I sometimes have students, (or their parents on their behalf), tell me that they’re bored with church, and they don’t want to come anymore. They express how youth group, or Sunday worship is repetitive or routine or unexciting, and they in essence, tell us that they are checking out.
When I hear that, I am immediately convicted of the sad fact that we have as a ministry have failed them miserably. Yet our failure is not in realizing that we are not providing a vibrant, engaging, substantive experience for students. Our shortfall is not that we haven’t designed fun, creative, energizing environments for them to gather with their peers.
The problem, is that we have failed to teach young people (and their parents), that The Church is not entertainment. It is not Chuck E. Cheese or DirectTV or the NFL. It is not the multiplex or the trampoline park or the mall.
Church on Sunday, is preparation for life beyond it. It is that one crucial hour, to hopefully get a little Godly perspective on how to live the other one hundred and sixty-seven.
Ministers have done everything to entice and retain teenagers. We’ve used lights and stages and amplifiers and laser tag and lock-ins and coffee bars and messy games and extreme sports, all presumably to”meet teenagers where they are”, and to “make faith relevant”. In the process, we have conditioned them to become expert consumers of Christ; ones who grow increasingly fickle and demanding. They are easily bored and quick to express it. And we respond to this insatiable need they have to be impressed, by trying to continually one-up ourselves, and to out-entertain every other church in the process.
In orienting people’s spiritual lives around a weekly, on-stage, spectator event, The Church has actually taught teenagers that for faith to be real, it has to be spine-tingling, or tear-inducing, or roof-raising. God is everywhere, they learn, so long as the band is rocking and the crowd is frenzied.
But the honest, unexciting truth, is that discipleship is a spectacularly ordinary, gloriously boring, outrageously routine endeavor, where we daily choose belief a million times, despite the lack of emotional influence or exterior fanfare to do so.
The church building, exists on Sunday, to provide the space for people to gather briefly in community, to be encouraged, and challenged, and equipped, so that they can go about the work, (yes the work) of seeking spiritual maturity. When the band stops playing and the lights are off and the crowds are gone, we are left to navigate Tuesday morning and Thursday afternoon and Saturday night on our own, in the small and seemingly meaningless.
Think of it like playing on a baseball team. You work constantly to get ready. You go through daily conditioning and agility drills and batting practice. You meet over and over and over, not because it’s particularly exciting or fun, but because you are preparing to play The Game. You are honing your skills and sharpening your decision-making, and bonding with your team, so that come game time, you will be ready to do what you need to do, as second-nature.
The Church needs to stop pretending that Sunday morning is “The Game”, and to remember that it is preparation to play The Game.
And we need to stop misleading teenagers, with the lie that church is supposed to be entertaining, and remind them that there are real blessings in the boredom.
