Reaching the Millennials: An Interview with Thom Rainer, Again

 Reaching the Millennials: An Interview with Thom Rainer from Preaching Magazine, Vol. 27 No. 4

Preaching: You mentioned church starts. It seems that a lot of the best and brightest young ministers coming along are saying, "I'm not going to inherit the problems of a previous generation of churches. We're starting fresh with new churches."

Rainer: You're absolutely right. I have one son of my three who is involved in a church plant. These millennials, these young adults, many of them are frustrated with church as usual, with local church actions, business and what they perceive as irrelevancy. So they're starting churches.

Yet I would have a challenge for some millennials as well. Keep planting churches, have that attitude; but we've got about 400,000 established churches in the United States that we cannot give up on. I would say not only start churches, but prayerfully go into these churches to try to revolutionize them even if it takes a lifetime of ministry, because we're not planting enough churches to sustain the fall off of the established churches. I hope we'll see both groups rise up, more church planters and more church people as millennial leaders going to established churches to turn them around [CCS, underline added].

Reaching the Millennials: An Interview with Thom Rainer

 Reaching the Millennials: An Interview with Thom Rainer from Preaching Magazine, Vol. 27 No. 4

Preaching: You mentioned that probably as many as 85 percent of this generation are not Christian. You've taught evangelism; you are an evangelist yourself in terms of sharing the gospel. How do churches go about seeking to evangelize the millennial generation?

Rainer: Here's the irony: This is the smallest generation of Christians, we think, in America's history. We could begin to lament that reality and say there's absolutely no hope. The irony is that this is the greatest opportunity to evangelize [CCS, underline added].

Benchmarking Spiritual Church Growth Via Community Impact

"Another mark of spiritual church growth is community impact. Some remarkable results followed the ministry of the early church. In Acts 4, Peter and John are in the hands of the authorities as a result of their preaching and healing ministry. After the trial the writer declares that these authorities "took knowledge of them, that they had been with Jesus." There stood the man who had been healed. The miracle was evident. . . . If we imagine that a spiritual impact on a community will always involve social acceptance, we are mistaken. But whatever the response, we must not be satisfied until the neighborhood around us becomes aware of our presence, and as a result, recognizes our relationship to the living Jesus Christ" (Harold L. Longenecker, Building Town and Country Churches, 83).

Longenecker provides a couple benchmarks for ascertaining spiritual growth in a local church:

1. Find out if "the neighborhood around [the local church] becomes aware of [their] presence,"
2. Find out if the neighborhood "recognizes [the local church's] relationship to the living Jesus Christ."

In order to know these, a local church must:

1. Proclaim Jesus to the neighborhood, and--
2. Then listen to the neighborhood.

Christian Living: Joyful and Enthusiastic

Ned B. Stonehouse quoting J. Gresham Machen in the biographical-memoir J. Gresham Machen:

Instead of stifling the pleasures afforded by the acquisition of knowledge or by the appreciation of what is beautiful, let us accept these pleasures as the gifts of a heavenly Father. Instead of obliterating the distinction between the Kingdom and the world, or on the other hand withdrawing from the world into a sort of modernized intellectual monasticism, let us go forth joyfully, enthusiastically to make the world subject to God [underline CCS] (187).

Machen got it right: Christians need to be joyful and enthusiastic as they make the world subject to God, i.e., as they fulfill the Great Commission.

Christian Witness

"The one basic mistake in Christianity is to regard Jesus as someone who lived and died, and whose life we study and whose story we read. Jesus is not a figure in a book. He is a living presence, and the Christian is the man whose whole life is a witness to the fact that he knows and has met the Risen Lord" (William Barclay, The Acts of the Apostles, 10-11).

Fishing for Men

Charles Spurgeon on fishing for men: "I sometimes hear of persons getting very angry after a gospel sermon, and I say to myself, "I am not sorry for it." Sometimes when we are fishing the fish gets the hook into its mouth. He pulls hard at the line; if he were dead, he would not; but he is a live fish, worth the getting; and though he runs away for a while, with the hook in his jaws, he cannot escape. His very wriggling and his anger show that he has got the hook, and the hook has got him. Have the landing-net ready; we shall land him by and by. Give him more line; let him spend his strength, and then we will land him, and he shall belong to Christ forever" (Spurgeon's Sermon Illustrations, 56).

Reminds me that we all go to Christ kicking and screaming, wriggling and flopping. There is no other way, for we are, after all, saved by grace. At first, we are angry, we don't like the gospel and we don't like gospel sermons. But then God regenerates us, he gives us a new heart and new desires. Thus, the gospel becomes sweet to us, gospel sermons become sweet to us. Our anger is changed to joy unspeakable.

Gospel

C. H. Spurgeon. Excellent, as always!

"If you stand half a mile off from a man and throw the Gospel at him you will miss him, but if you go close to him and lay hold upon him, giving him a hearty grip of the hand, and show that you have an affection for him, you will, by God's blessing, lead him in the right way."

Unchurched America

The book cited below was originally published in 2001. I don't know whether or not the statistics have remained the same. I have read that 9-11 temporarily bumped-up these type of statistics. My hunch is that in the past handful of years that throttling has subsided. However, either way, the statistics cited below are disconcerting.

