Living Open Source

One of the resources I picked up at the recent Baptist Assembly was the much anticipated Ctrl Alt Del - Rebooting church for young adults. It is a resource that has been put together by a group of Young Baptist Leaders which aims to help our churches work out why there are so few young adults in church and how church might need reconfiguring, rebooting or something else to make them more relevant.

One thing I learnt at the assembly this year is that apparently I am no longer a young adult. People up on stage kept referring to the under 35s. So now I’m having therapy for a mid-life crisis. But enough of me, and back to the rebooting of church.

Ctrl Alt Del highlights some of the issues facing young adults today and tries to suggest ways in which the life of a church might better meet these needs. It also asks particular questions about the relevance of worship and preaching for the younger generation. This is a helpful resource which doesn’t pretend to offer any easy answers. Though I can’t help thinking that a group of leaders old or young is unlikely to yield such generic observations about the lives of others.

We can get a bit disillusioned when we look at church these days. Especially when you are relatively young, you find yourself in the minority and the church in general is slow to change or respond. The mindset of those over 50 is different to the under 30s, there is no getting away from it, though the generational gap is not confined to how old you are. It is more complicated than that. The challenge to create a church community that embraces all is severely underestimated.

I read another interesting book by Don Tapscott over the summer, called Growing Up Digital. It made me realise that the generation gap we see in church is not something that is confined to church. In fact Tapscott predicts such a chasm in society, in his work nearly 10 years ago. He recognised the emergence of a new generation with a mindset totally different to that of previous generations. His analysis focused on how technology has encouraged the emergence of a generation capable of greater self-expression, interaction and discovery when compared to the numerically dominant baby-boom generation. The latter currently hold power in our society (and in our churches), and having grown up on a diet of TV they tend towards learning through a broadcast mode. Perhaps that is why you get that initial distrust of “getting into groups” in church and why they prefer those good old fashioned preachers!

But trouble has been brewing. Tapscott observed even 10 years ago that:

“As n-gen culture is extended into society every institution will have to change.”

and his prediction that those n-geners,

”who meet resistance will decide that the main way to fight the status quo is to abandon it and create their own enterprise”

has huge implications for church life. And you can see already how this prophecy has come true in church life.

Can church be rebooted? Or does it need an upgrade? Dual-core perhaps?

Sorry for all the computer metaphors. I suppose I could also say that the title “Ctrl Alt Del” for the resoucre is also a bit of an out dated metaphor. It has been a while since computers needed such brutal intervention. You don’t even need to reboot to install new drivers these days and my kids don’t know what Ctrl Alt Del is, just like they have never seen a record player.

What do you think the issues are?

Bibliography:

Tapscott, D. (1998) Growing up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation USA:McGraw-Hill