The past couple of weeks were like a reunion dinner, meeting with people from my FES past.
I had lunch with a past secretary of PKV, the Varsity Christian Fellowship group in Universiti Malaya. She is married to her president of the fellowship in her time and they are both leaders in their church. I also met the president of the fellowship in my first year in the university, when he came to preach in my church. He is leading a church and also involved in training. Another former president of the VCF is in my church and so is his secretary, married to another Christian from her fellowship.
My church celebrated her 20th Anniversary last Sunday and among the many people in the history of the church remembered was another past president of the VCF, who has since gone to another church. I also met my housemate in my varsity days and he is leading a church as well and he was the person who made available the church premises for my church over the past 20 years. My team leader when I was in FES was also remembered but he was not present, being unwell. Finally I also met my FES boss, the former chairman of the board of FES.
Recently someone who was in my Sunday School class, back in the day when I taught in Sunday School as a teenager, got in touch with me again. She was also a part of the university Christian fellowship when I was with FES.
I had wondered, when I was a part of the staff team in FES, how the kids would turn out when they are thrown into the cauldron of life and work. I am pleased and grateful to see that these, and many others whom I had the privilege to be a part of their developmental years, have turned out well and as I speak to them I can see that their commitment to God, to truth and to the Gospel has remained strong. They have resisted the powerful influences that have been unleashed in this millennium. I can still recognise them; their voices have grown and matured through the years but the underlying cadence is there.
In my conversation with my FES boss, I shared what was then just fragments of a thought about an issue that I have been deeply troubled over.
While the anniversary was an occasion to celebrate the faithful hand of God it was the next 20 years that I was focused upon and it didn’t look good. This is a church that has very few in their 20s-40s passionate about God, about truth and Scripture, about love, mercy and compassion, about the Gospel. The children who have grown up have left the church for more exciting ones, or have left the country.
The Christian culture that I see in the young is a lot less grounded in the Word and more influenced by self-indulgence. But I don’t see the generation tasked to bring them up coming to grips with the challenge of the powerful voices that their children are so completely exposed to. “Resistance is futile” as the Borg would say.
How do we reach a generation that has been trained to choose what they want to hear and pay attention to, with no sense of responsibility towards truth? Likes and loves are no longer what they used to be. How can we reach a generation that knows a little about everything and believes they know more than you do? How can we reach a generation whose values have been shaped by the shows and movies and music that they consume? How can we reach a generation whose challenge in life is boredom? How do we reach a generation that has been so exposed to such well-produced influences while we are still grappling with powerpoint and microphone?
We do what the media cannot: speak and interact individually and personally. They are geared towards the masses; we speak, discuss, share and love the person.
The Church has been doing the same things that were effective two generations ago and force-feeding this young generation with propositional truths, theological concerns, mingled with clever thoughts and ideas, from the pulpit, but failing to feed the soul that thirsts to be more than a number in a host of followers.
I told him that I have been going through Nehemiah recently and it struck me that his generation, the second generation in exile, was one that did not really know God, as their parents had their nation and culture destroyed, and had to survive in a foreign land and culture.
Yet by God’s grace they returned to Jerusalem after 70 years, determined to do better than their ancestors. And Nehemiah and Ezra, and other priests and Levites, were on hand to teach them the Word and lead them to repent of the sins of their ancestors and to renew their allegiance to God.
Ultimately the answer is in God and we can be his instruments to reach this generation with real truth and real love (and not slickly-produced ones), or we can be irrelevant while still maintaining churches filled with memories.
“Ready for one last hurrah?” I asked the 79-year-old.