Church: Community or Institution?

The church's future depends on our ability to hold two key ecclesial concepts together: community and institution.

I make the case for this claim in a new article - which you can find here - where I look at the reality of the church as both a community of Jesus' followers and an institution complete with church hierarchy, bureaucracy, and connectional structure.

In my experience, Gen Xers tend to gravitate toward the notion of the church as a community. We are skeptical of the 'big institution' approach of our forebears in the Builder Generation, but we're also turned off by the 'save the world' idealism of the Baby Boomers. So we tend to retreat into the local, focusing on our own immediate communities and their surrounding environment.

Don't get me wrong: I think the localism of the Xers is one of their best qualities. It means that we are asking tough questions about the character of the church. As a disciplined community of Jesus' followers, the church must not be a place where cheap grace is preached and practiced. I don't think it's any coincidence that Xers in general tend to be turned off by the "Open Hearts, Open Minds, Open Doors" marketing campaign of the larger church. It's not that we don't have open hearts; it's just that we don't want the gospel watered down to some nebulous slogan just for the purpose of trying to make ourselves seem more likable.

On the other hand, the same local focus that helps Xers to think seriously about matters of personal and communal discipleship can sometimes hinder them when it comes to thinking about their responsibility to the institutional church. We tend to neglect the larger church because we don't see what good it does for us and our communities. (Shane Claiborne, who I posted about positively last week, is an interesting example of this trend. Shane grew up in the UMC, but the radical discipleship he practices now is essentially in a free church evangelical context. When he came to speak at Duke a few weeks ago, he made several contradictory statements that made me want to ask him about his understanding of ecclesial authority. Alas, I didn't get the chance.)

But it's important for Xers to remember that the church is bigger than the local congregation. Just as we are individual members of the one body, so too are our congregations individual members of the body of Christ. We live in an age skeptical of big institutions or not, it is true. But in my mind, that gives us all the more reason to reform our own institution so that it better reflects the church God would have it be.

The article, by the way, was published by Faith & Leadership, a new venture of Leadership Education program at Duke Divinity School. It is a kind of cross between an online magazine, a blog, and an all-purpose resource center for church leadership. The site went online a couple of weeks ago, and they've already featured some really insightful articles and commentaries.

I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on this issue of community vs. institution, particularly if you have time to read the article. I consider it to be crucial to our leadership of the church over the next few decades.

Shane Claiborne's Christianity

Shane Claiborne is changing our understanding of Christian discipleship.

In a gentle yet relentless sort of way, his writing and speaking are calling Christians to account for the way we go about following Jesus. If you don't know what I'm talking about, pick up a copy of Shane's Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical. Part memoir and part call to action, this book gives an overview of Shane and his vision for discipleship.

Shane came to Duke to speak a couple of weeks ago, and his visit prompted me to pen a column about him in the current issue of the United Methodist Reporter. As I point out in the article, when you try to tell someone about Shane's message, it all sounds like Sunday School 101: love the poor, don't give in to violence, share your possessions, go out and make disciples, faith in Jesus means acting in addition to believing.

But of course, with Shane it goes much deeper than Sunday school. As he points out in his warm and funny way, most of us fall way short of what Jesus would have us do. We get so caught up in our lives and so shaped by the culture that our Christianity ends up pretty superficial. Shane's message is that it doesn't have to be that way; we really can live gospel-formed lives if we are willing to take the Jesus we find in the Bible seriously.

I think Shane's message has a special relevance for folks like me who are part of large denominational church bodies. We tend to look for 'macro' fixes to our problems - the kind you get by passing legislation at General Conference. Shane's tack is very much a 'micro' approach to discipleship. You change the church by changing individual lives. You engage in your own neighborhood, and you love your neighbors. In Irresistible Revolution, Shane describes describes faithful Christians as "people who are building deep, genuine relationships with fellow strugglers along the way, and who actually know the faces of the people behind the issues they are concerned about." That sounds simple, but it is not the pattern of discipleship we practice most of the time.

If you haven't read Shane, pick up a copy of one of his books. But be prepared for him to shake you down to the foundations.

[For those who are interested, here's a link to The Simple Way in Philadelphia, the intentional community that Shane helped to found and where he currently lives.]

Obama: Our first Gen-X President

On Tuesday, Barack Obama will be inaugurated as our nation's 44th president. Born on August 4, 1961, he's just 47 years old. He will be the first African-American president in the history of the U.S., the significance of which is touched on poignantly by Bishop Woodie White in his annual birthday letter to Martin Luther King, Jr.

In my new United Methodist Reporter column, I ask the question, "Is Obama our first Gen-X president?" I believe the answer to that question is yes. It is true that in I have written about my skepticism of considering Obama a full X'er in the past - both here and here. But I've changed my mind.

In one sense, the Baby Boomer generation is a demographic reality. Between 1946 and 1964, the number of live births per 1,000 people in the U.S. population spiked. The U.S. Census Bureau considers those years to be the parameters on the Baby Boomers for that very reason.

But in another sense, a generation is a cultural concept that does not bend readily to hard statistical parameters. As I have argued elsewhere, a generation is ultimately defined by shared experience. And in that sense, Obama is very much a Gen X'er.

For instance, the Boomer experience is defined in so many ways by the period from the mid-1950s through the 1960s: in national politics from JFK (the dashing hero) to Nixon (the dark villain), in the Civil Rights struggle from Brown v. Board of Education to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 'revolutions' from music styles to attitudes toward sex and gender, with all of it overshadowed by the geo-political tensions associated with the struggle against communism - the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and (most pointedly for the Boomers' enduring generational personality) Vietnam.

