Last week, two different articles were forwarded to me regarding Millennials.  Both articles referred to a recent report form the Pew Center entitled “Religion Among the Millennials.” It’s part of Pew’s ongoing research of the generation of young adults between 18-29. 

While the findings from this report are of great interest to me — 18-29 year olds make up half our community — I could have told you some of the results without the need for a survey.  Living in a university town, you pretty much know that millennials tend to tip to the left politically, are more tolerant of differences in people’s lifestyles, thoughts and beliefs, and they are fairly open to change.

Their lack of “belonging” when it comes to faith-organizations didn’t surprise me either.  We recently did a message series at Calvary entitled “UnChristian” and our eyes were opened to the reputation that the church has with millennials.  In fact millennials are more unconnected to church then any previous generation — at the same age.  At the same time the Pew research is finding that although millennials are extremely disconnected from church, their belief systems still closely resemble that of older people today.  One paragraph reads,

“Young adults’ beliefs about life after death and the existence of heaven, hell and miracles closely resemble the beliefs of older people today. Though young adults pray less often than their elders do today, the number of young adults who say they pray every day rivals the portion of young people who said the same in prior decades. And though belief in God is lower among young adults than among older adults, Millennials say they believe in God with absolute certainty at rates similar to those seen among Gen Xers a decade ago.”

In other words, it is less the case that this generation is losing faith and more the case that they are leaving church.  They are unplugging from religious organizations at an unprecedented rate.

The question is why are they dropping out?  The book UnChristian has several reasons.  Robert Putnam — author of the book Bowling Alone — focuses on one of those reasons.  Last year in a presentation that Putnam gave for the Pew Foundation.  He said this,

“Young Americans are dropping out of religion at an alarming rate of 5-6 times the historic rate (30-40 percent have no religion today versus 5-10 percent a generation ago).  ….youth’s religious disaffection is largely due to discomfort with religiosity having been tied to conservative politics.”

Last week I wrote two blog posts about evangelism.  The word literally means “tell good news.”  So I asked the question, “How did telling good news get such a bad rap?”  I think the reason might be that somewhere along the line we traded the good news of the (big K) — Kingdom of God for the okay news of a (little k) kingdom of politics.  If our politics is keeping us from reaching millennials — it might be time to let the donkey and the elephant retire to pasture.

If you would like to ponder the difference between Big K-good news and little-k good news, click

Last Saturday, we celebrated State Patty’s day in State College.  Crowds of people descended upon the bars for 16 hours of alcoholic-induced partying.  Which made me think of “the tipping point” concepts described by Malcolm Gladwell in his book of the same name.   

Now I tend to be attracted to numbers. I’m not talking about complex mathematical equations, numbers as in crowds. As a communicator I get energized by crowds. As a pastor I want to see crowds of people become connected in smaller communities where they can find support, friendship and growth. As a citizen of the Kingdom of God who is in love with Jesus and the city where He has called me to live, I want to see multitudes of people encounter Jesus.

There’s nothing wrong with being attracted to numbers — it’s not about counting people, it’s simply about realizing that people count.

But I think I veer off course when I am contemplating the strategies needed to help multitudes of people encounter Jesus.  My default is to think that it takes numbers to influence numbers. But it seems like Jesus thought that when it comes to the process of transformation — individual and city-wide — quality matters far more than quantity.

The words that changed D.L. Moody’s life were spoken to him by a man passionate about crowds. He said, “Moody, the world has yet to see what God can do with one person fully committed to Him.” Jesus loved the whole world and drew significant crowds but he invested his life in 12 disciples (11 were fully committed) and couldn’t we say that those 11 had a significant part in changing the world.

Malcolm Gladwell’s, book The Tipping Point is a study of how organizations change, how people are influenced to change. How does a system reach the “tipping point” whereby people and culture are transformed?  Gladwell documents that it takes no more than six children in a school to begin wearing a certain brand of sport shoe to reach the tipping point whereby in just a few days a hundred children will begin wearing that same brand of shoe.

