Have Faith, Churches: Just Be There

Zaina Qureshi, 16, says gender
equity, immigration rights and
racial justice are important. (WSJ)

Not exactly a shocking conclusion from a report on the views of teens and young adults: "Young People Say Disconnect Keeps Them From Church". So what are the issues that young people do care about? [bold added]

Half of young people ages 13 to 25 surveyed said they don’t think that religious institutions care as much as they do about issues that matter deeply to them, according to a report released Monday by the Springtide Research Institute, a nonpartisan nonprofit. Those issues include racial justice, gender equity, immigration rights, income inequality and gun control. Springtide tracks the views of American teens and young adults. It has done research work in conjunction with the Princeton Theological Seminary and the Mennonite Church, among others.

The biggest disconnect involves LGBT rights. About 71% of youths said they care about gay rights, but feel that 44% of religious communities care about the same issue, according to the survey of 10,274 people across the country representing various faiths.

‘I was afraid to live my life,’ says
dancer Amethyst Rose. (WSJ)

If you asked me and my peers what we cared about as college freshmen, we would have said: the war in Vietnam, race discrimination, sex discrimination, the military/industrial complex, the Bomb, police brutality, and freedom of speech. 50 years later those issues have either gone away or have shifted leftward--I don't mean the latter in a pejorative sense--equality of opportunity has mostly been replaced with equality of result.

The main point is that, as a young person, I was too busy making plans pursuing worldly goals, though I never completely disengaged from organized religion. I only started drifting back due to: 1) more frequent reminders of my own mortality; 2) attainment of some objectives did not achieve fulfillment and raised the is-that-all-there-is question; 3) the Christian perspective really did prove insightful at crucial turning points.

Because I am not a priest or have a personal stake in keeping every religious institution alive--let's face it, there is overcapacity given the demand--I am not worried about the decline in membership. This is a temporal trend that will reverse; just study the history of American great awakenings,

The goal of churches should be just to stay alive, to be available to individuals for when the inevitable personal crisis arises and they find that the answers do not lie with politics or their racial or gender identity.

Have faith: they'll come back, they'll need you, so just be there.