Obama is too young to have been affected firsthand by any of these Boomer experiences. Instead, his personality was shaped by a specifically Generation X childhood: growing up in an era of increased globalization, the shrinking world (in terms of travel, education, and religious pluralism, in addition to the economy), the rapid advance in communications technologies (cable television, evolution of the telephone, various audio and video recording devices, and the personal computer), the race and gender issues of a post-Civil Rights and post-sexual revolution period, and the reality of increased instances of divorce and broken homes, families with two parents working outside the home, and the image of the 'latchkey kid.' He was not, of course, affected by all of these in equal measure. Some of the features of Gen X upbringing were more a fixture in the 1980s (when I mostly grew up) than the 1970s (when Obama mostly grew up). But his life was touched by many of them. And in my book, that makes him an X'er.

Two points to note about this, and both of them have to do with the way Obama himself is changing the definition of Generation X. The first is the date. Noted Gen-X author Jeff Gordinier suggests in X Saves the World that Generation X should be dated from around 1961 because of the birthdates of Slackers filmmaker Richard Linklater (b.1960) and novelist Douglas Coupland (b. 1961). I've always thought Coupland deserved front rank in terms of who defines Generation X because he wrote the novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture that firmly entrenched the term in pop culture. With Obama's birthdate also in 1961, it seems reasonable to consider the question of Generation X's beginning date settled.

The second point is around how Obama is trying to give a certain characteristic Gen X'ers share a greater prominence. If one of the iconic images of Baby Boomers is that of 1960's protest (a mass event involving lots of angry young people chanting things), then the iconic image of Generation X has to be what I am doing right now: sitting alone in my living room, trying to make a difference but doing so in a more individual and less 'partisan' manner. In lots of ways, it seems like Gen X'ers are less partisan people in general, and the technological isolation that we experience has made us hungry for community (though in more localized and less 'mass' ways than our predecessors). That, in my mind, is a lot of what Obama represents. We've all heard his message about 'change,' and I usually take that to be transcending the partisan rancor of his Boomer predecessors. If you haven't read his memoir - Dreams from My Father - you should. It is a book about a deeply personal journey whose early life was shaped by many of the forces that X'ers have typically struggled with, and I would argue that it is also a book about searching for community. It's Gen X through and through.

Will he be up to the task? No way to tell for sure, but I suspect he will be. E.J. Dionne and David Brooks were on NPR yesterday evening talking about meeting with him recently, and both the liberal Dionne and the conservative Brooks spoke in very complementary terms about his demeanor, knowledge of issues, and approach to meeting with people from both sides of the aisle.

Back to the beginning

Okay, so I've been a little obsessed with this project of archiving the entire corpus of my work with the United Methodist Reporter. But it has been fun, allowing me to go over old columns and book reviews that I wrote years ago and re-reading them so I could write little annotations when I add them to the blog's archive.

I couldn't locate my very first two columns on the Reporter's website, so I inquired with the good folks at UMR Communications and - voila! - they got both of them up in a jiffy. My second column was called, "Single with cheese: Are we listening?", and it looked at the nature of singles ministry in the church today. Most of the concepts of singles ministry that I have encountered are fairly outdated (and in fact, the term itself seems old-fashioned). So I wrote the column to suggest that we should view singles as they are rather than according to yesterday's labels. That's an important thing to note, and I think it impacts on the way we go about evangelism. (Not everybody lives in a family of four behind a white picket fence, after all).

It was this column that launched my writing for the Reporter - an initial offering entitled, "Get ready, Church: Here come Gen X'ers." As I went back and re-read it four years later, I was surprised at how many themes I mention in this first column that have remained consistent topics for me in the years since. The sense that 'now' is the time for Gen X'ers to step forward and lead, the sense of rootlessness and uncertainty that faces us in the postmodern world, and the challenges that the economy and technology pose, are all present there in the first column. Also present is an indication of my high ecclesiology - that is, my belief that the church, as the body of Christ, is the one place where we can really find a home. I believe that now as strongly as I ever have.

At any rate, those first two columns have been added to the blog archive now, and you can find them by clicking on the 'UM Reporter Columns' tab in the left-hand sidebar, clicking on the drop-down window to choosethe year, and selecting '2005.' We're still dealing with a couple of weird occasional glitches on the archive pages, but most everything is posted now.

Obama: Gen X or not?

In some ways, it's an interesting question. Obama was born in 1961, which by most calculations is at the tail end of the Baby Boom generation.

Susan Ferrechio wrote an article in the Washington D.C. Examiner presenting the point of view that Obama is, indeed, the first Generation X presidential candidate. I actually have a neat connection to this article - I was interviewed for it! And while I'm not 100% sold on the idea that Obama is an X'er, I do find some of Ferrechio's points to be persuasive.

In my own writing on the parameters and characteristics of Generation X (which you can read here, for example), I have suggested that Gen-X really starts at about 1965 and goes until 1982. That allows its beginning to match up with the end of the baby boom (which is, in some sense, a measurable demographic characteristic). But Generation X itself is really more of a cultural concept than a statistical category, so any parameters of its beginning and ending are going to be inexact (Ferrechio, for instance, defines Gen-X as those born between 1961 and 1981, which allows her to include Obama in it).

