Hilton Head Island, SC – Dec. 31, 2023
The Chapel Without Walls
Isaiah 28:7-13; Proverbs 22:1-6
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it. – Proverbs 22:6 (RSV)
In the twenty years The Chapel Without Walls has existed, we have had only one young child who attended regularly with his parents. He and his parents started attending when he was about four over nineteen years ago, and they stopped coming when he was about eight. He was a very bright child, and he is now a junior at one of our nation’s finest universities. As he grew, he became involved in more and more youth activities, including Sunday morning sports. Because he was unable to come to church, his parents stopped coming also. That pattern has been duplicated in millions of homes around this country and throughout the world.
Our youngest regular attendant at The Chapel is in his forties. He told me he was at a party of his contemporaries before Christmas on a Saturday night. Around midnight he headed toward the door. As he did that, a man asked in jest, “Why are you leaving so early; are you going to church in the morning?”, assuming that of course he was not. When said he would be going to church the next morning, everyone was astonished. They couldn’t imagine anyone his age going to church.
This sermon is about your children, grandchildren, and for those who have them, great-grandchildren. It also is a sermon for those people. If you feel so inclined, you might email it to them with a brief explanation of why you are doing so. Those who are 50 or younger have grown up in a culture that has become increasingly secularized, but it has most affected younger folks. When I became a minister in the mid-1960s, many communities expected that “the best people” (however it was determined who they might be) were expected to attend church. Now that is the expectation almost nowhere in America or elsewhere where Christianity is the dominant religion. I read a story in a newsmagazine a few weeks ago that said the same phenomenon is happening in Muslim-dominant countries. Religion is in decline in most of the developed world, in part because of the internet, which most young folks love. However, conservative religion is thriving in underdeveloped, less well-educated sections of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
The Roman Catholic Church is the branch of Christianity where the decline is the greatest but is also the least publicly acknowledged. The severity of old-line priests and nuns in the old days and the continuing rigidity of the Vatican in forbidding abortion under most circumstances has led many young adults quietly to drop out. The scandals of pedophile priests being protected by the hierarchy has resulted in far more younger Catholics leaving. Now fewer babies are being born to Catholic couples, and that adds to the falling numbers.
For at least sixty years, most American Mainline Protestant denominations have also experienced major shrinkage. Primarily over LGBTQ issues, the United Methodist Church has lost 6000 congregations. During the past dozen years the UMC had a quarter of their total churches leave to the Global Methodist Church, a much more conservative international denomination. The Presbyterian denomination in which I was raised and in which I served for forty years has lost almost two-thirds of its members since the Sixties, while the country more than doubled in population. While all that was happening, denominations tried to lift the importance of denominations at the same time that younger people were offended by that emphasis. They have more loyalty to a local congregation than to a denomination. If they remained in churches, they gravitated toward non-denominational congregations, especially megachurches, with numerous activities for people of all ages, but especially children and youth.
Accompanying this was a trend toward the growth of evangelical denominations. However, even they are having problems with some of their own people who were raised in conservative congregations. They were rebelling against the exclusivity emphasized by those churches, in addition to their insistence on the “inerrancy and infallibility” of the Bible. The most evident example of this this loss is the numerical decline of the Southern Baptist Convention, by far the largest American Protestant denomination. Several years ago it claimed to have sixteen million members, but now it has fewer than fourteen million, and, like the Roman Catholics, their membership numbers are suspiciously squishy.
Another complaint among younger people, many of whom are more humanitarian-minded than some older folks, is that churches spend too much money on themselves and too little by serving the poor and dispossessed. Some of the church buildings constructed twenty-five to fifty years ago were exorbitantly expensive and large, and are now costly to maintain. Idealists are put off by such expenditures, and younger people are more likely to be idealists, while many older people become more realistic about everything.
A widely used phrase has emerged to describe many people from ages twenty to sixty; “I’m spiritual, but I’m not religious.” This means different things to different people. In general it connotes an important identification with God and spiritual matters, but not with organized religion. It is understandable why many people feel that way. They complain that the Church spends too much money on the Church, and too little for the world. They observe that religious groups spend too much on religious “stuff,” broadly defined, and too little on secular “stuff,” also broadly defined. If religious people are not careful, religion can cause them to lose their religion.
It may seem to us that what we are seeing now is unique to the present. Nevertheless, there were similar instances throughout the past, when things appeared to fall apart. If the Old Testament prophets thought there was anything to grump about, they enthusiastically grumped about it. Referring to God, Isaiah asked, “Whom will he teach knowledge, and to whom will he explain the message? Those who are weaned from the milk, and those taken from the breast? [In other words, the very young.] For it is precept upon precept, line upon line, here a little, there a little…that they may go, and fall backward, and be broken, and snared, and taken” (Isa. 28:9,10,13).
Some of the younger people who reject their traditional religious background gravitate toward what is called “New Age” thinking. Its leaders do not follow biblical teachings as such, but concepts which they believe are more in keeping with 21st century realities. Line by line and little by little, what the young espoused becomes lost in a plethora of new and enticing ideas.
There are a large number of American congregations like ours that are not traditional but also are not “New-Age-y.” Frankly, I think that if many younger people were to attend such congregations, they would find they are not really traditional, and that what is preached in these churches would appeal to younger people. But they have been turned off by too much old-fashioned traditionalism that they reject religion altogether without trying to give more liberal churches a chance.
The Book of Proverbs is a collection of hundreds of pithy statements spoken and remembered over several centuries in Israel from the time of the conquest of Canaan up until a few centuries before Jesus. Our nation had a master “proverbist” in Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac. “God helps those who help themselves, Early to be and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. Little strokes fell great oaks. He that goes a-borrowing goes a-sorrowing.”