Don’t get obsessed by the number, but what if Jesus and Gladwell are right?  What if a small group of people fully committed can bring an organization or a city to a tipping point of change?

Then the question in our city is which 6% will have the highest quality of commitment to their cause?  Which 12/11 will band together through the thick and thin of full commitment?  If 6% of the people in a city — or a church for that matter — become 100% committed to making Jesus the tipping point in our region, what would happen?

State Patty’s Day is a local (Penn State student created) knock-off of St. Patrick’s day which calls students to about 16 hours of alcoholic excess.   It’s a mess.  This year, a group of folks from Calvary and a couple of other campus ministries went downtown into the heart of State Paddy’s day and gave away free hot chocolate, prayer-walked, and helped drunk people find their way home.  In addition we did a reverse confessional booth — we confessed the sins of the church to those who aren’t Christians — and had multiple opportunities to help people encounter Jesus.  My guess is that there were under 50 people involved in this State Paddy’s day outreach.

So I was just thinking what would happen if next time around — we got 6%.  For the sake of easy numbers, let’s guess that 10,000 students were downtown drinking.  What if next year we have 600 people prayer-walking, helping drunken students find their way home, giving hot-chocolate, and talking to people about Jesus?

I wonder if that would bring a tipping point — for good, rather than for a tipping point for a pint?

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So I’ve already written a couple of blog posts about “the rock” and Job’s story in Job 19. (Rock1 and Rock2)   It’s important to take moments and reflect and consider what words make up your life message.  But Job was asking for a rock, not to engrave his life message or even his last message.   Job was calling for a rock, because he wanted to write down words of hope, words of promise and truth, that would help him make it through his wilderness experience.

That’s how we make it through difficult seasons, we remember promises from God that are not defined by our circumstances and we write it on a rock.  What are the promises from God that will get you through when life isn’t easy?   Here’s what needs to go on your rock:

• Whatever is real. It needs to be something that is true, that you know you can  believe no matter what.
• Whatever is forever.  It needs to be a truth that stands the test of time and even the test of eternity.  It isn’t a fad and will never grow old.
• Whatever is central.  There are a lot of forever truths out there.  The Bible is full of them.  But there isn’t enough room on the rock for all of them.  What are the truths, what words of God, what promises are central to your life, core to your heart?

Do you want to hear what Job wrote on his rock?  This man who experienced more hardship in a few months than most of us will experience in a lifetime, was hanging on to these words:  (Job 19:25-27)

But as for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, and he will stand upon the earth at last.  And after my body has decayed, yet in my body I will see God!  I will see him for myself.  Yes, I will see him with my own eyes.  I am overwhelmed at the thought!

Here is my translation of Job’s engraving:  My Redeemer Lives – So I Will Trust.   I will call out to my God for my God lives and no matter what live may throw at him, he stays standing.

My Redeemer Lives – So I Will Hope.  The best is yet to come.  No matter how good my circumstances are at this moment, nor how difficult, the best is yet to come.   One day I will see Him.

Finally God’s Love Wins – So I Will Not Fear.   When Jesus came he told us that God wants to be known as our Father.   You will see God, Job wrote, and Jesus said that this God who will stand victorious in the end, he is your father.  You know what?  If he is your father you have captured his heart.  If God’s love is more real to us than our circumstances, then everything that happens to us, or ever could happen to us, will be seen through the lens of God’s love.

Take a look at this video by Francis Chan — a few minutes to think through what life might look like with these truths on your rock.

If we want to get honest about life, we need to recognize that sometimes it isn’t easy, and sometimes our friends aren’t our friends, and sometime we even wonder if God is against us.  That’s where Job was at in Job 19 (see my rock1 post)…but that’s not where he stayed.  His story takes a turn.  It’s a turn that caused me to ask myself…

What Words Are Engraved On My Rock?  In vs. 23-24 Job cries out…

Oh, that my words could be recorded.  Oh, that they could be inscribed on a monument, carved with an iron chisel and filled with lead, engraved forever in the rock.