One way of thinking about Obama's place in Generation X it is to look at his two chief rivals for the presidency - Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, and now John McCain in the general election. In some ways, those two are quintessential Baby Boomers from the political left and political right. Clinton swung left after her mid-1960s flirtation with Barry Goldwater; together with husband Bill, she epitomizes the New Democrat of the Baby Boom generation, who consolidated the political and cultural gains of the 1960s and 70s and then moved to the center (particularly on economics) as a strategy to get elected.

McCain, on the other hand, was one of the young men who marched off to Vietnam and had his life determinatively shaped in the process. Regardless of his reputation as a maverick (and his advocacy for such non-conservative policies as campaign finance reform), McCain is more or less a Baby Boomer Republican whose career was largely influenced by Reagan conservatism (i.e., free market economics and a hawkish foreign policy).

As I point out in an earlier blog post, Obama has the distinction of growing up too late to be affected by Vietnam in his formative years. And he was too young for his personality to be forged in the crucible of the Civil Rights struggle as well. His rhetoric is heavy on the language of 'change', even if it's not always clear what he means by that. And he places emphasis on wanting to get past the very partisan divisiveness that the Boomer left and right have been embroiled in for the past several years. So in many ways, Obama's candidacy signals a cultural shift, even if he belongs chronologically to the last few years of the Baby Boomer generation.

A lot of this is just a matter of interpretation. As with all cultural notions, there aren't really any statistics to employ. I'll admit that, if Obama wins in November, his very presidency will undoubtedly have a big impact on how Generation X is defined. At any rate, it's good food for thought during while the Democratic National Convention is going on.

Gen X'ers unite!

When I posted a few days ago on some changes I had noted in the blogosphere, there was one site I didn't know about at the time but want to mention now. It's Jennifer McCollum's JenX67 blog, which looks at the characteristics of Generation X and some of the peculiar challenges that Gen X'ers face.

I found out about Jen's blog because of a project she has started to locate and highlight 50 Gen X bloggers in all 50 states of the union. She writes this about her project:

"I am on a quest to link to 50 Generation X Bloggers - one for each of the fifty states ... Through this project I hope to facilitate dialogue among a diverse group of Gen Xers, and do my small part to instill pride in my generation. I want to grow our collective courage to live our time. We're long overdue. Onward Gen X."

I'm particularly interested in what Jen is doing because of the Gen X theme of her writing, but even if she was doing something totally different, her site would be well worth visiting just because of the creativity she has put into it. I'll be happily adding it to my favorites.

Obama as the Democratic nominee

As the results come in for the final Democratic primaries of the season, CNN is projecting that Barack Obama is going to have enough delegates to push him over the top in the race for the Democratic nomination. That means that Senator Obama is, in fact, the presumptive nominee from the Democratic Party for president of the United States. That, in and of itself, is a hugely historic moment. Whether you consider yourself a Democrat, a Republican, or something else, the fact that Senator Obama is going to be the nominee for president in the general election is (as Wolf Blitzer just mentioned) an example of "history unfolding" in our nation's long political story.

This blog is called Gen-X Rising, and it purports to comment on issues concerning Gen-X'ers and their connections to faith, church, and community. One of the CNN commentators made a really interesting comment just a few minutes ago when he compared Sen. Obama to recent presidential candidates like Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and George W. Bush. He identified all those guys as 'Baby Boomers' and he said something to the effect that "Obama is something different. He comes after all those guys." The commentator pointed to all the questions about the Vietnam war that have followed those other candidates throughout the years, and he suggested that, because such a question does not apply to Obama (who was too young for Vietnam), he is in another category. This commentator did not mention Generation X, but that is the group he was presumably talking about.

That leads to a question: Is Barack Obama a Baby Boomer or a Gen-X'er?

Most estimates of the years that encompass the Baby Boomers look at those people born from around 1946 to 1964/1965. Unlike the difference between Generation X and the Millennial Generation (which is purely based on a distinction of perceived cultural separation and the standard measure of 18 to 20 years for a generation), the Baby Boomer generation is actually based on demographics. When American G.I.'s returned from World War II, there was a sharp increase in the number of births in this country (a trend that probably had as much to do with the end of the Great Depression as it did with the end of World War II). And that trend continued until the mid-1960s (when divorce rates increased and widespread contraception had an impact on the birth rate).

Barack Obama was born on August 4, 1961. That means that, by any measure I've ever seen of the generational boundaries, he is a Baby Boomer. He's a very late Baby Boomer, and he is certainly a Boomer who was too young to be affected by the military draft or by Vietnam. But he's still clearly a Boomer.

Then again, there's something that seems really Gen-X about him. I think this is what the commentator on CNN was picking up on. There is something about Obama that doesn't seem to fit with the Clintons, Bushes, and Gores of the political world. Whether it's his race, his personal history, the crowds he attracts, or his "Change we can believe in" message, there's just something that just seems to identify Sen. Obama with Gen-X'ers (and even Millennials).

In exactly this way, I think this quality of Obama marks him as a transitional figure in the history of the United States. It is, in some ways, similar to the role that Bill Clinton played in 1992. At that time, you had a Greatest Generation figure (and World War II veteran) - George Bush the elder - as the sitting president. He had followed a generationally similar figure in Ronald Reagan. But Bill Clinton was not from the Greatest Generation; he was clearly a Baby Boomer. And the country's choice of him over Bush was a sign of the passing of the torch, in a generational sense. When Clinton was elected over Bush, the leadership of the country had passed from the generation that won World War II to the Boomers.

