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Want to Reach the Next Generation? Love the Church (Part II)

In this second part of last week’s editorial, we will read of three theological “marriages” we must have as we strive to disciple the younger generation in the faith. Central to each of them is the Church, for it is God’s blueprint for how Christians mature and grow up into Christ, as we have seen in Ephesians 4.

 

May this encourage us tie our walk, our mission and our Gospel of Christ to the church as we seek to glorify God by being and making disciples, especially those of the next generation, of Jesus Christ.         

Pastor Luwin Wong

 
1. The Church and Embodiment

We must marry our theological anthropology to a rich ecclesiology. People often don’t know it, but they need the church. Every one of us has a deep and enduring problem — we crave rich community. However, the cultural air we breathe teaches us to distrust God’s answer to our craving.

 

Like a waiter who serves diners, faithful Christian evangelism persuades people to eat the best dish on the menu, even one that might look unappetising at first glance. We befriend lonely neighbours and invite them into the communion of the saints. We counsel emerging adults hungry for wisdom and connect them to mothers and fathers in the faith. We embrace friends who feel spiritually dirty and pour the waters of baptism on them. We walk with isolated people looking for an embodied faith and bring them to the Lord’s table in the context of the local church. We challenge unanchored souls looking for purpose and sweep them up into the mission of God’s people.

 

Out of all the options on the menu, we point them to the church.

 

2. The Church and Mission

In an age of spiritual decline, we must marry our missiology to our ecclesiology. I believe there are essential tenets of the church to which Christians must commit themselves to see the gospel compel people to faith. These tenets flow out of the scriptural pattern and confessional belief that outside the church “there is no ordinary possibility of salvation” (Westminster Confession of Faith 25.2). The primary place where God works in the world is in and through his church, through which Christ “preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near” (Eph. 2:17).

 

In our desire to reach the next generation, Christians mustn’t reinvent the church or replace the church; we must cling to the church’s blueprint given to us by God in Scripture. If we’re honest, plenty of us are embarrassed by the church’s failures. However, when a kitchen knife is dull, we don’t abandon knives altogether. We sharpen it.

 

While distrust of authority and power is at an all-time high, let’s educate, rigorously train, and solemnly ordain our elders and deacons. While many claim that truth changes with the times, let’s devote ourselves to the apostles’ teachings as our unmoving foundation. In an age when celebrity pastors have illegitimately become quasi bishops through the worldly accumulation of power, let’s submit to the church’s accountability structures and decision-making processes. In a time when Christian influencers determine orthodoxy in blogosphere councils, let’s compassionately embrace the church’s creeds and confessions. The church still can, and must, be the church.

 

Christians mustn’t see the church as tangential to the spiritual growth of the next generation but as central to it. This holds true not only scripturally but also empirically. According to Barna’s report on Gen Z, a deep involvement in the church is an essential ingredient in the lives of resilient Gen Z disciples. While Barna’s data showed there wasn’t a drastic difference between a habitual churchgoing Christian and a resilient disciple at the level of his or her “cognitive understandings of the Christian faith,” the most significant difference between those two groups was a deep, personal connection with their church communities. Spiritual depths are found in the depths of the church.

 

3. The Church and Christ

Most importantly, we must behold Jesus’s marriage to the church. Jesus loves the church and delights to use it. The plan to centre the church in the future of the Christian faith might sound absurd, but we plan to point the next generation to the church because this is Jesus’s plan.

 

In a culture that sees the church as a stronghold of hypocrisy, 1 Timothy tells us it’s a “pillar and buttress of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15). While it feels like the church is falling apart, Jesus says, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18). Though many see no future for the church, Ephesians tells us that God’s plan for the church is eternal (Eph. 3:10–11). When the world claims to love Jesus but hates the church, God tells us, “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (5:25). Though the church needs a makeover, Jesus will “present the church to himself in splendour, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish” (v. 27).

 

In this day and age, we’re invested in the church because God has already invested in his church, “not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ” (1 Pet. 1:18–19). God has made the church his home (Eph. 2:22) and is working all things to its benefit (1:22). The church is a central part of God’s future plan, and so it must be a part of ours, no matter how post-Christian our culture might become.

 

(1) Cyril Chavis Jr. (2024, October 22). Want to Reach the Next Generation? Love the Church. The Gospel Coalition https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/reach-generation-love-church/

 

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