With research like this, it’s always interesting to see what everyone agrees on. And with young people who identify as Christians, one of the things they overwhelmingly agree on is what is important in a church. An experience of God is the most important thing without a doubt, followed by community, and then by teaching. Social action follows in fourth, and then in a comfortable last place is evangelism (we’ll come back to that). That looks like encouraging news, for what can be more important to our young people than that they come to experience the living God for themselves?
So, 50 per cent of young people who identify as Christians don’t read their Bible more than once a month. Only a third read the Bible a couple of times a week or more. When held together with the fact that young people expressed a strong desire to experience God in their churches, something seems amiss. Because the thing is, there’s a link between the discipline of Bible reading and the experience of God. One of the main day-to-day ways you experience God is through reading the Bible. When the author of the book of Hebrews writes to his readers, he says, ‘So, as the Holy Spirit says’ and then he starts quoting Psalm 95, ‘“Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts”’ (Hebrews 3:7-8). He’s saying: the Holy Spirit speaks to you today. More than that, the Holy Spirit speaks to you today through reading the Bible. If our young people want to encounter God afresh, then they can hear his voice speak to them today through his word.
There’s a linked trend which might shed some light on what’s going on here. The young people surveyed don’t seem to care much about evangelism. Of the six options of things important in a church, it’s comfortably the thing they see as least important, and when asked to rank various statements in order of importance, ‘the best thing I can do is tell my friends about Jesus’ is fifth place, sitting behind ‘Jesus wants us to be nice to other people’. This isn’t because our young people are all closet universalists: hardly any of the Christian young people thought that everyone goes to heaven, instead the vast majority believed ‘that hell is a real place’ and ‘you will only get to heaven by believing in Jesus’. So, even though most young people hold a pretty orthodox view of heaven and hell, there’s not a corresponding urgency in evangelism.
Here’s a thought then: have we separated the special, nigh-on indescribable, experience of God from day-to-day Christian living? There seems to be deep times of special intimacy where our emotions are especially stirred, our hearts are set on fire, and we are overwhelmed with the presence of God. Here’s a great dead theologian Jonathan Edwards (1703 - 1758) description of such a moment:
‘Once, as I rode out into the woods for my health … To walk for divine contemplation and prayer, I had a view, that for me was extraordinary, of the glory of the Son of God, as Mediator between God and man, and his wonderful, great, full, pure and sweet grace and love, and meek and gentle condescension… The person of Christ appeared ineffably excellent, with an excellency great enough to swallow up all thought and conception — which continued, as near as I can judge, about an hour; which kept me the greater part of the time in a flood of tears, and weeping aloud. I felt an ardency of soul to be, what I know not otherwise how to express, emptied and annihilated; to lie in the dust, and to be full of Christ alone; to love him with a holy and pure love; to trust in him; to live upon him; to serve and follow him; and to be perfectly sanctified and made pure, with a divine and heavenly purity. I have several other times had views very much of the same nature, and which have had the same effects.’ (The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 1)
These moments are incredible but also rare. They aren’t the normal experience of Christian living. Our normal day-to-day life is much less dramatic. We hear God speak in his word, we call out to him in prayer, we obey his voice by doing what he says, and we tell other people about him. Through doing these normal things we get to know God better and we trust him more. But this day-to-day experience is the foundation of those other rare moments of special intimacy.
Think of the Christian life like a marriage; while there are times of special intimacy these come out of the regular day-to-day conversations and time together. An attempt to have those moments of deep intimacy without the regular day-to-day conversations isn’t a relationship – it’s a series of one-night stands, and there is no real satisfaction in a series of one-night stands, whether in someone’s bed or at the front of church with the band playing.
So what can we do to help our young people here? One thing that will help is to strengthen their understanding of their union with Christ. There seems to be an idea that God only comes close to us at certain times, that he sits far off until he needs to make a big show. The reality is far from that. When God saves someone, he does it by uniting them in his son, Jesus. In our salvation we are buried with Jesus and will be raised back up with Jesus (Romans 6:5-6) and our life becomes hidden in Christ (Colossians 3:3). Because of this, we are never far from God. We might find prayer hard, struggle with Bible reading, and can’t bring ourselves to tell other people about Jesus, but in Christ we are in the very life of God. And as we keep reading about him and speaking to him and speaking of him, we can expect him to be revealing himself to us.