Now here is Obama. Like I said, he is still a Baby Boomer. But look at the clear cultural differences between he and Hillary Clinton (and especially John McCain). Chronologically, he is a Baby Boomer. But influentially, he is Gen-X'er and Millennial through and through. And so I think this night marks something significant in the history of the country. In terms of presidential politics, the Baby Boomers didn't even last a generation (just 16 years, assuming Obama can beat McCain in November). Now it is time for the Generation X'ers to lead.

(God help us.)

------------------------------------

[Update: If you'd like to read CNN's next day report on Obama capturing enough delegates to secure the nomination, you can read it here.]

Worlds enough and time

The death of 28-year old actor Heath Ledger took many by surprise yesterday. (See the NY Times article here.) While there is no official cause of death, the apparent condition in which Ledger was found suggests that he overdosed on pills. There are plenty of actors and actresses in Hollywood whose death wouldn't surprise much of anyone, but Ledger was not one of those. He was a fairly low-key actor, who didn't seek the limelight and chose to live in Brooklyn rather than on the West Coast.

I'll never forget the first time I saw "A Knight's Tale." I had heard that the movie inserted rock music in a lot of the jousting sequences, and I expected to hate it. To my surprise, I found myself laughing from start to finish. It was one of Ledger's first starring roles, and he did a superb job.

I have a friend whose pet peeve is the petty bickering that often goes on in the church and distracts congregations from what they ought to be doing. Whenever he hears about a church fighting over the parlor furniture or the hymn selection in worship, he is fond of remarking, "Those people have way too much time on their hands." And by and large, I think he's right. Most United Methodist churches in this country are fairly affluent by the world's standards, and they often find themselves fighting over things that don't matter a whole lot. They've got money, they've got time, and they're bored.

You could say the same thing for a whole lot of people in Generation X. They don't have the kind of needs that most of the world has to worry about - food, water, shelter, security, etc. So they find ways to keep themselves distracted from the pervasive boredom that creeps in when basic needs are met and there is no clear sense of what to do next. Often, that comes in the form of substance abuse.

Wouldn't it be great if the church was really able to shape people in such a way that they understood service to Christ as the defining call in their lives? If they sought out their own salvation rather than seeking a fight with a fellow church member over a careless comment in Sunday school? If they committed their lives to serving the poor in Christ's name rather than committing the sin of speaking ill of their neighbor?

And wouldn't it be great if Gen X'ers were the ones to help make the church a place where that happens?

Every time I hear about another prominent member of my generation lost to the toxic combination of money, boredom, and the ready availability of drugs, it grieves me that the church is failing in its mission to proclaim the good news that there is another way. It is not about pointing fingers at a certain type of lifestyle; it is, instead, about offering a kind of lifestyle constitutive of values deeper than fleeting high of intoxication.

Heath Ledger left behind a 2-year old daughter named Matilda.

Conference within a conference

The past few days have had me busy trying to catch up from the time I missed when I was back in Arkansas for annual conference. Hopefully, my posts will become more frequent in the days ahead.

I can't overstate how optimistic I was at the general vibe on the part of Gen X and Millennial clergy who got together during our annual converence session. This was really the "conference-within-a-conference" for me. In fact, I was so pumped that I worte a column about it in the Reporter. You can read it here.

One of the things that occurred to me as I was sitting with my colleagues and friends at annual conference is that we are "on the clock," so to speak. We ain't gonna be young long. So our window to really influence the church in a formative way is probably going to be narrow.

Oh, we'll influence the church sooner or later. But if we don't make our presence felt until we achieve "senior status," then I am afraid we will have forgotten why we thought the Christian life should be lived differently in the first place.

For any Arkansas readers out there, Eric Van Meter has begun to follow up on our discussions at conference. I believe he will be trying to get folks together late in the summer or early in the fall. For non-Arkansans, I hope you all will begin to investigate common work and ministry among the X'ers and Millennials out there. It is worth the effort.

Peace to all...

What a week!

It's Friday evening, and I am finishing a 7-day period where I preached at a blessing service for a friend's child, attended the Arkansas Annual Conference, worked like crazy to get caught up on all the Latin work I missed while I was away from Durham, and logged about 2000 miles in travel. It's good to be home!

Since this was the year we elected delegates to General and Jurisdictional Conferences, it was an interesting annual conference session. I'll share a few thoughts:

-- As always, it is really good to attend annual conference just to see friends and colleagues in ministry. That was especially the case this year, since I am now living in North Carolina and haven't gotten to see those folks Emily and I have missed over the past year. I also had a lot of people express the desire for us to return to the conference when I finish my Th.D., something that I hope God provides a way for us to do.

-- This year marked the third year in a row that Eric Van Meter has organized a Gen X clergy supper. We had 30 or so clergy and clergy spouses who gathered in the Arkansas Tech University Wesley Foundation building on Monday evening for good ol' Arkansas barbeque (this is a noun rather than a verb for those of you not from the South). Eric does a good job of resisting the temptation to set an agenda at these gatherings. And so the conversations just naturally flow from what our concerns and hopes happen to be. This year, we focused on the need to keep in touch with young seminarians while they are in school as well as talking about how to get better involved in connectional conference structures such as the Board of Ordained Ministry and other appointed bodies. We believe this is important to add our voices to conference leadership. This year, we made the firmest commitment yet to keeping in touch and making progress throughout the year. We had some volunteers offer to serve as 'point people,' and I think we are going to use the new 7 Villages website to build an online connection. Kudos to Eric for all his work in this area. He has shown real leadership. And good luck to him as he starts a new appointment in campus ministry at Arkansas State Univeristy in Jonesboro. The Gen X clergy gathering is, by the way, something I would highly recommend for other annual conferences to do.