What words do you want to be remembered for…?   We all have some words that we remember our parents saying right?

• – Don’t run with that stick you might poke your eye out…
• – Don’t shoot those spit wads, you might poke someone’s else’s eye out.
• – Always wear clean underwear…just in case…
• – If you fall and break your leg don’t come running to me.
• – I brought you into this world and I can take you out.

What is your life message?  What would you want to be engraved on your own personal monument?

I hope that my kids always remember that I told them,  “I love you no matter what.  Nothing  you can do would ever make me love you less.  And nothing you can do will ever make me love you more.  I just love you.”  I hope my kids remember me often saying, “I see great potential in you.  God is doing stuff in you and he will do stuff through you that you can’t imagine.  I see it in you, even if you don’t.”

It’s important to take moments and reflect and consider what words will you be remembered for…and what is your life message.  But Job was asking for a rock, not to engrave his life message or even his last message, he wasn’t writing the epitaph for his tomb stone.

Job was calling for a rock, bcse he wanted to write down words of hope and words of promise, words of truth, that would help him make it through his wilderness experience.  That’s how we make it through the times when life isn’t easy, and friends aren’t friends and it seems like even God is against us.  We remember words of truth,  words of hope, promises from God that are not defined by our circumstances and we write it on a rock.

What words of promise and hope… what words from God do you hang on to as “true no matter what?”  Write those on a rock.

In one of my favorite episodes of  Everybody Loves Raymond,  Ray and Deborah learn that their daughter — she’s about 8 or 9 years old — is asking the questions, “Why are we hear?”  Naturally they are thinking that she’s asking the birds and bees question.  So it’s decided that Raymond must have “the talk” with their daughter.  He gets a book.  He reviews the pictures and the details.  He gathers up his courage.  He goes to his daughter’s room.  He sits beside her on the bed and says, “Honey, I understand you have some questions.  He opens the book to the first picture and starts talking, only to be interrupted by his daughter who says,

“No Daddy, I already know that stuff, I know how God made me, I just want to know why God made me?”

Raymond mumbles something about how it got too crowded in heaven so God had to put some people on earth to make room up there, and he runs out of the room.  Because talking about our purpose for living is a scary thing if we don’t know the answer.  But we don’t have to be ignorant of the answer.  The answer saturates the Bible.  God put it in the book of Beginnings.  In Genesis chapter 8 when God commissioned Abraham, He said,

“I will cause you to become the father of a great nation.  I will bless you and I will make you a blessing to others.  All the nations (families) of the earth will be blessed thru you.”

Jesus put it in his most famous sermon,  Matthew 5:13-16,

“Let me tell you why you’re here.  You’re here to be light, bringing out the God colors in the world…  I’m putting you on a light stand. Now that I’ve put you on a hilltop on a light stand, shine. Be generous with your lives and by opening up to others you’ll prompt people to open up with God, our generous father in heaven.”

You see it when Peter says to a crippled man,

Silver and gold I have none, but what I do have I give you rise and walk.

We see it in Mary’s response to the angel who told her that God had chosen her to bring Jesus to the world.  She said,

I am your servant, let it be as you have said.

God has given us a mission to bless the people of the world by helping them encounter Jesus, the love of Jesus, the power of Jesus, the grace of Jesus, the wisdom of Jesus, the way of Jesus.  I love the way one writer put it in response to my post on friendship evangelism.  “When we love God completely, the good news bursts out everywhere and we don’t need a class to teach us. When we don’t love God completely, a class won’t help.”  Go do that this week.  Love God completely.  Then love your neighbor.

The Old Testament book of Job is one of those books, that we are rarely compelled to spend time reading.  But if we don’t read it we miss some awesome truth.  I was reminded last week of a phrase in Job, “Write it on a Rock.”  Let me set the context. 

