The Young Ones (A Primer on Proclaiming the Gospel to this Generation)

Was this the easy path, or the tough narrow one? It's been a year and a half as a teacher of sorts. I had repudiated the rat-race. The money was good, I noted, but the hours were long, tedious and tiring. Ironically, while I've had my stresses in this new line, spending so much time giving to others, the returns have been worth it. To my up and coming peers, service to the children (and to the Church) is immensely rewarding. If not financially, then intellectually and spiritually.

Yet, when I see the young (or should I say, younger - most people would consider me to be "young", too) - I worry. When I was...younger, I brushed off fears of the new technology as the worries of neo-Luddites. I am slowly beginning to agree with them to a certain extent. Human interaction takes place primarily with screens. And particularly small screens at that. While they give us access to enormous resources, we have become somewhat dependant, indeed almost locked into them so that our world has become rather myopic. Those are my worries. I still stick to a wait and see approach. But what I'm seeing can sometimes be both exhilarating and unsettling.

That's one part. Another worry concerns an event that has been on-going for a long time now. I dismay at seeing my faith lose relevance to the world. Yes, this has been happening for a long long time. But reading about it in the books and seeing it in action are two different things. You struggle and ask what's the point as your beliefs slowly seem to become more and more esoteric - teachings that better belong in a distant past and not today's world (I recall the words of Bultmann who, nearly a century back, dismissed traditional Christianity as being rendered untenable by the advent of lightbulbs. If lightbulbs, what more touch screen phones!)

The Gospel, at least in the much of the modern world can no longer be proclaimed "as is". I often hear stories of Orang Asli folks who convert, teary eyed, at hearing the story of how Yesus saved us. I admire their faith, but suspect that won't fly anymore with today's young, who are themselves being evangelized by non-believers and other anti-theists. I often see image macros reposted, with anti-religious one liners. Compelling at first glance but easily deconstructed. But the short attention spans of today's generation has no time for that. And so, at least among the peers I have observed - religion is treated with disdain at worst and indifference at best.

Which all comes back to the world as we have it today. A world where people can rely on medicine more than God (which is virtually unprecedented). A world where "science" holds more hope for progress than "religion". And so it goes.

This is not about rebranding or marketing religion to the young ones, the new generation, one that is more connected, knowledgeable (okay, in my experience, not necessarily) and aware than the ones before. This is, rather, about taking stock and looking back at how we have grappled with the herculean task of the Great Commission. The methods have changed, but the message has not. Is time then, to reformulate the basic truth claims of Christianity? Maybe, maybe not. We can all agree that the death and resurrection of Jesus (no matter how trivialized and ridiculed it has been made up to be - and in a sense, rightly so) is the sine qua non of our faith.

Ironically, it is a historical truth claim - one that simply asks to be examined and if found true, to be believed - that has so often been ignored in an age where faith is constantly being pushed as believing what you know ain't true. The touchy feely Jesus is my best friend/girlfriend/boyfriend proclamations won't cut it anymore (my personal opinion) with today's youth. A head in the sand mentality with science's claims of the universe won't do too (I recently heard a preacher attempting a critique of evolution by saying "If evolution is true, why are there still monkeys?") If you cannot get the things of this world right, what does that say about your handling of the things of God?

We, the young Christians, have to do deal with all of this. Proclaiming the Good News has never been so easy; it has also never been so difficult. God help us.