Antifragile Ministry

Each year at the Presbyterian Church in America's (PCA) General Assembly a group of younger pastors gather for the annual Next Generation Forum, which creates a space for rising leaders in the church to talk about the issues facing the PCA and the church more broadly. We are honored to publish the talks presented each year. Today we are running Robert Hasler's remarks. We published Derek Rishmawy's yesterday.

The subject of tonight’s event is addressing the question of what the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) can and might do about the challenge of generational turnover. Of course, that challenge includes the passing of the torch from Boomers to Gen Xers and Millennials as well as reaching new generations of men and women with the Gospel. 

Where I want to start, however, is by reminding us that ours is not the only institution facing down the uncertainty of generational turnover. All throughout America, institutions of every sort are bracing themselves for the fallout.

With that in mind, I want to frame my talk by asserting what I believe are twin realities.

First, that the PCA is already grappling with the challenges of generational turnover and that it is no small contributor to the restlessness we feel as a church right now.

The second is that we have no more idea of what will happen when the Boomers, by force of nature, finally pass on the torch of ecclesial governorship than what will happen when they no longer wield the same influence in politics, markets, and the culture. If what we feel now is any indicator, all we might be able to say with certainty is that the future has never felt so uncertain. 

As I prepared my remarks, the greatest temptation was to try and offer some all-encompassing diagnostic that would explain these generational fault lines and illuminate the future for us. I’ve tried, instead, to internalize the lesson I learned from my old seminary professor, Dr. Jack Collins: I am not a prophet and I’d be crazy for wanting to be.

But that won’t stop me from making some educated guesses about what the future landscape of ministry might look like, and I think that starts by accounting for two key trends in the broader culture. 

First of all, we know that the U.S. fertility rate is well below replacement level. People in America have not – and are not – having as many children as previous generations. That a declining population will have to be counteracted either by massive reforms in the economy or through higher levels of immigration in a country already fraught with populist sentiment raises questions and concerns that go far beyond technical solutions; they inspire existential questions of national identity.

This is not so different from what we face in the PCA. In staring down the challenge of losing a large percentage of our membership roles as our fathers and mothers in the faith ramp back their involvement and eventually pass on to glory, we face immediate questions of resourcing and leadership which in turn inspire the kind of existential wrestling that leads to questions like, “What kind of PCA do we want to be?”

Secondly, there’s also the matter of the so-called “vibe shift” — or what some people call Gen Z’s seemingly higher appreciation for religion broadly and Christianity in particular. While I think the vibe shift is real, it remains a far cry from the kind of national “revival” we heard so much about in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination. There’s also the question of whether the vibe shift has a Roman or Eastern flavor to it. 

I suspect a lot of you here, like myself, have anecdotal evidence that something is going on. The data gives the story a slightly different shape. My best read of it is the precipitous climb of the “nones” has reached its zenith, for now at least; Gen Z is probably attending church at higher frequencies than previous generations; and that church is far more likely to be nondenominational than anything else.

As I’ve thought about these trends in my own ministry context, I’ve come to subdivide the challenge of generation turnover into three distinct but interrelated challenges – challenges I think we’ll have to face in our individual ministries and as a denomination. 

Those three challenges are a resource challenge, a leadership challenge, and an evangelism and discipleship challenge, and they’ll be a roadmap of sorts for the rest of my talk.

The Resource Problem

The first challenge that the generation turnover poses for our denomination is a resource challenge. Now, there’s a very conventional and perfectly legitimate way to think about the resource problem, and that’s to focus on finances and manpower and addressing possible shortages in both. But let me offer another way to think about the resource problem. 

Like I said before, I don’t think we can really predict how extensive the disruption caused by generational turnover will be. Interrelated contractions in the economy and in population pose civilizational challenges that extend far beyond the doors of our churches and the pocketbooks of our members. 

So, let’s just suppose it’s way more disruptive than anything we can imagine. At the expense of sounding overdramatic, what if the level of freedom, prosperity, and stability we enjoy today isn’t permanent or inevitable? After all, “there is a time for everything,” Ecclesiastes reminds us. 

Now, I could be wrong. Maybe in the face of an even larger, more existential, social, and political conflagration than anything we’ve experienced in our recent history our civil authorities will learn from their past errors and lead with prudence over ideology, Americans of all stripes will link arms, and everyone will overcome their individual passions and prejudices for the sake of the common good. 

But what if that doesn’t happen? What if instead we see things that will make us pine for the good ole’ days of 2020?

Let me put it this way: We can’t limit ourselves to thinking about the resource challenge as only a drop in giving or volunteers without taking too many ancillary social and political conditions for granted. History hasn’t stopped. We must recognize that the benefits and privileges churches have historically enjoyed under an older political consensus could radically change under a new one. What would you do, for example, if you and your elders and deacons woke up and suddenly had no access to your church bank accounts because you transgressed the new cultural orthodoxy by preaching biblical truth? How would you keep diaconate resources flowing to those who needed them? Is your church resilient enough to keep ministry going when your lease at the school or your agreement with the campus administrators is torn up, or your tax-exempt status revoked? How would accounting for that kind of contingency change, not just your budget, but your whole philosophy of ministry resources?