In Job 19, Job has already experienced in a few months, more hardship and difficulties than many of us will experience in a lifetime.  Most of his children and their families have been killed. His business has been ruined.  His house has been destroyed.  In Job 19:13-19 he says that his close friend have forgotten him; his servants ignore him, his breath is offensive to his wife, and his kids don’t want to look at him.   Life is hard for Job.  In fact he says, in vs. 19:20-22,

I have been reduced to skin and bones and have escaped death by the skin of my teeth.  Have mercy on me, my friends, have mercy, for the hand of God has struck me.  Must you also persecute me, like God does?   Haven’t you chewed me up enough?

See if we want to be honest about life, first of all we would say that life isn’t always easy.  Sometimes life is just hard.  Bad things happen. I don’t really need to say more on this one, because if you know you know.

Then in the midst of the bad times, sometimes we find that friends just aren’t really friends.  That’s one of the things Job is struggling with.  He’s going through the worst days of his life and these three self-appointed friends come to minister to him, but really all they are doing is tearing him down.  It’s all your fault Job.  God must be punishing you.  Did you ever go through a time when it seemed like your friends weren’t really friends? You were just looking for a word of hope and they told you all hope is lost.  You were looking for a shoulder to cry on or a hand to hold you up and they just weren’t around.  You were looking for someone to pray for you, but they just didn’t have time.

If we want to be honest about life, the reality is that sometimes friends just aren’t friends and it can’t get worse than that…until it seems like even God…   Sometimes it seems like God’s against me.

That’s where Job was at, but that’s not where he stayed.  His story takes a turn.  It’s a turn that caused me to ask myself, what words are engraved on my rock?  You’re thinking, we’ll what do you mean Dan?  In vs. 23-24 Job cries out,

Oh, that my words could be recorded.  Oh, that they could be inscribed on a monument, carved with an iron chisel and filled with lead, engraved forever in the rock.

If you are going to engrave words on a rock, you are going to engrave words that matter.  You are going to engrave words that will last forever.  You are going to engrave words that you want to be remembered as your words.  So let me just ask you… what words are engraved on your rock?  When you go through difficult times, what words matter the most to you?

I’m struggling with evangelism.  What comes to mind when you hear the word evangelism?  Telemarketers?  Mormons? TV evangelists?  Sales?  Agenda?  The word literally means proclaim good news.  How in the world did “proclaiming good news” get such a bad rap?

In the world that I have grown up in, we have researched, practiced, and marketed the best ways to evangelize.  I can teach you how to use Evangelism Explosion, The Four Spiritual Laws, The Wordless Book, and Steps to Peace with God.  I have been to evangelism seminars and read evangelism books.  We have specialized evangelism strategies such as prayer evangelism, servant evangelism, and friendship evangelism.

Why do we need so much training to proclaim good news?  Do you remember going through birth classes?  Did I miss the night they trained us how to tell others the good news that my child was born?  Remember when your favorite football team won the Superbowl?  Did you miss the half-time training regarding how to tell your friends the good news that your team won?

Did you ever find yourself in the midst of using the friendship evangelism strategy, only to have your friend start wondering if she was your “project?”  All of a sudden the friend feels betrayed by your evangelism.   See here is what I’m thinking; I think evangelism most naturally occurs in the context of friendships… where friendship is the goal and evangelism just happens.  When evangelism is the goal it simply feels uncomfortable.

See the ultimate commands that we have been given are twofold:  Love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor like you love yourself.  Developing friendships is the goal not a means to an end.  If this is the case, we might want to be counting conversations more than we count conversions.  We might want to be training people on how to develop strong friendships more than we are training people how to use an evangelism strategy.  And if a friend says no to our Jesus, it should never cause them to lose a friend.

I know a woman who has been leading a Bible Study among women in our extended neighborhood for most of my life.  Some of them are not Christians yet, but they are friends.  I believe that God smiles on those friendships and with all my heart I believe He is pursuing those women with all his heart.

Perhaps one of the reasons we struggle with evangelism is that we just don’t have time to develop friendships?  Go love your neighbor.  Some day when your neighbor is your friend, tell him about the Jesus who has changed your life.

