What Does the Gospel Offer Millennials?

If there is one defining characteristic of Aberdeen, and particularly of its young people, it is probably loss of hope. You can see it in the young men and women who walk with their heads down. You can see it in the high use of drugs and alcohol among millennials in this neck of the woods. You can see it in the young woman I talked with the other day who was checking out my groceries and told me; “No matter what I do, I can’t make it. I’m working two jobs and still living with my parents.”

None of this is particular to Aberdeen—it is replayed all across the country in our towns and cities, from the Rust Belt to the ghettos of Los Angeles, from the decaying rural towns of the Northwest Peninsula to the post-mill towns of Massachusetts.

The story is almost always the same. Young people (and their elders) can’t find work, or they work multiple jobs with low pay. They go to college or they don’t, but 36% of my generation have moved back home with their parents.

This reality comes with tremendous shame. In a culture where worth and value are associated with economic success, a growing number of people fall short. For young people, moving back home is a sure sign of failure and you can see it in their eyes.

In our conversations in Outside Church Walls, I often end up asking myself the same questions: What do we, as the church, offer these people, these young people?

We often seem to think that to get people in our doors or to be relevant to our culture, we need to gloss over our story, we need to make sure we are not too dogmatic, we need to sit with questions instead of offering answers. As much as I appreciate sitting with questions and as opposed as I am to the fundamentalist style dogmatism that makes up so much religious discourse in our country, I wonder if we haven’t thrown the baby out with the bathwater.

When I left fundamentalism, I questioned my faith intensely. I considered abandoning it altogether. Something made me hold on the core of my own faith and, in time, I joined the Episcopal Church.

In the Episcopal church, I found a different tendency—such a deep fear of dogmatism that people were sometimes afraid of taking a stand on anything, of even articulating a gospel at all. In our last meeting, we were asked this provocative question: “What have you lost?”

If we lose our story, if we lose the gospel, then we become nothing more than a slightly religious liberal social club that does some nice charity and advocacy work. And the young men and women I know do not need—heck, I do not need—a nice club that cares about us.

There is a line we quote often, from our baptismal covenant, where we vow to respect the dignity of every human being. This vow is not a warm, gushy sentiment as much as it is a solid biblical theology. Rooted in a God who created us in the divine image. A God who was incarnated as a human being in Jesus, affirming our dignity. A God who joined us in our suffering and in our pain—who was born to poor parents on the edge of empire, who lived as a wandering prophet with nowhere to lay his head, who died imprisoned and executed by the Roman state—a God in solidarity with us. A God who was resurrected in power, in defiance of the powers of this world, and who promised us resurrection life.

No more, no less is what we can offer— and what we stand to lose.

In a world that tells our young people that they are failures, that their worth and dignity are contingent on an economic success less and less possible, the Christian gospel offers dignity. It offers a God who has entered into our experience. It offers a God who stood up to the powers that be and won. In other words, it is a gospel that offers hope—not because some nice people at church care about us, but because God is on our side.

It is this gospel that allowed me to keep my faith those years ago. It is this gospel that we have to offer, if we will only preach it.

Sarah