I’m not trying to be a doomer. I’m simply trying to convey that there are resource challenges and there are resource challenges; and we have to be ready for both, even if preparing for the latter feels a bit unsavory. “Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves,” our Lord says. 

Ask yourself: What is your church doing right now to be resilient enough to weather a significant resource challenge caused by generational turnover, even if we don’t feel its full effects for 25 or 50 years from now?

The Leadership Challenge

The second challenge that comes with generational turnover is a leadership challenge. Again, I believe this is something we’re already experiencing and it goes far beyond the sort of friction caused by different groups in the PCA vying for leadership roles in churches, presbyteries, and permanent committees. 

I’m talking about the challenge of facing new paradigms of pastoral leadership that are emerging with this generational handoff. Often, evangelicals adopt and defend these paradigms on the basis that they are corrections from the perceived errors of older generations and so meet the demands of Zoomers. 

The most popular fad right now is an evolution in what I’ve heard described as a kind of “guru” model of pastoral leadership. It’s a newer version of the evangelical leadership style supercharged by a new technological landscape where pastors are not so much expected to offer a regular foretaste of heavenly life through the ministry of Word and Sacrament as they are supposed to participate as one more voice among a host of evangelical leaders who provide unimpeachable solutions for emotional, spiritual, intellectual, vocational, and (unfortunately, we’ve all heard the Mark Driscoll clips) sexual wholeness.

For better or worse, many in younger generations believe legacy evangelical institutions and leaders proved themselves anemic throughout the controversies of the last ten years. Some are gravitating towards “guru” pastors who will tell them with “Thus saith the Lord” certainty not just what the Scriptures say about the magistrate’s divinely ordered office, but also things like who you should vote for (or, at least, who not to vote for); not just that it is the parents' duty to train up their children in the fear and admonition of the Lord, but also exactly what kind of school you should send your kid to; not just what godly womanhood looks like, but that you have a responsibility to undo the nineteenth amendment.

How did we get here? As we all know, it’s not that the subject of politics, education, or gender are totally beyond the scope of ordinary ministry. But I think because evangelicalism already suffers from poorly distinguishing the church from other kinds of institutions, and as those other kinds of institutions that would normally address those subjects have suffered or betrayed their own core mission, it’s the church that’s been put in this position of picking up the slack. 

Today, younger generations, for better or worse, expect their pastor to have answers to these questions and more, and plenty of less responsible men have taken advantage of the market demand to peddle their own personal or political agendas. 

Now, what I find personally striking about this new development in pastoral leadership is that it’s actually quite old. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that on this point modern evangelicalism has “horseshoe’d” so hard that it’s become a kind of uniquely American form of Roman Catholicism – a simple, but not ordinary form of Christianity where adherents participate in a strange “new way to do church” all the while “guru” leaders who wield bishop-like power issue non-negotiable edicts telling you how to think and what to do about the most pressing matters.

As pastors and elders in the PCA, we have the unique challenge of pointing people to a different, uniquely Protestant way of pastoral leadership and about the Christian faith – leading people toward a form of Christianity that is ordinary, but not simple. 

It is ordinary because our “way of doing church” continues to center the priorities we find in the early church of Acts 2: word, prayer, and sacrament within the embodied, covenant community of God’s people. But it is also not simple, because we believe Christians are called to something quite amazing, something extraordinary even, something I think we might take for granted sometimes: disciplined lives of ongoing maturity into the image of our Savior.

We, as pastors and elders, have to lead people to understand that there is no shortcut to the good life nor any way to offshore the working out of their sanctification. 

And that will require confident, bold preaching concerning the things the Scriptures principally teach. We have to be bolder about God, bolder about man, bolder about sin, bolder about the Gospel, bolder about worship, and bolder about the duties required of man. But also bolder to lead men and women to work out for themselves those things Scripture leaves to individual conscience. 

That’s our calling. And it is not one which we can afford to be ambivalent about. Our flocks, empowered by the indwelling Holy Spirit, and ministered to through a life of embodied participation in the local church, still have to do the hard work themselves – to pattern their thoughts after God’s thoughts, to grow in wisdom, and act for the good of others and for the glory of God in all the unique circumstances of their lives. 

The Evangelism and Discipleship Challenge

Finally, I want to end with the evangelism and discipleship challenge. Here, I want to try and offer one reading on what’s going on with public sentiment among younger generations towards religion broadly and Christianity in particular. 

