The Barna Group, a non-profit Christian research organization just released this report: A New Generation Expresses its Skepticism and Frustration with Christianity. From the report:

When young people were asked to identify their impressions of Christianity, one of the common themes was “Christianity is changed from what it used to be” and “Christianity in today’s society no longer looks like Jesus.” These comments were the most frequent unprompted images that young people called to mind, mentioned by one-quarter of both young non-Christians (23%) and born again Christians (22%).

Kinnaman explained, “That’s where the term ‘unChristian’ came from. Young people are very candid. In our interviews, we kept encountering young people – both those inside the church and outside of it – who said that something was broken in the present-day expression of Christianity. Their perceptions about Christianity were not always accurate, but what surprised me was not only the severity of their frustration with Christians, but also how frequently young born again Christians expressed some of the very same comments as young non-Christians.”

…

David Kinnaman, who is a 12-year-veteran of the Barna team, pointed out some of the unexpected findings of the research. “Going into this three-year project, I assumed that people’s perceptions were generally soft, based on misinformation, and would gradually morph into more traditional views. But then, as we probed why young people had come to such conclusions, I was surprised how much their perceptions were rooted in specific stories and personal interactions with Christians and in churches. When they labeled Christians as judgmental this was not merely spiritual defensiveness. It was frequently the result of truly ‘unChristian’ experiences. We discovered that the descriptions that young people offered of Christianity were more thoughtful, nuanced, and experiential than expected.”

It’s sad that after all this striving, all this effort over the last decades to be “cool, hip and relevant”, that many church leaders are deeply frustrated and unable to understand why when the answer is right there in the sentence – “their perceptions were rooted in specific stories and personal interactions with Christians and in churches…It was frequently the result of truly ‘unChristian’ experiences”. I’m sure it’s tempting for them to just pass it off as the “end times” or throw up their hands and just bemoan the ungodly, callous, jaded, cynical, video-game-drugged “youth of today”. It’s hard to look into the mirror and start to grapple with the facts:

• that demographically-driven, toothless, uninformed, repetitious, self-referential pablum has become the standard of modern church worship, teaching and communal life;
• that the church leadership’s idolatrous embrace of media and political power has corrupted and compromised their mission to spread the gospel;
• that holding on to theological dinosaurs like literal creationism, end-times fantasies, and anti-homosexuality, combined with wide-spread ignorance of church and world history, are pushing the church into the fringes with the other loonies who seem unable to seriously grapple with basic scientific and historical reality;
• that the church has built it’s own airless and pale imitation of modern culture in a herculean attempt to simultaneously attract secular people while dulling all of the raw, passionate, edgy, sensual or authentic parts into a bland smoothie that won’t offend career churchgoers;
• that the church has chosen arrogant and suffocating isolation from the broken and unlovable in favor of idolizing the photogenic and the successful and the conforming.

The Church will not, and cannot, die because the Church is the body of Christ who is risen — invisible, world-wide, laboring with those who labor, mourning with those who mourn, loving the unlovable. But I don’t see any guarantees in there for churchgoers. Christ said “unless a seed falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies it produces much fruit.” The tectonic shift in the American church isn’t coming – it’s here – and it’s going to be a painful and prolonged death for the traditional Western church. God willing, that death will produce new fruit, new life.