Only 41 percent of Americans attend church services on a typical weekend [Barna Research Online, 1999]. Each new generation becomes increasingly unchurched. . . . Our recent research on the younger generation, the bridgers (born 1977 to 1994), indicates that only 4 percent of the teenagers understand the gospel and have accepted Christ, even if they attend church. Of the entire bridger generation, less than 30 percent attend church. America is clearly becoming less Christian, less evangelized, and less churched. Yet too many of those in our churches seem oblivious to this reality. . . . The percentage of adults attending church on a given weekend in 1999 was the same level it was in 1986.

Despite a plethora of resources on reaching those who do not attend church, the population of the unchurched in America continues to increase. Noted one Christian researcher, "At the same time that in America a multitude of new churches are being launched, and the mass media continues to report on the impact of megachurches, the number of unchurched adults is also on the rise." . . . And as noted earlier, only one person is reached for Christ for every 85 church members in America" (Thom S. Rainer, Surprising Insights from the Unchurched and Proven Ways to Reach Them, 33-35).

 The implications are disturbing for said statistics. The "unchurched adults" of the "bridger generation" are a growing, rising, and flourishing segment of contemporary entrepreneurs, lawyers, politicians, medical physicians, day laborers, musicians, and artists, and when they marry or cohabit they form second generation unchurched-families.

Defending Justification

Why devote so much time to defending the imputation of Christ's righteousness when there are so many unreached people groups and millions of people who have no access to the Gospel? I will mention two things. One is that over the past twenty years of leading a missions-mobilizing church I have seen with increasing clarity that teacher-based church planting and not just friendship-based church planting is crucial among peoples with no Christian history. In other words, doctrinal instruction becomes utterly crucial in planting the church.

...

The second thing I would say about the doctrine of justification and missions is that Paul develops this doctrine in the book of Romans in a way that shows it is absolutely universal in its relevance. It crosses every culture. It is not a tribal concept. He does this by building part of the doctrine out of the connection between Adam and Christ in Romans 5:12-21. For example, take only verse 19: "For as by the one man's disobedience the many were appointed sinners, so by the one man's obedience the many will be appointed righteous." This, along with the whole context, shows that what Christ came to do in his obedience was universal in its scope and significance. It is not just for the posterity of Abraham, but for the posterity of Adam--namely, everyone (John Piper, Counted Righteous in Christ, 32-33). 

First Native American Saint: Witness

You can go to USA Today to read an AP article about Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Native American saint. Kateri was beatified by Pope John Paul II and canonized by Pope Benedict XVI on 10/21/2012.

The article covers in detail that her canonization has sparked both skepticism and pride. On the one hand, "Traditional Mohawks" worry that "Kateri's sainthood could be used as a way to encourage Native Americans to eschew their ancestral values for Catholic dogma," but on the other hand, the article also cites that many don't think her sainthood is a contentious issue.

It will be interesting to see how this skepticism/pride develop in the upcoming years. I'm not Roman so I don't have a clue what is coming down the sainthood pipeline, but I would imagine that other Native Americans are slated to be beatified, canonized, et cetera by Rome in the upcoming century. I don't know the vesting particulars for someone to officially be recognized as a saint, but if the matriculation process has concluded for at least one Native American saint, then my assumption is that other Native Americans can't be very far behind. Take that with a grain of salt, it being an ill-informed assumption by an outsider of Roman Catholicism.

What I do know is this. "Traditional Mohawks" should be worried. Jesus Christ is Lord, contra the traditional-religious-mythological views of the Mohawk/Iroquois League of Nations.

Traditional Mohawks should be worried, the Lord probably will use Rome's sainthooding of Kateri to draw additional Mohawks to himself. God does, after all, use means, and church history is full of conversion stories attesting that God used godly Christians as means by which sinners were exposed to and heard the Gospel, repented and were drawn unto Christ the Redeemer (e.g., God used Saint Ambrose's ministry to prepare Augustine for conversion).

Kateri is a witness to non-Christian Mohawks, other non-Christian Native Americans, and non-Christian Americans alike. Kateri is a witness that all of them need to to stop their foolish raging (Psalm 2:1), repent of their sins, and "Kiss the Son" and put their trust in Jesus Christ (Psalm 2:12).

Great Commission: World Begun Again

"The Great Commission to the Church does not end with simply witnessing to the nations. Christ's command is that we disciple the nations—all the nations. The kingdoms of the world are to become the kingdoms of Christ. They are to be discipled, made obedient to the faith. This means that every aspect of life throughout the world is to be brought under the lordship of Jesus Christ: families, individuals, business, science, agriculture, the arts, law, education, economics, psychology, philosophy, and every other sphere of human activity. Nothing may be left out. Christ "must reign, until He has put all enemies under His feet" (1st Cor. 15:25). We have been given the responsibility of converting the entire world. . . .

"What would you say if you hired a worker, gave him detailed instructions, and all he did was to sit around wondering when the quitting bell will ring? Would you regard him as a faithful worker? Does God regard you as a faithful worker for His Kingdom? I repeat: the purpose of prophecy is ethical. It is God's assurance that history is under His control, that He is working out His eternal purposes in every event, and that His original plan for His creation will be fulfilled. He has placed us into the great war for world history, with the absolute guarantee that we will win. Even if He has to make the whole universe stand still for us (Josh. 10:12-13), the day will last long enough for us to achieve victory. Time is on our side. The Kingdom has come, and the world has begun again. Now: Get to work" (David Chilton, Paradise Restored).