-- Billy Reeder and his group Sanctus led an emergent-style worship service outdoors following regular worship on Monday evening that was pretty well attended. The Holy Spirit was obviously in attendance, which was awesome.

-- This was the first conference session that I have attended where we have elected delegates to General and Jurisdictional Conferences. For all the horror stories I have heard about how nasty elections can be, I think this one went pretty well. We ended up electing a balanced group including Conservatives, Liberals, and Moderates. I think that is important, since it reflects the makeup of our annual conference. For the record, I personally voted for people who would generally be categorized in all three groups.

-- Kudos to Revs. J.J. Whitney and Aubrietta Jones, who were elected as General and Jurisdictional delegates, respectively. They are both Gen X'ers and help to bring a young clergy voice to our delegations. Sarah Steele, a Millennial teenager, was also elected as a lay delegate to General Conference. And Jay Clark, youth ministry guru who has held positions in the Arkansas Conference, New England Conference, and the General Board of Discipleship, was elected as a Jurisdictional alternate. Jay is soon moving from Nashville to become the minister of youth at Pulaski Heights UMC in Little Rock, and my only regret is that he was not elected as a General Conference delegate in his own right. But then, there's always 2012!

One final note: In her e-mail recap of annual conference, SMU professors (and Arkansas Conference elder) Rebekah Miles wrote, "There is nothing like the sound of a group of preachers and lay people singing hymns loudly and enthusiastically at annual conference." Amen to that! "And are we yet alive?" You bet we are. And the work of the kingdom goes on.

Gen X/Y Gathering

Things are extraordinarily busy right now. I'm taking a large summer load of coursework, and I'll be taking off this weekend for annual conference in Arkansas. I am going to try to continue to post at least once per week, but if I slack off a little bit, just bear with me. I am laptop-deprived, so I don't know what my opportunities for Internet access will be in AR next week.

Just wanted to give everybody a heads-up on Amy Forbus' report on the Gen X/Y Gathering that took place at Mt. Sequoyah in Fayetteville, AR, in late May. You can read it on her blog here. I also talked with Eric Van Meter, a clergy friend from the Arkansas Conference, and he said the event was fantastic. There were about 56 participants, mostly from the South Central Jurisdiction, but also including people from as far away as Florida and Maine. Doug Pagitt and Tim Keel were featured speakers. There was worship, Holy Communion, and lots of free time to discuss the future of the church and how we might lead in the coming years.

The Gathering was also put together in 'grassroots' fashion. This was not the programmatic idea of a general board, jurisdictional committee, or annual conference. It was the result of a Spirit-led movement of pastors who wanted to see seminarians and clergy get together to talk about crucial issues of how we can lead the UMC faithfully forward in our day.

My current residence in Durham didn't allow me to attend, unfortunately. But it has been good hearing about it from Amy and Eric, and I'm sure I'll hear more at annual conference next week. From what I understand, the Gathering has already spawned further conversations - about another event in the future, but also about more sustained work between pastors and churches within annual conferences. That is good news.

If you attended the Gathering and would like to share more in the comments section of this post, feel free.

Electing Gen-X delegates

Guy Williams has an insightful post over at Guy's Mental Wanderings about electing younger delegates to General Conference. With a lot of talk - especially in the Methoblogosphere - about electing young adult delegates, Guy wants us to take a step back and ask some important questions about how we go about making choices.

For starters, Guy suggests that age should not be a determining factor. That is, he does not want to elect a young delegate just because that person is young. He wants delegates who represent faithful views, with regards to the doctrine and missional priorities of the church. He also wants to elect strong leaders, which may or may not correlate with a certain age range.

I think Guy's views are right on. I have been supportive of electing younger delegates to General and annual conferences. In fact, not long ago, I wrote a column specifically supporting the selection of younger delegates to annual conferences, as a way of familiarizing young adult laity with United Methodist polity and encouraging them to become involved in leadership. But Guy is right in insisting that age cannot and should not be a determining factor. As much as the UMC needs the energy and insight that young leadership brings, it needs truly faithful leadership even more.

So what does that mean for the push to elect younger delegates? It is still very important. But potential younger delegates should be put under the same scrutiny as their older counterparts, so that they will be elected for who they are and what they represent, not just how old they happen to be.

Gen X'ers, Millennials: Take note

I want to let you know about an event that I think is crucially important for Gen X/Y leadership in the church. I write about it in my column this week in the Reporter. It is called, "The Gathering," and it is, well, a gathering for young adult leaders in the church this coming May. This is not an initiative by a particular annual conference, and it is not a top-down event put on by one of the general boards. It is truly grass-roots, in the sense that a small group of pastors got together and started a conversation about the need to get young adult leaders together in a physical space.

There has been a whole lot of good stuff that has happened online to connect us over the past few years. But we all know that virtual community has its limits. So it is that much more important for us to actually get together to worship, talk, and plan for the future.

Check out the website here for The Gathering for registration details. Tim Keel and Doug Pagitt will be speaking, which is exciting, but what is more exciting is just the possibility of getting a couple of hundred young leaders in the church together in one space.

