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BY BRYANT OSKVIG
UMCONNECTION CONTRIBUTOR

"It is a waste of time and resources to chase after young people; maybe you have to have certain life experiences before you are ready for Christian discipleship."

This statement was overheard at an event for new clergy. Now, normally you would expect this sort of event to be filled with young adults, but the average age of starting clergy would suggest otherwise. This church leader further justified his argument based upon the age of the people who attended this Christian event and the average age of people in worship across the country.

I certainly have a bias in response to this person's claim. When I was 14, a pastor asked me to listen for the guidance of God in my life; when I graduated from college, I went to seminary, and I have served in the church since I was a "not spiritually ready" young adult.

It is unfortunate when we blame our failure to communicate the Gospel to another generation on them and not ourselves. Why, if the church has not had a meaningful place in someone's life before, would we think anyone would turn to the church later? Is the Gospel only for those who "are ready?"

This attitude only perpetuates the idea that fewer people in worship is not a real concern and the reason so many are choosing not to find a church home is that they "are not spiritually ready for it." Our continued withdrawal, waiting for others to come to us, will only feed our loss in relevance for our communities and continued worship decline.

Maybe, it is not that people need to be spiritually ready; maybe we have done a poor job living into the mission of the church. We have spent the last couple hundred years building things, and we have forgotten why we built them. Rather than, as responses to the call of the Gospel, we treat them as monuments to our forebears and ourselves. While we understand our mission to be the making of disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world, we don't know why or have a vision of what a transformed world might look like.

We built colleges and universities so that all would have access to an education (our legacy, even in the 1800s, was to open our schools to all genders and races). We built hospitals so that all would have access to the medical care they needed, and we built churches so that the people of an area could be gathered for the continued growth of their faith and for the public witness to our communities. Our colleges and universities now hardly acknowledge their Methodist heritage; our hospitals have been sold to other corporations or run by their own private boards and our churches stand within a few miles of each other sparsely populated by the remnants of the founding families.

Our forebears did not intend to build monuments to themselves that would burden the future church with the maintenance of crumbling structures; they built edifices for mission. When these structures no longer meet the needs of our mission, we should honor those commitments of the past and redeploy their commitments for the call of the Gospel in the present.

But, it is so difficult to let go of these structures, especially when there is no articulated call. We have to articulate for ourselves why we should do this (merge congregations, raise money for buildings, start new congregations, provide grants to struggling congregations). With clarity about the mission of the church, decisions become easier to evaluate and tough choices become clearer to determine.

In a society that values personal pleasure over communal responsibility, consumption over compassion, and appearance over depth, the Church of Jesus Christ has a witness to share for those that wander about lost, broken hearted and yearning for more. We should not afford ourselves the luxury of preserving a building because our grandparents were married there. Our grandparents were willing to move from the house church or chapel that their parents built to a new and hope-filled witness in a different building or place. So should we.

The challenge for us is articulating the mission so that it has an immediate purpose; it is answering the question of why. Why should the world be transformed? We must articulate the wounds and sins of our world, and make clear how the call of the Spirit in the Gospel of Christ meets the needs of our neighbors, both physical and spiritual. We built schools, hospitals and churches for a clearly understood need; this is a different time with changed needs. We need to easily justify why we have chosen to live together in a counter-cultural way. Until we do that, we will continue to limp along repairing our monuments to the past.

All this relates back to these uninvolved young people. It is not about being ready; young people are waiting for the church to make a clear explanation as to why they should be a part of the church. They can do "good" on their own; we have to explain why they should want to be a part of the community, and "because God wants you to" is not a useful explanation.

We have to explain and meaningfully live out the sense that together, bound in the grace of God as a church, we are more able to live out the vision of the kingdom of God in which the hungry are fed, the broken hearted are comforted, and peace is spread throughout our world. We have to be willing to sacrifice for this mission of transforming our world in the name of Christ.

Until we are ready to do this, it's not that young people are not spiritually ready for us yet; we are not spiritually ready for them.

The Rev. Bryant Oskvig is a campus minister at Georgetown University.