You can’t follow Jesus without leaving something behind.  If our problem is not simply that we are doing too much and being too little; if our problem is slightly more complex in that we need to stop doing somethings all together but do somethings more, than one of the greatest needs in the live of faith today is to get good at the discipline of surrender.   You can’t follow Jesus without leaving something behind.

I was talking with another pastor today about the difficulty of discipleship in today’s culture.  The difficulty is simply that no one has time.  But that isn’t really the problem, everyone has time we are all simply deciding to invest our time in something else.  But if those something else’s leave us unsatisfied, we hurry to the next thing and if we do a whole bunch of things that don’t satisfy our lives become full of hurry.

But remember the secret to eliminating hurry is not to eliminate doing, it is to invest more and more time in doing those things that ultimately satisfy our hearts.  But how do we find those “doings” that will ultimately satisfy our longings?

Dallas Willard classifies spiritual disciplines into two groups, disciplines of abstinence and disciplines of engagement.  I think it is the practice of the disciplines of abstinence that will help us identify the “doings” we need to undo and the “doings” we need to do. So we practice the disciplines of solitude, silence, fasting, chastity, and sacrifice.  And in the midst of those abstaining disciplines we ask God to show us what he wants us to do.

So let me suggest a way to wrap up all those disciplines in one for a period of seeking God for “doing” wisdom.  Make a (not) to-do list. 

List 5 things (one thing in each category) that you will stop doing during the season of Lent (I know some of you thought this was leading to a familiar place.)  This season extends from now till Easter.  As you abstain from these “doings” ask God to show you the “doings” that will satisfy your “being.”

So pick one thing you will stop doing that will lead you to moments of friend-abstainence (solitude).  Pick one thing you will stop doing that will lead you to moments of abstaining from noise (silence).  Pick one thing you will stop doing that will lead you to sacrifice…etc.

• Maybe you will stop doing tv.
• Maybe you will stop doing your ipod.
• Maybe you will stop doing facebook or texting.
• Maybe you will stop doing guys night out.
• Maybe you will stop doing the novels.
• Maybe you will give up Spring Break.

Or maybe not…  :)  It depends on how different we want to “be.”

I wonder if one of the struggles we have in this “being” vs “doing” discussion is that so many of us struggle with performance love — this feeling that if I don’t measure up I won’t be loveable.  If I don’t perform I won’t be loved.  If I live in a shack and don’t have much to show for all my work, I will be alone.  So we strive to earn love.  (By the way that’s one of those “things” that won’t satisfy — trying to earn love.)

So when we suggest to someone that they need to stop focusing on their activity for Jesus and start fueling their adoration of Jesus, what we might be saying, is you don’t have to earn the love of Jesus.  To that I say — yes!  We do not need to earn and would never be able to earn the love of Jesus.

But what if our motivation for “doing” is not to earn the love of Jesus but to show our love for Jesus?  That is the right kind of doing.  In fact maybe I would go so far as to say that we cannot “be” in love with Jesus unless we “do” love Jesus.  In other words love is a verb.  Imagine a husband who never does anything for his wife in the attempt to show her that he loves her so much he would just rather be with her, than do for her.

There is this interesting teaching from Jesus in John 15.  It goes like this…

¹²My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. ¹³Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. ¹⁴You are my friends if you do what I command. ¹⁵I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.

Jesus is distinguishing between servants and friends.  I think we could agree that servant has more of a “doing” flavor and friend has more of a “being” flavor.  But notice this, the distinction between friend and servant is not a lack of doing.  In fact both the servant and the friend “do what Jesus commands.”  The difference is that a friend knows more; there is greater intimacy between friends.

Jesus offers us this intimacy.  We don’t have to earn it, but if we embrace it we will “do” what Jesus commands.  Jesus told Martha that “only one thing is needed and Mary has chosen the best thing.”   She was doing what Jesus wanted her to do.  So what is the one thing you need to be doing right now?  Are you doing that?  If not, the “being” is going to be less than satisfying.