-- Young adults, whether in college, graduate school, or just beginning a career, take time to figure out how to balance their life. The newness of "freedom" -- being away from home, being on their own, making their own money, etc. -- can be more overwhelming than they realize. (One stab at prescription: If a young adult only knows church as a program that was part of his family schedule growing up, rather than as a community life that was integral to his family (and that his family was integral to), he is more likely to consider church expendable in this transition.)

-- Young adults are just flaky. Seriously. To put positive spins on this: they are spontaneous, adventurous, experiential. To put negative spins on this: they have trouble committing, and they have trouble remembering. They may tell you "I'll be there" one day, and then forget what you were talking about the next. We have folks who attend our Element worship service once every four weeks, and for them, this is attending regularly. Never put it past a young person to "forget" about a service project because he was chatting at Starbucks with his friends or overslept after a late-night XBox session.

-- Young adults really do want community and they really don't want to be pandered to. They are finding these qualities very rare when they even bother looking for a church in a new environment.

-- Young adults are very, very busy. This is just an observational hypothesis, but it appears to me that each generation becomes more like the hurried, multi-tasked, overworked, overextended generation ahead of it sooner.

Here are some challenges particular to the environment Element ministers in: Nashville, TN. The same challenges above apply, but here are a few unique additions:

-- All young adults are transient, but in Nashville, they are even more so. As in most college towns, kids are here for school and consider their "real life" back home and on hold. They are here for their degree. Young folks come to Nashville to study medicine or nursing at Vanderbilt or music business at Belmont (or whatever), and as this is only a pit-stop for them, there is no real incentive to invest in discipleship here. Factor in all the aspiring entertainers (in Nashville, just throw a rock out your window and you'll hit a musician -- they are like actors in L.A., where everyone you meet is "really an actor"), and the transience compounds. Young adults are here to break into the music business. While they're here, they're busy writing, playing, trying to get gigs, working at Starbucks, and then when it doesn't pan out after a year or so, they move back home.

-- Our particular church is in a suburban area about 15 miles outside of downtown Nashville, which might as well be 100. Better exposure and strategic advertisement can lessen this distance, but young adult life takes place in the heart of Nashville, where the colleges and clubs and coffee shops and restaurants and art venues are, and most young adults are reluctant to travel outside this bubble. Why would they want to just to "check out" a church or young adult ministry? (We are relying on our already invested folks to bring friends, and most of them are.) For college kids without cars, our church may as well be in Alabama. In addition, despite the fact that, according to one church staff member's research, our church is in the area of Nashville with the highest concentration of single twentysomethings, because we have no draw for them (the "mall" is a joke, the restaurant selection numbers about five, no music venues, etc.), young people spend their non-working life outside our area.

These are the unique challenges of ministering to college students and young adults. They are easy to pigeonhole, difficult to predict. And they are a joy to do life with when you can get one to slow down. :-)

I have found it refreshing that most of the young adults I meet are as tired of the self-helpy, mealy-mouthed, buffet-style, consumer-driven church as I am, and they are hungry for substantive teaching, and for the Gospel. Despite consuming media at a rate that dwarfs older generations, they have a low tolerance for "the show" in church.

Joyful Thanksgiving

Forget happy. I know this day can be a huge test in patience for some. I know some who have to (sigh, grumble grumble) spend this day with their family. Helps the rest of us who would like to be home with family not take peaceful homes for granted.

Hey, today, why not pray that God will overfill your cup with grace. So when Uncle So-and-so is picking on you, when Grandma is comparing you with your more successful cousin, when Mom or Dad is doing that passive aggressive thing about why you don't come home more often (when you happen to be home right now! gosh! :-), endure. Endure and respond with love.
Make it your little secret. Inside you will feel like you're winning a secret battle.

Vomit grace all over the table, horn-o'-plenty centerpiece and all. Be Jesus at that table and overturn it with kindness.

Forget happy. Things may be stacked against your being happy.
But Jesus has your heart. And that's cause for real joy.

Hope everyone is well. I realize this isn't the typical Happy Thanksgiving post. But I just know personally some people who struggle with being home today, because home is not happy. So I don't want to be naive about the fact this reality is fairly widespread.

Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, since as members of one body you were called to peace. And be thankful.
-- Colossians 3:15

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad;
the desert shall rejoice and blossom like the crocus;
it shall blossom abundantly
and rejoice with joy and singing.
The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it,
the majesty of Carmel and Sharon.
They shall see the glory of the Lord,
the majesty of our God.

Strengthen the weak hands,
and make firm the feeble knees.
Say to those who have an anxious heart,
"Be strong; fear not!
Behold, your God
will come with vengeance,
with the recompense of God.
He will come and save you."

Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,
and the ears of the deaf unstopped;
then shall the lame man leap like a deer,
and the tongue of the mute sing for joy.
For waters break forth in the wilderness,
and streams in the desert;
the burning sand shall become a pool,
and the thirsty ground springs of water;
in the haunt of jackals, where they lie down,
the grass shall become reeds and rushes.

