, judgmental, intolerant, weak, religious, angry, and without balance. Christianity has become a nice Sunday drive. Where is the living God, the Holy Spirit, an amazing Jesus, the love, the compassion, the holiness? This type of life, how I yearn for that’”(page 35).
“However, before you dismiss the unChristian perception as “just Christians doing their duty,” realize that the challenge runs much deeper. The real problem comes when we recognize God’s holiness but fail to articulate the other side of his character: grace. Jesus represents truth plus grace (see John 1:14). Embracing truth without holding grace in tension leads to harsh legalism, just as grace without truth devolves to compromise. Still, the important insight based on our research is that Mosaics and Busters rarely see Christians who embody service, compassion, humility, forgiveness, patience, kindness, peace, joy, goodness, and love” (page 37).
“Are you starting to wrap your heart and mind around all this? Millions of young outsiders are mentally and emotionally disengaging from Christianity. The nation’s population is increasingly resistant to Christianity, especially to the theologically conservative expressions of that Faith” (page 39).
Posted on June 26th, 2008 by Brian Sparks.
Categories: unchristian.
Seeing Christianity from the Outside
“[outsiders] reject Jesus because they feel rejected by Christians” (page 11).
“Often ousiders’ perceptions of Christianity reflect a church infatuated with itself. We discovered that many Christians have lost their heart for those outside the faith” (page 14).
“UnChristian reflects outsiders’ most common reaction to the faith: they think that Christians no longer represent what Jesus had in mind, that Christianity in our society is not what it was meant to be” (page 15).
“Christians use terms like “pagans” or “the lost” or worse. Other phrases are also inadequate, such as “nonChristians” (which defines them simply by what they are not) as well as “nonbelievers” or “seekers” (labels that are not necessarily ture of all outsiders)
“Labeling people can undermine our ability to see them as human beings and as individuals.” (page 17).
“Each generation contains more than the last, which helps explain their growing influence. For instance, outsiders make up about one-quater of Boomers (ages forty-two to sixty) and Elders (ages sixty-one-plus). But among adult Mosaics and Busters, more than one-third are part of this category, a number that increases to two-fifths of sexteen to twenty-nine-year-olds” (page 18).
“Christianity’s image problem is not merely the perception of young outsiders. Those inside the church see it as well-especially Christians in their twenties and thirties”(page 18).
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