A century ago, one of the once best-known proverbs in Proverbs was this: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it” (22:6). Probably most parents then were taught that by their parents and grandparents. Unfortunately for us, the Book of Proverbs is not read in worship or in Sunday school much anymore, and its maxims are rarely taught to children by their parents. But it once was both widely believed and expounded that if children were taught the way they should go, they would not depart from it as they got older.
But what is the way we should go? Is it “You shall not plow with an ox and a donkey together,” as it says in Deuteronomy (22:10)? Most of us don’t know what makes an ox an ox. As for donkeys, we might not be able to distinguish one from a Shetland pony. Jesus said, “Do not cast pearls before swine” (Mt. 7:6), although he was not speaking literally. Most of us don’t have pearls to cast, and we are seldom if ever around swine before which to cast them.
Times change, and what once seemed wrong seems right, and what seemed right seems wrong. Because the young are more eager to get on with life, they naturally prefer what they perceive as the behavior of their peers than that of their parents. No doubt it has ever been thus. But the potential problem is that now younger people may be more self-absorbed than in previous generations. If they are like that, it may be because they feel the older generations have left them with difficulties that seem almost insoluble, such as climate change, ecological desecration, political polarization, and a growing gap between the very wealthy and everyone else. If they don’t protect themselves, they reason, no one else will.
The other night we watched a movie comedy on television called Mistress America. It was about a young woman who was writing a novel about another young woman who had become a close friend to her. I won’t take time to explain the plot in more detail. In it, all of the characters in the screenplay, female and male, seemed unusually fixated on their own well-being at the expense of everyone around them. They also were all highly skilled in the usage of four-letter words, and in undermining one another with abandon. The movie was intended to display the weaknesses of young adults in a humorous way, and it succeeded in that, but there were few redeeming qualities in any of them. I have no idea how old the people were behind the production of that movie, but it seemed to me whoever they were and however aged they might be, they were gleefully dumping upon urbane city-slicker twenty-or-thirty-somethings, and offering them no discernible means of extracting themselves from their vapid, self-centered lives.
In order to maintain the standard of living to which their parents have accustomed the young, many now-older parents themselves both work full-time outside the home. Therefore arrangements have to be made for someone else to care for their young children during the day, and either that does or does not go smoothly. Many younger adults are irked by political proclamations of national prosperity when they are struggling just to keep their heads above the fiscal waters. It has been postulated that the children and grandchildren of the oldest generation in America will be the first generations in history to have a lower standard of living than their progenitors. And they may resent that. Besides, many young couples have decided not to have children. They either conclude they can’t afford them or they don’t want to bring children into a world in such colossal turmoil. It is not surprising that many of our children and grandchildren believe that the troubles they face on a daily basis are the mistakes made, not by themselves, but by older people.
As the divorce rate in America rose dramatically, many children and youth felt abandoned by the parent who left home, usually the father. People whose parents divorced are somewhat more likely to divorce than those whose parents stayed together until death did them part. The fragility of family life affects everyone, and especially the young.
There is yet another issue that I find particularly troublesome. I can understand why young folks might turn their backs on Mainline Christianity, which told them they should love everyone equally, and if they did that, not much else would be required of them. However, many such people became involved in evangelical churches after they had children (if they had children). There they were told that if they believed the right things, attended regularly, contributed generously, and followed the rules, all would go well, and they would be passengers on the Heaven-Bound Express. Not everything goes well for anybody, and so many younger adults have become disillusioned hermits, living to themselves in the midst of thousands or millions of other people around them, trying to scratch out an existence in a world they feel is stacked against them. Many of them don’t pay attention to what is going on in the world, they don’t vote, they hang out with a carefully chosen small group of friends, and they withdraw from the type of lives their parents and grandparents had happily chosen for themselves.
No one, other than God, sees reality as it really is. There are many factors which explain how disintegrated the world is. If the younger generations blame some of their troubles on the oldest generation, it may not be totally warranted, but it must not be totally ignored either. We were so busy ourselves trying to keep up with what we thought we needed to keep up with that we failed to train our children in the ways they should go, so in many respects they didn’t go there.
For decades, American parents were too child-centered in the wrong ways and too oblivious of the ways their children needed to be taught in order not to make bad choices. For those of us who are card-carrying geezers, our offspring are what they are going to be. Maybe we can do better at training our grandchildren in the way they should go, but our influence on them is the most effective when we live close to them. Alas, for some of us, that pleasurable prospect has never transpired.
This is one of the most doleful sermons I have ever preached. God’s spirit is always present within every generation, eager to inspire them to re-commit themselves to Him and to His plans for the world. Back in the day when denominations published entire hymnals only for youth, I remember one of those hymns, sung to Jean Sibelius’s majestic composition, Finlandia.
We would be building temples still undone
O’er crumbling walls their crosses scarcely lift;
Waiting till love can raise the broken stone,
And hearts creative bridge the human rift ;
We would be building; Master, let thy plan
Reveal the life that God would give to man.
Church World Service is an organization to which I regularly contribute. A few days ago I received an outstanding proverb printed on a wooden circle. It says, “BElieve THEre Is GOOD in the World.” But in bold black letters part of the proverb also says, “BE THE GOOD.” That is what all people of all ages need to do. Be the good.
It is always the unsought responsibility of younger generations to try to overcome the mistakes made by older generations. May God grant them the vision, courage, and trust to take up the challenges and tasks at which we have failed. And thus may the kingdom of this world become the kingdom of our God and of His Christ.