And a highway shall be there,
and it shall be called the Way of Holiness;
the unclean shall not pass over it.
It shall belong to those who walk on the way;
even if they are fools, they shall not go astray.
No lion shall be there,
nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it;
they shall not be found there,
but the redeemed shall walk there.
And the ransomed of the Lord shall return
and come to Zion with singing;
everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;
they shall obtain gladness and joy,
and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

- Isaiah 35

“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

“The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!

Greek: haplous - Single
"simple, single," is used in a moral sense in Matt 6;22, Luke 11:34, said of the eye; "singleness" of purpose keeps us from the snare of having a double treasure and consequently a divided heart. The papyri provide instances of its use in other than the moral sense, e.g., of a marriage dowry, to be repaid pure and simple by a husband (Moulton and Milligan). In the Sept., Prov 11:25.

I talked to a handful of 20somethings who dropped out of church for a few years and are now back and engaged. When I asked them about the worship style of our church (we’re a mix between blended and traditional), the answers were all different. Most of them indicated that they would rather we sing less and get to the preaching quicker. “That’s what we’re there for,” said one. Others mentioned how much they loved the organ. A couple mentioned that the “hymns” could be hard sometimes, but that they wanted to learn them anyway, as they felt they were important.

My generation is musically fragmented.

. . .

The idea that a “contemporary” music service is going to reach my generation just makes me laugh. No one in my class is there for the music. They are all there for the relationships and the Bible teaching. Not that the music is unimportant… it’s just not central.

Even funnier is the mindset among the Boomer generation that if we were to start using the organ and singing hymns again that all the young people would leave. The Boomer generation is making the same mistake that their parents did, thinking that what attracted them to church is what will attract their kids. Sorry. It isn’t happening. Furthermore, musical style isn’t much of a factor anyway.

For some reason, I have a feeling that most churches don’t really want to invest in the 20something crowd. It’s almost become an expectation that people will drop out of church between 18 and 30 and then return when they have kids and are ready to start “real life.” Meanwhile, the 20somethings are drinking their lives away, buying into the American dream of materialism, and starting off marriages on shaky foundations.

Let’s keep hoping in the 20somethings and stop cursing them with low expectations or old-fashioned ideas. ”Contemporary” worship is so old anyway.

Let’s bring this generation back to the church with what they might have missed during their childhood and youth group experience: the gospel!

The Law is indeed a mirror (as James' epistle elucidates), it does indeed confront us in its very existence with our failure to measure up, with the complete imperfection within us. No, by the law will no one be justified. Yes, the law's declaration demonstrates our own alienation from God's holiness. But this notion that this negative declaration is only why it exists, to show us we can't do it, is just . . . weird. I just can't read the Sermon on the Mount, for instance, in which Jesus makes the Law harder by making it about our hearts and not just our behavior, and think it's just some bizarre logic puzzle meant to mean the opposite of what it says.

When Jesus says "Love your enemies," yes it is implicit that we can't do that perfectly, that it is not in our own power to do that or even want to do that. But it is still a command. It is still something to do. And with the Spirit's transforming power, in the new life in Jesus, it is something we can and must do.

I like what Dallas Willard says about this stuff: The life of faith is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. There is a huuuuge difference. And I think many of those who get hung up on the Law as mirror -- setting one "use" of the Law against another -- fall off the horse on the other side.

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.

- Matthew 5:17-20

A voice cries: “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God. Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”

When eastern princes marched through desert countries, ways were prepared for them, and hinderances removed. And may the Lord prepare our hearts by the teaching of his word and the convictions of his Spirit, that high and proud thoughts may be brought down, good desires planted, crooked and rugged tempers made straight and softened, and every hinderance removed, that we may be ready for his will on earth, and prepared for his heavenly kingdom.

This expresses my deep hope, both for myself, for my family, for my church and for those I am privileged to teach, that we will daily "prepare the way for the Lord".

Yet often the road is not clear. My heart is not smooth ground for the Spirit to move, unhindered.

I'm reminded - and this is the way my mind works early on Sunday mornings, I guess - of those chase scenes we've seen a hundred times in movies. Not car chases, but the on-foot kind. You know the ones I'm talking about: as the person being chased is running, he or she keeps grabbing random objects (trashcans, boxes of stuff, etc) and throwing them in the way of the chaser.

In the movie Sandlot, there is a fabulous on-foot chase scene, featuring Bennie "the jet" Rodriguez and a huge saint bernard named Hercules. Bennie has retrieved a Babe Ruth autographed baseball from Hercules' backyard collection, and Hercules wants it back! One segment of the chase scene has Bennie knocking over trashcans in Hercules' way as he runs for his life.

The funny thing about that scene is that, ultimately, Hercules chases Bennie back to the sandlot and to Hercules' back yard. They end up where they started, and the ball is back where Hercules wants it.

And as Jesus was going up to Jerusalem, he took the twelve disciples aside, and on the way he said to them, “See, we are going up to Jerusalem. And the Son of Man will be delivered over to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn him to death and deliver him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified, and he will be raised on the third day.”