You Lost Me, by David Kinnaman

Chapter Three & Four

1. Here are some characteristics of the nomadic mindset:

- They still describe themselves as Christian. They have not disavowed Christianity but are no longer particularly committed to their faith or especially to churchgoing.

- They believe that personal involvement in a Christian community is optional. They see going to church or being with Christian friends for spiritual purposes as options, not requirements.

- The importance of faith has faded. They admit that Christianity was more important to them at some point in their past. If they describe it as important, it is on their own terms. About one-quarter (24 percent) of the young Christians we interviewed say they may be willing to return to church later in life, but it’s not particularly urgent to them.

- Most are not angry or hostile toward Christianity. They tend to find their personal history with the faith amusing, or perhaps distressing, but they are not generally angry about their past. Frustrated and disillusioned, yes— especially with Christians. Hostile, no.

- Many are spiritual experimentalists. Nomads find meaning and spiritual stimulation from a variety of activities in their lives, which sometimes include trying on other religious experiences for size.

- Review each of these 5 characteristics and share examples.

2. Here are some characteristics of the prodigal mindset:

- They feel varying levels of resentment toward Christians/Christianity. Many still have positive things to say about specific people (such as their parents), but the overall tenor of their perceptions is negative.

- They have disavowed returning to church. They feel deeply wounded by their church experience and do not plan to ever go back.

- They have moved on from Christianity. Prodigals describe themselves as “over” Christianity, saying it just does not make sense to them. Their spiritual needs, such as they sense them, are being met elsewhere.

- Their regrets, if they have them, usually center on their parents. In other words, they recognize that their faith choices have made a significant impact on their parents yet they feel as though they were compelled to de-convert.

- They feel as if they have broken out of constraints. Many prodigals feel that the Christianity they experienced kept them stuck in a box or demanded that they become someone other than their true self. They experience leaving as freedom.

- Review each of these 5 characteristics and share examples.

3. Let’s look at some of the characteristics of young exiles and their perspectives about the faith.

- Exiles are not inclined toward being separate from “the world.”

Exiles want their faith to matter. One-third of young Christians (32 percent) identified with the statement, “I want to find a way to follow Jesus that connects with the world I live in.” They long for their spiritual lives to be connected, to be whole, and to make sense.

- They are skeptical of institutions, but not wholly disengaged from them. Even while they sense God at work outside of church, not all are post-institutional in their faith. Just one-fifth of young Christians (21 percent) say that the institutional church is a difficult place for them to live out their faith. Many young exiles are infrequent participants in conventional faith expression, such as regularly attending a church worship service, but most of them remain connected in some way to a faith community.

- Young exiles sense God moving “outside the walls of the church.”

This was among the most common views of any we assessed in our research— God is moving outside the church and exiles wanted to be a part of it. As Ryan’s story at the beginning of this chapter illustrates, many young people want to participate in ministry outside of conventional forms of Christian community. We explore their perceptions more fully in later chapters, but in a nutshell, exiles are dissatisfied with a church that is a weekend event, not a movement of God’s people on mission for Christ.

- They are not disillusioned with tradition; they are frustrated with slick or shallow expressions of religion. In some of our research, we discovered a common theme to be “I want to be part of a Christian community that is more than a performance one day a week.” Similarly, a frequently expressed sentiment was they “want a more traditional faith, rather than a hip version of Christianity.”

- Exiles express a mix of concern and optimism for their peers.

This generation is certainly self-centered but they are also very communal and peer-oriented. A related concern is the feeling of loss many young Christians reported about their peers. Many described being very concerned about seeing so many of their generation leaving the church.

- They have not found faith to be instructive to their calling or gifts.

One of the recurring themes in our research with young exiles is the idea that Christianity does not have much, if anything, to say about their chosen profession or field. The ways career and calling connect to faith and church community seem to be missing pieces in the puzzle for many young exiles.

- They struggle when other Christians question their motives.

A final characteristic of these young exiles is that their fellow Christians - particularly older believers - frequently have a hard time relating to their choices and concerns. This can be the young person’s parents, but often is the friends of parents or other well-meaning Christians who can’t get their head around their unique calling. In fact, many times these young exiles end up staying under the radar, as both fellow Christians and nonbelievers often misunderstand their faith and their calling.

- Review each of these 7 characteristics and share examples.

You Lost Me, by David Kinnaman

Chapter Two

1. Let’s return to the way teens and young adults express their disconnection from the Christian community: you lost me. When someone uses this idiom, they are suggesting that something hasn’t translated, that the message has not been received. Wait, I don’t understand. You lost me. This is what many Mosaics are saying to the church. As we’ll see in this chapter, it’s not that they’re not listening; it’s that they can’t understand what we are saying.

- When and where have you experienced this with Mosaics/others?

