The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 30 - How The Church Can Win Back Young People

Episode Date: May 15, 2018

Young people are by nature idealistic, radical, energetic, and eager for change. The church in America tries, and fails, to win them with bad rock music and corny pop culture references. Why not win them with the truth which will give them precisely the radical change they seek? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A little while ago, when I was traveling, I don't remember what city or state I was in, but I attended a local church before my flight. And it's always kind of a game of Russian roulette to go to a church out of town when you're traveling. And I guess I lost the game this time around. I walked into this church, and I knew immediately what I was in for because I noticed that the choir members, if you can call it a choir, they were all dressed in shorts and flip-flops. and everybody was talking, not just the choir, but everybody, everybody, everybody was talking. They were treating this time before church as kind of a cocktail hour, and so people were

gabbing and gossiping and carrying on. Nobody was praying. You look around, there was no prayer anywhere to be found in the church. And that's how it is in a lot of modern churches. There's always noise, always. There always has to be noise and sounds and never. silence even for a moment. At some point in recent history, we decided that a church is a place that should always be filled with noise and there must never be silence in a church. When, of course,

a church is exactly the place where you should be able to go and get some silence. There needs to be silence in church because silence facilitates mental prayer, which is something that should be happening in a church. It's part of the whole reason a church exists. Anyway, finally, church started and the choir or the jam band for Jesus, whatever it was, they played a song that sounded like a cross between kind of a 90s Disney soundtrack and maybe an easy listening favorite that you would find if you scrolled through your aunt's second generation iPod. It wasn't contemporary, it wasn't relevant, it wasn't good.

But it also wasn't traditional, and that was the whole point, because tradition is yucky. That's old. We can't have tradition. Anything that existed prior to 1967, we can't have any of that. That's all bad because it's old. Old things are bad. The singer was, the lead singer of this band was relatively talented, but he carried on like a lead singer of a band. and you got this distinct impression that he was fishing for applause,

not that he was worshipping the Lord of the universe. He wasn't, now, music and church should be bringing us all into this, you know, reverent state of awe before the sacredness, the holiness of God, right? It should be bringing, it should be this communal experience which elevates us and brings us up towards God. That's what music. That's what church music is supposed to do. It's not supposed to bring us back down to earth. It's not supposed to remind us of the culture. No, it's not supposed to do that. It's not supposed to make us stand in awe of this very talented band. It's not even, you know what, it's not even about bringing us. It's, it's not even about like bonding us with

each other, like a campfire song or something. It's all about togetherness and being together. it's not actually what church music is supposed to do. It's about bringing us all towards God. And it certainly did not succeed in doing that at all. And it seems like it wasn't designed to. And a lot of church music these days is really not designed for that. It's not trying to do that. So the pastor, when it was time for him to deliver his sermon,

he opened up with a round of jokes, which were not funny, but at least they succeeded in being unsirious. which I guess is close enough. And the sermon was jam-packed with youth slang and pop culture, and he mentioned some TV shows and Netflix. He made sports metaphors. He didn't do anything with the metaphors. He just kind of hung them out there so that we could be impressed

that he knows about these things. And the reason why, now I've, this all scene I'm depicting, I've seen things like this a million times, the reason why this one still sticks in my head, even a couple of years later is because I distinctly remember he made this reference

to angry birds. This is a couple of years ago. But even by then, this was a very dated reference. But, and so I just cringing at it, like, oh my gosh. But it did the job, I guess, of letting us know that the guy speaking

also uses smartphones. Or at least he used a smartphone at some point in the last five years. And I guess the young people in attendance were supposed to go, OMG, he totally gets us. L-O-L guys. Did you hear him talk about angry birds? Unfortunately, what was left out of his sermon was any semblance of an insight or a challenge or a truth or a call to action or a point. And about halfway in, I turned to look around at my fellow congregants. And do you know what I saw?

A lot of empty seats. A disinterested yawn echoed through the halls. And the people who were sitting in the pews, what few of them there were, they looked to be on average about 87 years old. And this was clearly everything I was witnessing from the pop culture references, the sermon, the casual dress, the music, okay, all of the irreverence, Okay, all of this was designed clearly to appeal to young people, but I looked around and it was, it looked like a nursing home. I didn't, I was, I was probably the youngest person there by about 50 years.