This is not just for pastors. Laity and seminary students are encouraged to attend. For those of you outside the South Central Jurisdiction, yes, there is an airport in Fayetteville, AR, where Mount Sequoyah is located. There is an airport in Little Rock as well, which would probably have cheaper flights and is only about a 3 hr. drive from Fayetteville.

I have heard from enough of you over the past year - from California, to Texas, to Illinois - that I know there is a real desire for us to come together and claim God's future for the UMC. Here's a real place where it can begin to happen.

Quiet desperation

Our generation has a crisis of 'meaning.'

That is, we have become confused about where we should find meaning in our lives.

If you ask people, they will say that they find meaning in life in all sorts of ways - their families, their faith, their jobs, their hobbies, and their recreational interests, etc.

And on the surface, that is true. But our culture (and by that I mean 'consumer culture,' roughly understood) teaches us to find meaning in purely market-driven, materialistic ways. We are told that our happiness is directly connected to what we have the ability to purchase. Meaning is equivalent to the acquisition of certain commodities.

And this is more than just a straightforward process of the advertising industry convincing a consumer to buy a certain product. It is rather the culture that has developed where we are encouraged to constantly spend in order to consume, consume in order to spend more, and keep a wary eye on our neighbor to find out what we should be consuming next.

In this environment, a man's insistence that he finds meaning in his family is corrupted by the market's definition of how that meaning is construed. His understanding of value in the family is tied directly to the home he has bought, the car he drives, the vacation he is able to take, and the entertainment system he is able to purchase. The accoutrements surrounding the family thus become the litmus test of the family's 'success' or level of happiness.

I think Gen X'ers instinctively realize that there is something deeply flawed about this market-driven, consumerist value system. But because we are immersed in it all day, everyday, we don't always know how to escape. To fight misery, we adopt a number of different strategies. One is to surrender to the system, attempting to lose yourself in complete and total participation in it. Another is to find a chemical release, through alcohol, illicit drugs, or prescription drugs. Both approaches are attempts to avoid the deep spiritual illness that results from trying to find meaning in an ultimately meaningless system.

Where should we find meaning, then? Scripture is clear that the only proper locus of meaning is love. It is love of God, who has created us and desires our full redemption. And it is love of our neighbor, who reflects the very image of God to us. When the church is living as the church should, it is the place where we can learn about that love.

I know some of you might be rolling your eyes right now. Just another preacher who says that Jesus is the cure for everything. But look, we've all found ourselves staring obsessively at ads on television, salivating in some store at a shopping mall, and preoccupied with the idea of purchasing this or that product (which, of course, we really do not need).

When that happens, haven't you ever felt a vague sense of unease in your gut? And doesn't living in a world where you are manipulated into situations like that leave you feeling just a little like something is very, very wrong?

I write about this reality in my column this week. I welcome your thoughts.

Help Wanted: Generation X Leadership

Have you taken a look at the age demographics in the United Methodist Church lately? If you had to take a guess, would you think that Gen X'ers represent:

A) 35% of membership
B) 25% of membership
C) 15% of membership
D) Less than 10% of membership

If you guessed "D" you are right on target. That's right: our whole generation makes up less than 10% of the total membership of the UMC.

There could be any number of different reasons why this is the case. But if your gut reaction is to say, "Our church has just fallen behind the times," you should think again. Wealth, mobility, and the Baals that the world has to offer to Gen X'ers have a lot more to do with the reason. If membership hemorrhaging has anything to do with our interior ecclesial life, it has more to do with our refusal to insist on high standards and accountability than it does on issues of Traditional VS. Contemporary worship styles.

I write about one possible response to this trend in my Reporter column this week. It is simply this: If we want Gen X'ers to see the church as a place where they are wanted and needed, the church needs to start relying on them. That means making a concerted effort at putting Gen X'ers into leadership positions, from the local church on up to General Conference.

Do you have any ideas?

Is 'Generation X' real or imagined?

I sometimes get challenged from readers of my U.M. Reporter column about my focus on the concept of "Generation X." Some claim that it is just a word game, that there is no such thing as a coherent group of people defined by that label, despite what definition I or others might try to apply to it.

Obviously, I disagree with this point of view. I think there is a "Generation X," and I think it has some definite parameters, related to both age and experience. The problem with most people is that they want to judge the Gen-X concept by some type of hard scientific criteria, leading many to conclude that there is no such thing. But the concept of generation is a cultural one, so its definition is always going to be somewhat fuzzy.

In a column a few months back, I attempted to talk about the history of the term, "Generation X" and the the distinctiveness of the group it describes with reference to Henri Nouwen's The Wounded Healer. I'm going to print the column below. It's a bit long, but I would be interested in feedback if you have thoughts one way or the other. Is there a "Generation X?" If so, what is its defitinion?

"GEN-X RISING: 'Inward generation' must find courage to engage surroundings"

By Andrew C. Thompson

Most people would say that Generation X received its name from the 1991 publication of Douglas Coupland's novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. The media picked up on Mr. Coupland's name for the generation of seekers the book describes, and the label stuck.

The popular definition of Generation X evolved into something like the following: the rising generation of young adults, characterized by a deep sarcasm and sense of irony, who are frustrated by the rampant materialism and lack of meaning they see in the world and yet see no clear alternative.

However, Mr. Coupland never claimed to coin the term. He borrowed the "X" from an earlier novel, Paul Fussell's Class (1983).