2.  Busters learned to use technology as an ally against the Boomers’ influence and control; if they could master technology, they had a strategic advantage. Mosaics, however, have been raised with these technologies in full supply, and that reality is facilitating new patterns of learning, relating, and influencing the world, as well as changing the way they think about church and Christianity. Technological access allows them to experience and examine content originating from nonbiblical worldviews, giving them ample reasons to question the nature of truth. It generates extraordinary distractions and invites them to be less linear and logical in their thought processes. It empowers them to think as participants, not just as consumers, of media. And it makes them both more connected & more isolated than generations before.

- Where do find such connection & isolation in family & friends?

3. The second seismic cultural shift is how alienated today’s teens and young adults feel from the structures that undergird our society. We might think of alienation as very high levels of isolation from family, community, and institutions. Alienation is rooted in the massive social changes that began in the 1960s; the drama of dislocation unfolding in the Mosaic generation is taking place on a stage set by the Baby Boomers.

- What’s different now compared to the 1960s? How are young adults alienated in family, in adulthood, and in institutions?

4. There is both good news and bad news for the church with regard to young adults’ alienation from what used to be normative in our society.

The bad news is that, where congregations and parishes are structured to meet the needs of the “old normal,” it will be difficult for young people to find a meaningful place. The good news, however, is that the church is uniquely called to be the community of God— and true, authentic community banishes isolation, loneliness, and alienation and replaces them with love.

- What will have to change about how we “do ministry” to meet the needs of the “new normal?”

5. The changing spiritual narrative in North America is the third factor in our culture’s discontinuity from previous eras. Let’s call this skepticism of authority – new questions about who to believe and why. However, there is a new spiritual narrative on the rise that says Christianity is no longer the “default setting” of American society. The Christian faith exerted significant influence on our culture in previous generations, but much of that public role has dissipated during the past 130-plus years – the acceleration of those secularizing effects has been felt strongly in the last fifty.

- Specifically, how are the three arenas of Scripture, Christianity & Culture, and Christian Influencers impacted by their skepticism?

6. Let’s summarize the challenges and opportunities created by each of these new cultural factors:

Access. Few would debate that we live in a knowledge economy, in a creative age, powered by science-fiction– like technologies.

- Will the Christian community connect meaningfully with the generation growing up in this context?

Alienation. We are conducting a real-time experiment with relationships, family bonds, and institutional reinventions.

- Will the Christian community cultivate a presence-centered approach to developing young people, bringing us out of our isolation and alienating pragmatism?

Authority. The spiritual narrative of our culture has shifted— slowly in places, quickly in others— toward secularism and away from the Bible and Christianity.

- Will the Christian community see skepticism of authority as an opportunity or as a threat?

You Lost Me, by David Kinnaman

Chapter One

1.  In this chapter, I want to accomplish two things: define the dropout problem and interpret its urgency. A clear understanding of the dropout phenomenon will set the stage for our exploration of young adults’ faith journeys.

- Does a dropout problem exist? If so, for what reasons do so many spiritually active teenagers put their faith— or at least their connection to a church— on the shelf as they reach adulthood?           

- Why do young people raised in “good Christian homes” wander as young adults?

2.  The ages eighteen to twenty-nine are the black hole of church attendance; this age segment is “missing in action” from most congregations. Overall, there is a 43 percent drop-off between the teen and early adult years in terms of church engagement. These numbers represent about eight million twentysomethings who were active churchgoers as teenagers but who will no longer be particularly engaged in a church by their thirtieth birthday.

- What is your reaction to this statistic?

3. One of the things we learned from this research is that there is more than one way to drop out and more than one way to stay faithful. Every person goes on a unique journey related to his or her faith and spirituality, and every story matters. The reasons young people drop out, as similar to each other as they may seem, are very real and very personal to those who experience them. We discovered in our research that there are three broad ways of being lost:

- Nomads walk away from church engagement but still consider themselves Christians.

- Prodigals lose their faith, describing themselves as “no longer Christian.”

- Exiles are still invested in their Christian faith but feel stuck (or lost) between culture and the church.

- Review each of these types.  How do you perceive them?

- Can you identify persons close to you who relate to one or all of these types?  What are their individual stories?

4. Like a Geiger counter under a mushroom cloud, the next generation is reacting to the radioactive intensity of social, technological, and religious changes. And for the most part, we are sending them into the world unprepared to withstand the fallout. Too many are incapable of reasoning clearly about their faith and unwilling to take real risks for Christ’s sake. These shortcomings are indicators of gaps in disciple making. There are three central arenas where these gaps are in evidence— and where the church has God-given opportunities to rethink our approach.

1. Relationships.  Can the church rediscover the intergenerational power of the assembly of saints?

2. Vocation.  Can the Christian community summon the courage to prepare a new generation of professionals to be excellent in their calling and craft, yet humble and faithful where God has asked them to serve?