I'll tell you another quick story, a different church, this one closer to me. Before, beforehand, they, they, they, a giant projector screen dropped from the ceiling. and they played a rap video, a Christian rap video that had been, I guess, produced by the church youth group, and it was painful, painful. But I looked around in all the old folks in the church, and it was mostly old folks, they were all smiling. They thought it was really cute. You could tell they were really cute. They could see their grandchildren, and they thought it was the cutest thing.

As for the younger people, we were all cringing so hard that our face is hurt. You could tell we were all worried that our face would get stuck like this because that's how hard we were cringing. So one of those cringe moments where you can't even look up. You're just, you just want to shrink intuition. You're experiencing secondhand embarrassment to a degree that is just, it's causing physical anxiety in you. One more story. This one, not for me. Someone wrote to me a few weeks ago to tell me about.

the local non-denominational church that they just left because the pastor had embarked on this mission to win back young people. And this mission apparently involved introducing an electric guitar because, you know, those young people and those electric guitar, encouraging people to dress more casually at church and giving sermons on tolerance and racism and injecting again pop culture references into them as much as possible. You get the point. The point is that Christian leaders in America, church leaders, have set out to win back young people, to win back the young generation. And they certainly need to do that because the young generation is less religious, more atheistic, more secular than any generation before in American history. But in many cases, in most cases, probably they've set out to win back these lost sheep by trying to be cool and relevant and irreverent.

but all this ever succeeds in doing is impressing the aging people in the pews who ruined everything by injecting this garbage into the church in the first place. They're the ones who first decided that the experience at church should resemble your experience at a coffee shop or at a really bad rock concert. This is like my parents' generation. They're the ones who came up with all this. and so even now to this day, they're the only ones impressed by it. The young people are not. They love it. Their kids do not love it, as is clearly evident by the fact that their kids are not going to church.

And most of them have left the faith completely. Now, you can kind of understand, right? because think of what a secular young person, imagine what he would think if he was looking to give Christianity a try, and the first service he ever attended was of the type I just described. Now, when he leaves, what would he be thinking? Now, yeah, he won't be offended. So great, you didn't offend him. You didn't scare him.

Good for you. But you also didn't impact him. you didn't move him you didn't energize him you didn't give him any kind of deeper understanding of the faith at all now he went into church preparing to encounter something deep holy challenging but he probably walked out thinking like well what's all the fuss about what's all the fuss about this jesus stuff that was just like that just looked like something i could find anywhere in the culture. What was the point of that? And this is the problem with Christianity in this country, not just in our church buildings, but everywhere. It has no edge. It has no depth. It has no sense

of its own ancient and epic history. There's no sacredness to it. There's no beauty. There's no reverence. There's no pain. There's no sacrifice. All of these things that are in Christianity are not being brought out. And this is what people go to Christianity for. This is what they're expecting. This is what they want. When somebody walks, especially a young person who's never been to church,

and they walk into a church building, they don't want to see a coffee shop. They've seen a million coffee shop. They want something totally different, but they don't find it. The light of faith grows dimmer in this culture because Christianity has made, because I should say because the church, the American church, has turned Christianity into something

lame and boring. And that is a heck of an accomplishment, really, when you think about it. I mean, to make Christianity into something lame and boring, it's the least lame, the least boring thing in the universe. Yet we have managed to turn it into that. Every branch of the faith has become infected by this. Choice Hotels get you more of what you value. Here's a little tune to help you remember. Same drive, different day. Don't you wish you were getting away?

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And if we want to understand why Christianity is not winning souls and especially not winning the younger generation, then we just got to look here. The strategy has been, well, if we want to win back the sheep, if we want to win back the millennial sheep especially, then we have to make Christianity as unchristian as possible. It has to be stripped of its truth, of its sacredness, of its sacrifice, of its morality, of its tradition, of its history, of its hardships, of its joy. of its beauty of everything. And whatever's left, I mean, it's not going to engage or excite anyone, but at least it won't scare them away. That's the idea. There's even, you know, you find in some cases you have these very old churches,

these very old, beautiful churches, which do exist in America. Now, we don't have churches as old or as beautiful as what they have in Europe, but we still have very old, very beautiful churches. And sometimes what you'll find even is that, you know, the church will go through and they'll take away all the beautiful. They'll make an effort. They'll take the effort to make the church less beautiful. They'll take down the art.

