David Kinnaman & Gabe Lyons: Good Faith—Part 1

Speak personally for a moment—when did each of you come to faith?

Lyons: I was 11.
Kinnaman: I was also really young.

So do these current dynamics feel different than 25 to 30 years ago?

Kinnaman: Yes, this feels different for us as Gen Xers, but from our data, we can trace remarkable changes. Our research shows that Christian millennials are still very committed scripturally; they just don’t know how to express that in a way that makes sense to their peers. They’re outnumbered 2 to 1, not just by people who are indifferent to Scripture, but who are hostile to Scripture—who believe it’s a book of oppression.

When Gabe and I grew up as Gen Xers, and certainly when our parents and grandparents grew up as boomers and elders, culture was more neutral—even friendly—toward Scripture. That’s the big shift. Christian practice is waning, but even more precipitous is the decline in attitudes of confidence in Scripture. People believe it’s an ancient book of fables without much to offer today. We’re able to track that shift.

Lyons: I grew up in a small town in the heart of American Christian culture. There were a lot of assumptions you could count on sharing with your neighbors. We agreed as a society about what was right and wrong, moral and immoral. That commonality has shifted.

For example, one of our charts describes how much pornography has become normalized to the new generation—

Kinnaman: Yes! We asked people to rate the moral rightness or wrongness of a list of behaviors. Overeating and not recycling were rated as “worse” sins than viewing pornography by teens and young adults. Think about that—you’re more likely to be judged by a peer for throwing a recyclable in the trash than for using pornography.

Lyons: That is so different than 30 years ago. Everything’s up for grabs. That’s forcing Christians to rethink how we communicate the gospel.

But David and I are hopeful. The pressure we feel right now will purge some things we’ve long held dear but that were never part of our true faith. That’s great. Just difficult.

Tell me more about what these shifts hold for pastors.

Kinnaman: Well, another huge surprise for me was the degree to which pastors feel pressured to avoid certain topics. They feel pressure both from people outside the church and people inside. There’s a rising sense that they have to be careful how they say what they say.

It’s an interesting tension. There’s not necessarily just one audience anymore. There’s a broader community, people are coming from different backgrounds, you never know where your podcast will end up, or who will walk into a service. The world is becoming very transparent. A pastor has to contemplate a variety of audiences. That’s not easy to do. Pastors are really struggling how to work that out.

Couple that with the sentiment that faith leaders are seen as only having something morally relevant to say on issues of “spirituality,” not on culture, politics or how people live their lives. Pastors feel constrained, and the culture is ceasing to even expect them to speak on topics that intersect complicated issues of life.

Is that an informational problem for pastors or a formational one? Do they just need to learn more, or is there internal, spiritual work to be done to be prepared for such conversations?

Kinnaman: Both.

Lyons: Most pastors have good theological training around the tough issues, but how to convey that into ministry, into real relationships, into the public square—there’s a disconnect. They can teach what you ought to believe, but struggle with helping their congregations translate that belief to the wide variety of experiences and circumstances in our complex culture.

Kinnaman: You want an interesting statistic? 2 out of 5 schoolteachers in America are born again Christians.

Lyons: Think about that. It’s crazy. The church is frustrated there’s not prayer in schools, but they’re not seeing it right—almost half of our teachers are bringing their faith quietly into class every day. It’s not a public moment, but it’s who they are. But do pastors know how to support them strategically?

Pastors understand the social consequences of speaking to some of the difficult topics in our culture. Our encouragement to them is to speak up on these things, and demonstrate a loving way to talk about how our belief can lovingly be expressed without giving up what makes it our belief. The people in our churches want that.

In part 2 of the interview, Kinnaman and Lyons talk about culture wars, the characteristics that define evangelicals, and a threefold path for becoming “irrelevant” and “extreme” in the ways Jesus was irrelevant and extreme.

Paul J. Pastor
Paul J. Pastorhttp://PaulJPastor.com

Paul J. Pastor is editor-at-large of Outreach, senior acquisitions editor for Zondervan, and author of several books. He lives in Oregon.

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