Article Added On: March 07, 2005 - over 6 years ago
Title: Gen Xers find Jesus: Churches learn new ways to engage today's young people
Author: Joe Woodard
Publication: The Calgary Herald
Publication Date: January 01, 2005 - over 7 years ago
Faith Groups: Other Christian
Themes: religious attitudes in Canada

Abstract: This is a report looking at young people's religious attitudes in Canada. The reporter describes "today's Gen-Xers and Millennials" as "kids" and/or "they," making it clear that he belongs to Baby-boomers. (He does not seem to have much of an insight into the lives and aspiration of today's young people. Consequently, the article serves only those who have a fixed view of life and frame of reference. This is a prime example of why today's youths do not read a newspaper.)

Sunday, March 6, 2005

A Gallup Poll run last fall suggests that organized religion is making a comeback in Canada -- even among Canadian youth.

A poll of 1,005 Canadians completed in September 2004 and released in November has found 37 per cent of Canadians now attend religious worship at least once a month.

Sociologist Reginald Bibby of the University of Lethbridge says the signs are clear.

"What is noteworthy about the findings," Bibby says, "is that the 37 per cent figure is the highest since the early 1980s" -- up from the 30 per cent participation level he found in 2000.

Bibby himself has been cautiously predicting a religious revival in Canada since his 2002 book, Restless Gods, and his more recent, Restless Churches, released last September.

Now organized religion is showing signs of making a real comeback.

"The people -- who were predicting secularization would slay organized religion in Canada -- were looking at Europe when they should have looked at the United States," says Bibby.

Similar Gallup surveys conducted this year show Great Britain with a monthly-plus attendance level of 24 per cent, compared with 56 per cent in the U.S. Given the influence of American culture and American religious resources on Canada, says Bibby, "it would be logical to expect we could be coming in somewhere in the middle. And that is precisely what is happening," Bibby says.

"Two years ago, when Restless Gods came out, the evidence for a renaissance of religion in Canada was still sketchy. But new surveys like Gallup's are grounds for believing something very significant is taking place here."

The rise in weekly attendance figures, while not as high, may be more impressive. In the three years from 2000 to 2003, weekly attendance climbed from 21 to 26 per cent, making worship the single-most popular weekly group activity in Canada.

Even more surprising, a national youth survey discovered that weekly youth attendance is rising. By 1992, weekly youth attendance had dropped to 18 per cent, and Bibby expected it to drop farther. But by 2000, it had climbed to 22 per cent.

Ever the sociologist, Bibby remains cautious: "We won't know for probably 10 or 20 years as to whether we are looking at a minor blip or something much more profound. But at minimum, the data suggest that organized religion's losing streak is finally over and the wins are starting to come -- at least for now."

Sunwest Christian Fellowship pastor Willy Reimer has an immediate answer to the question of why youth may be returning to organized religion: dysfunctional families.

"I was just talking to the principal of a middle-class junior high school, and he was saying he's seeing increasing family dysfunction, increasing every year, even in the upper socio-economic groups," Reimer says.

"Teens are looking for support, community, a place of belonging, a sense of identity. And many of them are coming from families where that's difficult to find" -- not merely because of the extreme cases of divorce, Reimer adds, but simply parental busyness and a "latch-key" home life, leaving emotional holes that end up filled by sex, drugs and alcohol.

Most teen pregnancies occur between 3 and 6 p.m.," Reimer says.

"Kids want to know, 'Who are we as a family?' And when they don't have an answer for that, they end up looking for love in all the wrong places."

What's more, churches "across the board" today are making deliberate efforts to reach young people, Reimer says, "communicating in ways that kids can understand" and intentionally getting them involved in worship for which they can take ownership.

Sunwest itself is a "portable" church, with permanent offices, but holding its services in community centres and school auditoriums. Around 700 adults attend its two Sunday morning services. It began its own special youth service about five years ago, with 50 junior and senior high students in attendance. Since then, the services have been split into a Saturday night senior high and Sunday morning junior high services, drawing 160-170 kids. And "numerous parents" are being introduced to church life by their own children.

"It's not happening en masse, not yet, but a lot of kids are saying to their parents, 'We're going here, and we'd like to see you come,' " Reimer says.

The third factor is that kids today are very much interested in humanitarian causes -- "They want to explore their walk with Christ; they want to do good," Reimer says.

So Sunwest runs mission trips twice a year to Mexico, to build homes for the homeless in Tijuana, and that's "very attractive" to lots of youth: "We want to get them beyond that, but they want to do good," Reimer says.

Is it "conversion" in the scriptural sense: "Repent and be baptized"?

"They wouldn't understand those words," Reimer says.

"But many of these kids have been experimenting with things in junior high that we wouldn't have seen until college, and they know they've been making mistakes, mistakes they have to own up to.

"A lot of them don't have a father figure, and they want to know God loves them. They're responding to the love of Christ.

"Kids need boundaries," Reimer says, and while they won't admit it, they'll often press against the boundaries simply to discover if someone loves them. If they can't find those boundaries at home, many will look for them in a local church -- providing the church welcomes them.

Sociologist Bibby believes "the needs have been there all along," in one way or another, but "what's changed in the so-called market conditions are that religious groups are far more focussed on responding to these needs."

