Another Way of Stating the Problem
Exerpted from ChristianPost.com interview with Jim Shaddix, Senior Pastor of Riverside Baptist Church in Denver, Colo. –
Young people, he believes, are not opposed to hymns. In fact, they sing revisions of hymnals sung by contemporary artists such as Chris Tomlin and Matt Redman. And they are not opposed to the organ, or else many of them would walk out of ball games. Pastors clad in a suit and tie are also not a turnoff to the younger generation who watch late night show hosts Jay Leno and David Letterman run their monologues in a suit and tie.
Beyond the form of traditional churches and worship styles, young people, who are labeled as the future of the church, are opposed to the “fabricated Christian culture” within the traditional churches. “They’re opposed to the lifeless and heartless way we often sing those hymns,” Shaddix said at the second Baptist Identity Conference in Jackson, Tenn.
Many young adults are leaving the traditional churches they may have grown up in and searching for alternative forms, including the popular emerging church movement. Young people are not necessarily running to something, the Southern Baptist pastor highlighted. They are running away from something. And the standard answer church leaders would give to the question of what they are running from is the church form, the worship style, the traditional denominational affiliation – the tangible. But Shaddix believes the young believers are running from “lifeless Christianity.”
from my notebook 