Moving further back in history, Generation X was also the name of a punk band formed by Billy Idol in 1976. And even earlier than that, Generation X was a cult novel written in 1963 by Charles Hamblett and Jane Deverson, both Britons. The Generation Xers that they described were actually Baby Boomers, but ... well, let's not get that complicated.

As a descriptive term, "Generation X" has an interesting history. The complexity of that history is fitting, because the generation of people it labels — those born between 1965 and 1981 — is complex as well. And if the popular definition that has evolved is, in some sense, correct, then Generation X is a generation that desperately wants to find its way home. We Gen-Xers find ourselves in a fog, and we strain to see the light emanating from the lighthouse. We know there must be a safe harbor somewhere, but the path from stormy sea to solid ground is not clear.

The great spiritual writer Henri Nouwen (1932-1996) never wrote specifically about Generation X by name. However, he was concerned with the youths he saw growing up around him in the 1970s and 1980s. Nouwen's classic, The Wounded Healer, took a hard look at the generation of youths contemporary with the time of its publication in 1979. He called these kids "the inward generation," and he said that they were "the generation which gives absolute priority to the personal and which tends in a remarkable way to withdraw into the self."

Nouwen saw something characteristic about Gen-Xers long before they were ever called Gen-Xers. Namely, they see a lack of value in the world around them. Things seem to exist on surface levels only, and so the deep hunger that we all have for meaning gets turned inward in a search for something real.

"Everywhere we see restless and nervous people, unable to concentrate and often suffering from a growing sense of depression," Nouwen wrote. "They know that what is shouldn't be the way it is, but they see no workable alternative."

The search for a relief from anxiety takes on many forms, which are often unhealthy. Even people of faith have a difficult time.

Seekers after success come to embrace a worldly version of it that is related solely to salary level and hoarding material possessions.

Seekers after salvation come to privatize it in such a way that it is relegated to the salvation of individual souls, disconnected from the rest of the creation.

Seekers after discipleship come to understand a version of it that disconnects religious life in the church from secular life in the world.

Privatization, personalization, individualization. Call it what you want to. This is the tendency in Gen-X youths that distressed Nouwen. It smacks of a cynicism about the world so great that an "inward turn" is the almost compulsive reaction by a generation that hungers for something the world is not offering.

Nouwen believed that the cynicism of the youths he encountered was based on the ultimate danger to life posed by nuclear weapons. He wrote The Wounded Healer in the midst of the Cold War, when "the nuclear option" was something other than a tactic for dismantling the filibuster in the U.S. Senate.

Today, I suspect that the deep unhappiness of Generation X is based less on unconscious fears of nuclear holocaust and more on the pace of life — driven by developments in technology that race along faster than the human mind and human heart can keep up.

If we are indeed "the inward generation," then it is time that we gathered the courage to turn around and begin to engage a world that, admittedly, can seem huge and threatening. Truthfully, the world needs us. And fog or no fog, the ship that we steer must find its way home.

Say it ain't so, Shane, say it ain't so

Fans of Wesley Blog know about Shane Raynor's hiatus from blogging this past summer. But we were all thrilled when he came back at the beginning of the fall with the intention of blogging once or twice a week. So the news over at Locusts and Honey today came as quite a shock. Read it and weep.

I was first introduced to Wesley Blog sometime in early 2005, but I really got familiar with it when Shane skewered me for writing a negative review of an Adam Hamilton book in the United Methodist Reporter, back in July of that year. (And I stand by my review, by the way. Adam Hamilton is an important leader in the UMC, and his Church of the Resurrection does some tremendous ministry. But Selling Swimsuits in the Arctic buys wholesale into the "business model" of church growth, which is highly problematic in a theological sense.)

Shane and I e-mailed back and forth after I defended myself on his blog, and from that interaction, I came up with the idea of doing a "Gen X Rising" column on the Methoblogosphere, along with a companion interview of Shane himself. That project was a real watershed event in the life of my column. Up until that time, most of the contacts I had made through "Gen X Rising" were not, ironically enough, with Gen X'ers. They were with the rank-and-file readers of the Reporter, who tend to be older than Generation X. But Shane linked to the column and interview on Wesley Blog, and that caused a lot of folks to drop me a line saying they had 'discovered' the column. Like the book review, that column and interview are still on the Reporter's archive.

Why am I telling you this? Because Shane Raynor's influence on the community of Methodist blogs known as the Methoblogosphere has been huge. My own blog's existence is at least partly due to Shane and the Wesley Blog. The "Methodist Blogroll" which Shane created (and which is listed at the right-hand side of this webpage) has probably done more single-handedly to link up Methodist bloggers in cyberspace than all the individual efforts of bloggers combined.

Shane's approach to blogging gave us all a model to follow, and I'll always be grateful for that. He never shied away from tough issues, and he always let you know where he stood. But he also treated people who held a different perspective from his with a lot of grace. That includes the post about my book review, by the way. And it was nice to see such an attitude of honesty combined with courtesy in the blogosphere - a place that is lacking in both, oftentimes.

So now Shane reports that his work in youth ministry has led him in new directions. Good for him. I know he must approach local church ministry with the same attitude that he approached blogging. And while I am sorry to hear that some cybersquatter grabbed the Wesley Blog domain name, I look forward to the time when he gets the blogging bug again and jumps back onto the scene with a new site. Shane, blessings on you in your work for the kingdom.

FYI, you can still see what Wesley Blog looked like by going to this auxiliary site.