For two hundred years, social scientists generally have assumed that increasing "enlightenment" or the influence of science in society would result in secularization and the withering away of organized religion. "But they've simply been wrong," Bibby argues.

"That never applied to the U.S., and while it's applied to a lot of European countries, it's only partly ever applied to Canada."

The difference, Bibby says, is that the European state churches (and to some extent, the Quebec Catholic church) have had a monopoly on the religious market, and they've lost the ability to respond to people's needs. The U.S. (and to a lesser extent, the rest of Canada) has "real deregulation" of the religious market, and the churches "re-invent themselves" in response to changing circumstances.

What remains the same is a church's theology, and its people's urgent needs for a "significant conversation" and support in their family lives. What's changed has been styles of worship, types of outreach and teaching methods. Established European churches have contented themselves with a passive membership and becoming ceremonial backdrops for weddings and funerals. Without state sponsorship, however, North American churches are living or dying on their ability to engage the loyalties of their nominal members.

"Even within the declining mainstream Protestant churches, the United, Anglican and Presbyterian, it's only a matter of time before the active cores say, 'We have to turn this around,' " Bibby says.

"There's nothing Canadians believe is more important than their family life. And if they come to see that churches are engaged with their kids and supporting their aged parents, you can bet they'll respond."

Church historian John G. Stackhouse of Vancouver's Regent College thinks the numbers on religious observance are "interesting" but not yet conclusive.

"Church attendance figures are notoriously soft," says Stackhouse.

"It's possible that what we're seeing is a combination of factors: the United Church and Anglican declines finally bottoming out; some Evangelical churches doing better; Catholics benefitting from (Hispanic) immigration; and some (Evangelical) Asian immigration, mainly Korean and Chinese."

All of which means that any upswing in attendance is due first to immigration, and then to the 12 per cent conservative evangelical Canadians "doing what Evangelicals do" -- primarily in a few innovative centres such as Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary and the B.C. lower mainland.

When it comes to youth evangelization, Stackhouse says, a large proportion of 18- to 25-year-olds have "no significant religious background at all," Stackhouse says. "They may well say, 'My parents were, uh, Anglican,' or 'We were, uh, United,' but they have had little or no actual exposure to religion practices or institutions.

"In my years at the University of Manitoba, I found that students might know a lot, but none of them know the same things," he says.

"There's an advantage there. For most of them, Christianity is as exotic as Buddhism. They've got no filters and categories to discount it."

That near-universal ignorance of Christianity has practical effects.

First, today's Gen-Xers and Millennials "aren't as radical as they seem," Stackhouse says. Repeated polls have demonstrated they are much more conservative than their Boomer parents. But they received "so little teaching from their parents" that they don't have the vocabulary to express themselves. For example, they don't understand the difference between subjective spirituality and collective religion, and they know only that they haven't much contact with concrete institutions. But they're not hostile.

Second, the effort of the church has to be "Teach first, preach second," Stackhouse says. The post-modern generations are quite familiar with the dark side of individualism and liberation. But they first have to learn that the world can make sense, that there is an objective "truth," and that obeying the rules can bring happiness.

Unfortunately, Stackhouse says, the Christian denominations are still showing little confidence that they can take advantage of this new "not-anti-Christian" and truth-hunger barbarism among today's youth.

"We're still back on our heels culturally, suffering all the Canadian vices," he says.

"We're trying to be hospitable. We're afraid of looking like bigots. We've got that Anglo-Canadian diffidence about holding any strong opinions, and we're afraid of driving other people away."

Stackhouse says the big strength of the introductory Alpha Program, now offered in more than 2,500 churches, is that it assumes the people attending know nothing about Christianity, and it stresses making sense of life.

In fact, Stackhouse adds, with 750,000 Canadians now having taken Alpha -- 2.5 per cent of Canadians -- it might account for most of the increased church attendance.

Youth pastor Paul Wegenast with Epic Ministries, based out of old St. Paul's United in the Beltline, says youth are returning to prayer and faith-based relationships, but they are still very wary of organized religion.

"Obviously, like it says in (the Old Testament book) Ecclesiastes, 'There's nothing new under the sun.' But there's doing the same things in new ways," Wegenast says.

"The challenge is to keep it simple, to keep relationship and trust at the centre, and not, 'line up, do this and you're in.' Because whenever policy and structure become the centre, faith starts to become hollow."

Wegenast says there have already been radical changes in youth religiosity, with more to come.

"Twenty years ago, if you showed up in church with tattoos and nose rings, you were a pagan going to hell. Today, the question is, 'Where are you in your heart? Are you in a humble place before God?' " he says.

Wegenast admits any genuine revival is going to result in behavioural change. American evangelical pollster George Barna has pointed out the lack of any discernible difference between Christians and non-Christians when it comes to moral indicators like divorce rates. Wegenast agrees that "repentance" is a necessary indicator.

"But if you go into a church, and a girl has her belly-button showing, it doesn't mean she isn't learning modesty," Wegenast says.

"Bare midriffs are part of the culture she's coming from, and she's in process. If she's seeking a real relationship with the Wholly-Righteous-Above-Me God, you're going to see real changes in her behaviour. Real repentance.

"But it's not going to look like it did."