They'll take everything away. And they'll try to make it less beautiful. They say to themselves, let's make church less beautiful. Yeah, because you know what? That's what's scaring people away is the beauty. I mean, this goes in everything. This is even the way that the new churches are constructed, even the architecture where they're made to look bland,

like office buildings or just like nondescript auditoriums or from the outside, it looks almost like a DMV office or something like that. I mean, this, even the architecture of churches has changed because they want, it's almost like they want to just blend in with the landscape. They want to blend in with the culture as much as possible. They don't want anyone to know that this is actually a church and that there's something different going on here. The problem is that the church is trying to appeal to the wrong aspect of youth. You know, they see that young people can tend to be irreverent and frivolous and easily distracted and in need of constant stimulation.

And so they put forward a Christianity. tailored to those qualities. But that's not the aspect of youth that the church should be trying to reach out to. Okay. Because young people are also by nature radical, idealistic, hungry for change, hungry for a challenge, revolutionary. Most of the great revolutionaries throughout history have been young people. That's no coincidence. revolutions are led by the young in every case.

You know, revolutions are never led by 50-year-olds. It's always by the young. So it should be no trouble at all to get young people excited about Christianity. They want something radical. They want something revolutionary. Well, Christianity is exactly that. They want change. Christianity can give them exactly that.

They want higher ideals to aspire to. Christianity has exactly that. They want excitement. Christianity is the most exciting thing in the universe. I mean, think about it. As Christians, we are fighting a war against the devil himself. We are advancing against the darkest forces of the universe, and we're marching with God on our side,

and all the while, all around us, on a dimension that's invisible to our mortal eyes, there are angels and demons and supernatural forces, both good and evil, and they're fighting, and they're working to defend and destroy us. And this is all happening all around it. The stakes are infinite. Our souls hang in the balance. We're standing on a battlefield right now as we speak.

We are soldiers. The Psalms say, praise be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war. That's what it says in Scripture. Trains my hands for war. This is the feeling and the attitude that our leaders and our churches should be stirring in us. This is the truth of this life and of the faith.

It's a ferocious, formidable, terrifying, joyful, beautiful, fantastic, amazing, wonderful truth. It's the truth that the scripture spends over a thousand pages trying to explain. And it's the truth that should be shouted from the rooftops of every single church in America. That's how you stop the decline of Christianity in America. That's how you attract young people by just simply telling you. them the truth. That's all. Move them. Make them feel something. Make them feel anger and fear and longing and sadness and happiness and hope and determination. All of these things give them something to aspire to. They want to change. So give them a reason to change. Give them a way to change. That's how you attract

the young people. This should be, you know, the conversation that we should be happy, in America is, you know, how do we keep the older people still invested in Christianity? How do we keep them? It should be no problem to get the young people on board. This Christianity is something that naturally appeals to them because of its militant, warring, radical nature. And as I said last week, because in it, in the faith and in Christ, you find identity. And that is the thing most of all that young people are looking for.

Identity, purpose, challenge, sacrifice. We've got this idea that sacrifice is a dirty word. Nobody wants to do it. No, that's not exactly right. People are looking for a reason to sacrifice. Now, it's not an easy thing to do, but that's the kind of message they want. And when a young person, a secular young person,

a church, that's what they're looking to hear. They're looking to hear a challenging message of sacrifice and battle, and that's what they want. It doesn't mean they're going to immediately, you know, convert, but that's what they're interested in hearing. That's the aspect of youth. That's the, that is the thing in youthful nature that we should be reaching out to and appealing to. And it should be pretty easy to do. That's how you win back to young people with the truth. And it is an incredible truth, isn't it? All right. Thanks for listening, everybody. Godspeed.