I think it’s fair to say that most of our evangelism and discipleship resources of the last few decades have been oriented towards a “spiritual-not-religious” audience of upwardly-mobile, young professionals who were stakeholders in a globalized, small-l liberal, world order. These were de-churched, individually-minded people who, despite their hangups with organized religion, largely wished to retain its moral and ethical framework even if it took the work of a good apologist to show them that.

It was Tim Keller who so excellently exposed their hypocrisy in The Reason for God: You can choose to personally value things like justice and toleration and reject the worldview upon which they’re built, Keller preached, but there’s no integrity in that.   

I think our challenge will be adapting the resources we’ve inherited to reach a completely new generation with completely different ideological assumptions about the world and their place in it. 

Whereas the “spiritual-not-religious” were primarily fascinated with Christianity as a means of preserving what they liked about the current world order, I want to suggest to you that our future might be one of “religious-not-spiritual” men and women (and men in particular) fascinated with Christianity because of its potential to fix what they perceive are modern liberalism’s failures.

Just a couple months ago, The New York Times reported more and more people are finding themselves attracted to the idea of concrete, religious rituals to combat their sense of loneliness and detachment. Ross Douthat, in his new book, suggests the folks who at first embraced a choose-your-own-adventure spiritualism, mixing and matching spiritual practices from a diverse array of religious traditions, are exhausted and might be ready to accept the idea that the way to truth and wholeness means submitting your individual identity to a single, coherent religious tradition and community that’s bigger than yourself.

This is what I’m encountering in my ministry context, especially in the Army. And more and more, I’m noticing a subtle but important distinction in the way seekers and skeptics are framing their questions. 

Whereas the “spiritual-not-religious” were drawn by the prospect of achieving personal moral integrity; the “religious-not-spiritual” are far more interested in Christianity’s prospects for civilizational integrity and renewal. 

And it manifests itself in two different ways. Elite-aligned individuals are inclined to Roman Catholicism, its aesthetics, and the lure of something that, at least from what they’re told, is much older, more stable, and therefore more capable of resisting modernity and postmodernity than anything Protestantism can offer. 

At the same time, there is the more populist form embodied in the aspirational message of Charlie Kirk who included going to church alongside getting married and having kids as essential responsibilities for anyone serious about making America great again. Many of these folks are naturally inclined to the low-church, nondenominational expressions of Protestantism.

And the question that I’m wrestling with is simply this: How come they’re not coming to us?

Two quick thoughts and then I’ll wrap up. 

If I could be so bold, I think elite expressions of evangelicalism (and the PCA, insofar as we swim in those waters) tend to treat the stereotypical Zoomer who walks through the doors of a church for what I’ve called “civilizational” motivations with far more cynicism than they deserve. I heard Glen Scrivener talk about this recently on a podcast and I think it’s brilliant because he perfectly encapsulated what I’ve come across.

None of us, I suspect, would ever be as suspicious of the person — the addict or the criminal — whose life is crumbling around them and walks through the doors of the church because he or she believes Christianity can “fix” them. Yet, we seem to keep at arm’s length the person who expresses the exact same sentiment only about Christianity having the moral infrastructure to “fix” their society. My sense is that too many in our tribe automatically assume such a sentiment must come from a dangerous place of triumphalism when oftentimes it reflects a poignant discovery about secularism’s empty promises and the humble acceptance of man’s powerlessness in the face of such overwhelming brokenness. 

But here’s the second thought: With the willingness to receive these folks comes the responsibility of straightforward and long-suffering discipleship. 

We must be willing to extend far more grace even with the conviction to say, as I think Keller would, that you can choose to commit yourself to the defense and preservation of the West’s fundamentally Christian ethos, and not embrace the plain teaching of Scripture, or be personally humbled by an encounter with the living God, but there’s no integrity in that. 

Conclusion

Just yesterday I preached from Psalm 11 to our small church plant in Abilene, and it struck me afterwards how much the passage speaks to this challenge in particular.

“If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” This is the question posed to David — one that expresses the sense of hopelessness in the face of physical, emotional, moral, spiritual, and, yes, civilizational uncertainty. It’s not that dissimilar to the question Gen Z is asking.

How does David respond? He starts by orienting his heart to God’s heavenly throne. He finds refuge in God and in the memory of God’s righteous judgement on the wicked. God has not been blind to injustice and wickedness in the past. Surely, he is not blind to it in our world today.

Importantly, Psalm 11 doesn’t besmirch utilitarian motivations for seeking refuge in God. It just won’t let you stop there. Listen to the last verse: “For the Lord is righteous, he loves righteous deeds, the upright shall see his face.”

Psalm 11 directs us past the important desire for earthly safety and justice and peace and order and to that which all things are properly ordered — to the ultimate telos of human life itself: the beatific vision, to see our God and Maker face to face, without a veil, and to enjoy him forever. 

If we preach that. If we confess that. If we lead people to that, regardless of whatever generational turnover may bring us, I have no doubt the PCA of the future will be as strong as ever.