Gen X Connection

A friend turned me on to a new blog today, called Endangered Species: Church. It's written by a Gen X clergywoman named Erika Gara. Good stuff. I always like to see another X'er engaging the generation/church/pastor combo.

Best Gen X Movie Ever

And the Oscar goes to ...

Hands down, it's Kicking and Screaming, Noah Baumbach's 1995 film about the lives of a group of friends in the year after they all graduate from college. The movie's title refers to the manner in which they are entering the "real world," and the plot revolves around each of their individual struggles. The central plotline concerns the main character, Grover (played by Josh Hamilton), who is trapped in a sort of emotional limbo after his girlfriend Jane (Olivia D'Abo) moves to Prague.

I know there are other movies that aspire to the title of greatest Gen X film. Probably the first one that was talked about in this way (or at least the first one I remember) was Reality Bites. Not even close, in my book. Reality Bites came out the year I graduated from high school (1994), at exactly the age I should have liked a movie like that. But even then I remember thinking that it seemed contrived. It felt like a movie that was self-consciously trying to evoke the experience of a generation, like St. Elmo's Fire for people ten years younger (only not nearly as good).

Another truly good Gen X movie is the more recent Garden State (2004),written and directed by Zach Braff (who, like Baumbach in Kicking and Screaming, was making his first movie). I liked Garden State. I even heard a Baby Boomer bishop (Scott Jones) refer to it in a speech at annual conference a couple of years back, as a good movie for boomers to watch if they want to get a handle on the emotional paralysis and spiritual emptiness that many Gen X'ers experience. But for me, Garden State came a little too late. By the time I saw it on DVD, I had already come through the woods of that mid-20s identity crisis that so many of us go through.

On the other hand, I watched Kicking and Screaming during the summer after I graduated from college in 1998. Talk about timing. I've been told that it is a "guys' movie," and that is probably true. But it's still a good flick.

Anyway, check it out. It became available recently in a Criterion Collection edition, which you can order from Amazon. There are some great extras on the DVD, with the best being a series of 2006 interviews between Baumbach and many of the principals in the cast as they look back on the experience of making the movie. I think Baumbach must have answered a lot of questions about his film as embodying the Generation X experience, because he alludes to Gen X stuff several times in the interviews (often seeming a little uncomfortable with the connection).

Ultimately, it is just a really good movie with a really good cast. It is dialogue-driven, but the script is good enough to keep the movie going without getting bogged down in wordiness. It has some genuinely funny moments. And like I said, for Gen X'ers an awful lot of it will hit close to home.

(Warning: This post refers to a movie that is rated "R," so viewers should be aware of that. Sorry, I should have mentioned that before.)

What makes a Gen X'er???

The term "Generation X" means a lot of things to a lot of different people. For some, it's positive. They know exactly what being a Gen X'er means, because they know intuitively that they are Gen X'ers. And they are comfortable with that cultural tag to describe their particular experience in the world.

Others simply can't stand the phrase. They think it is a term void of meaning, or else it even creates hostility. I admit that I am baffled at the latter response when I get it. All I can figure out is that these folks think it is just another media attempt to catalog and pigeonhole something that is, in reality, too complex for that.

I think Generation X is a helpful term. What's more, I think the pop culture literature that has grown up around it is fascinating. The term itself goes back to a survey of disaffected youth done by a couple of Brits in the 1960s (and it was actually Baby Boomer youth their book was concerned with, but no matter). Billy Idol used the name for his band in the 1970s. But the "modern" use of Generation X came into popularity with the publication of Douglas Coupland's novel, Generation X: Tales for An Accelerated Culture, in 1991. It was then that the media really grabbed ahold and ran with the term.

So what does it mean to be a Gen X'er? I write about that in my most recent column in the UM Reporter. This is something I've done before and probably will do again in the future. I guess a part of me feels the need to defend the term, if for no other reason than because I have a column and a blog based on its inherent usefulness. If "Generation X" is really empty of meaning, then "Gen-X Rising" doesn't make a lot of sense, does it?

To me, being a Gen X'er is not so much about having been born between certain years. It's more about a common experience. The saying goes, "Here today, gone tomorrow." A more appropriate one for our day might be, "Here today, gone by 5:30." And it's that common experience - shared by many of us in our formative years - that makes Generation X a reality.

Read the column and you'll see what I mean. And as always, I welcome your comments.

Gen-X Rising Blog Debut

Hello, cyberworld! This is my first official post on this blog, so let me offer a little background...

For the past couple of years, I've been writing a column for The United Methodist Reporter, called "Gen X Rising." It looks at issues concerning the church and the Christian faith from the perspective of a Gen-X'er. Along the way, a couple of people suggested that I should expand my writing into the blogosphere (specifically into that happy corner of cyberspace known as the Methoblog community). I've wanted to do that for sometime, but it took awhile to get going.

I am a United Methodist pastor who has been serving appointments in campus ministry and the local church for the past five years. I left my appointment in June to return to school, and I've really missed the preaching and teaching I did on a weekly basis. So starting the blog just makes sense. I'm not planning on preaching in my posts : ), but I will be sharing my views on issues that I think are important to people of faith in Generation X. Because I'm a Methodist pastor, a lot of this will probably center on the UMC. But I won't limit what I write to Methodist topics.

I'll continue writing my column for the Reporter as well. Here's my most recent column online. If you have any comments or suggestions about the blog or my column, feel free to post a comment or e-mail me (andrew@mandatum.org).

Enjoy the blog!