Editor's note: When I was visiting churches, many people mentioned the current situation of fewer young people in the church. Some people believe that young people born after 1990 or 2000 are living in the Internet era, and are deeply influenced by postmodernism. Besides, many of them are the only child in their families. In their minds, traditional authority and collectivism have been deconstructed, and the traditional way of delivering sermons is not enough to attract them. Some pastors also pointed out that nowadays, with the pressure of work, it is difficult for young people to find time to go to church. There are also people who think that because of the variety of recreational activities, church activities are relatively boring for people, and their appeal to young people is greatly reduced.
Why do young people stop going to church? How do young people perceive the Christian faith? Brother W, an admirer of the Christian faith who was born in 1998, expressed his views.
Brother W is currently working in Shanghai. He came into contact with the Lord five years ago and went to the church for a period of time to meet periodically. He is still in communication with some pastors. However, after several years of contact, he still positions himself as an admirer, believing that he has not yet established a true Christian faith.
As far as he is concerned, he wants to believe, but unfortunately, the time is not right yet. After attending the church meeting several times, he didn’t feel touched. After a long period of time, he felt that it was just a waste of time, and gradually stopped going to the church.
In his view, the way people get to know Christianity at present is mainly through the church and some classical theological works. In the Sunday sermon of the church, the words shared by the pastors are empty for him as a person with no basis for faith and most of the time, these contents can only be shared as stories, and it is difficult to touch his heart.
He said he had attended many services at the church over the years and had been involved in ministry for some time. He believes that the church's content is basically around the core themes of love, sin, and salvation, but in his view, it is more of a theology-based theory with weak connections to modern society, so it is difficult to understand these teachings in a biblical context.
Brother W was on the one hand seeking the connections between the sermons and his personal life, hoping to explain his own life and state, and on the other hand pursuing some transcendent parts of faith above daily life.
Looking back on his initial contact with faith in the Lord, he mentioned that he had been thinking about a question, that is, is there any way a person can get rid of the bondage of secular values? Just like whether there is anything else to hold on to in the middle of the ocean. It was at this time that someone shared the Gospel message with him. So he went into the church to give it a try.
After the actual contact with the Christian faith, he found that Christianity is more about daily life, and he expected it to be a spiritual abstract content or a direction outside of life. "Not into the daily life, but out of the daily life, like the sense of medieval monasteries."
In his view, faith is a very pure thing, and many things in life are a pollution to it. He further explained, "What I'm looking for is a holier, or purer faith. But when this falls into life, it will be troubled by all kinds of trifles and complications. Reality affects your choice of faith."
Brother W has a yearning for the transcendence of the Christian faith. He said that in life, many people who believe in the Lord just regard faith only as a part of their life, or a way to achieve the life they want or their desires, with obvious utilitarian color. But when he found that some people in the church were fully committed to the Lord, he was touched, and that was part of the reason he wanted to continue learning about the Christian faith.
He believes that the church today must have some interpretation of the Bible that is in line with the times and more relevant to people's real lives. In addition, contemporary Christian leaders should respond to some of the controversial or discussible issues and phenomena of our time. "The church can't just entertain itself behind closed doors, it needs to understand what the young people of this era need, and can't always try to let the young people follow their own ways, otherwise the church will fall behind the times, and Christianity will gradually be marginalized."
Historically, religious beliefs were the core of people's lives before, but after the Renaissance, traditional religious beliefs were gradually deconstructed. The new faith, he argues, should be an ideology. For example, Christianity is about a kind of personalized and transcendent love and salvation, and these are gradually replaced by concepts, and now people tend to pursue such conceptual things, such as goodness, love, equality, justice, and so on, and rarely consider the personalized faith.
Brother W thinks that the reason that he has not yet believed is that faith is not something that a person can take the initiative to build, but an environment in which one lives. For him, preaching may play little role in the establishment of faith. Perhaps true faith can only be established after experiencing some ups and downs, and some collapse and destruction of existing ideas.
- Edited by Karen Luo, translated by Nicolas Cao