3. Wisdom.  How can the Christian community help young Christians live wisely in a culture of mental, emotional, and spiritual distraction?

5. Why should we concern ourselves with the faith journeys of young adults? Why does all this matter?

- First, it’s a matter of heart. The spiritual lives of millions of young people are at stake. That fact, in and of itself, should be reason enough to care.

- Second, awareness of young adults’ faith journeys is a matter of accuracy. Without accurate information, Christians have a choice to ignore or minimize the dropout problem or to sensationalize it. Neither approach is right or helpful.

- Third, it’s an issue of responsibility. I am not writing this book to blame anyone for the state of the next generation or of the church. We all have a part to play, young and old, churched or prodigal.

- Caring about the faith journeys of young adults is, finally, a matter of leadership.

- Discuss each of these responses and why they matter.

How God Became King, by N.T. Wright

Chapter Eleven

1. The car is the New Testament. The owner is the “ordinary Christian,” whether in the pulpit or the pew. The mechanics are a certain breed of New Testament scholar. And the sad little story represents the perception of many “ordinary Christians” about the effect of scholarship on their wonderful old text. Some scholars have said it’s unreliable. Some have said people have added bits that shouldn’t be there. Some have said you won’t be able to drive it much longer. But many others have just taken it apart, analyzed it word by word, drawn cunning parallels with other ancient literature, demonstrated its rhetorical skill— and left it in bits all over the floor. To be admired, no doubt. But not to be driven. I and many others have done our best to study the New Testament with a different aim. Without skimping on historical and verbal analysis, we have done our best to put the whole thing back together again, even though the owners may have to get used to driving slightly differently in the future.

- How does this analogy compare with your experience of reading and interpreting the Bible?  What are the virtues/limitations of this analogy?

2. Let me show what I mean by offering two readings of the Apostles’ Creed. The first is the implicit reading of much modern Christianity. It maintains its hold on the great doctrines that are there in the creed, but, as we have seen already, it distorts the narrative as a whole and those great truths with it. The second is the implicit reading to which I believe the canon of scripture, particularly the four gospels, compels us.

(Read & discuss each creedal statement applying both methods.)

- I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.

- And in Jesus Christ his only son, our Lord…

- Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried.

- He descended into hell.

- The third day he rose again from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty.

- From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

- I believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins…

- …the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.

3. This whole book has been about new reality, the new reality of Jesus and his launching of God’s kingdom. The new reality of a story so explosive (unlike the muddled, murky, “self-help” world of the noncanonical gospels!) that the church in many generations has found it too much to take and so has watered it down, cut it up into little pieces, turned it into small-scale lessons rather than allowing its full impact to be felt. Part of the tragedy of the modern church, I have been arguing, is that the “orthodox” have preferred creed to kingdom, and the “unorthodox” have tried to get a kingdom without a creed. It’s time to put back together what should never have been separated. In Jesus, the living God has become king of the whole world. These books not only tell the story of how that happened. They are the central means by which those who read and pray them can help to make that kingdom a reality in tomorrow’s world. We have misunderstood the gospels for too long. It’s time, in the power and joy of the Spirit, to get back on track.

-  How has N.T. Wright provided the means to “get back on track” with integrating the central messages of Scripture and Creed?

How God Became King, by N.T. Wright

Chapter Nine

1. If, then, the gospel writers are, as we suggested earlier, offering the story of Jesus as the completion of the story of Israel, in what sense is it now complete? How has it been fulfilled? The answer seems to lie, for the gospel writers themselves, in the dark strand that emerges at various stages of the tradition of ancient Israel. As the psalms and prophets sharpen up their vision of how God’s kingdom is to come to the world, there emerges a strange and initially perplexing theme: Israel itself will have to enter that darkness. The songs and oracles focus, from time to time and often mysteriously, on the idea that Israel’s own suffering will not simply be a dark passage through which the people have to pass, but actually part of the means whereby they will – perhaps despite themselves – fulfill the original divine vocation.

- How does Israel’s suffering provide a context & purpose for your faith?

2. God is the creator and redeemer of the world, and Jesus’s launch of the kingdom— God’s worldwide sovereignty on earth as in heaven— is the central aim of his mission, the thing for which he lived and died and rose again. How can we even begin to understand this? Perhaps we should say that, with the hindsight the evangelists offer us, God called Israel to be the means of rescuing the world, so that he might himself alone rescue the world by becoming Israel in the person of its representative Messiah. This explains the place of David in the story. He is, in some respects at least, the man after God’s own heart, the man whose Temple-building son would be God’s own son, as God says to David through the prophet Nathan: “When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your ancestors, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come forth from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me.” (2 Sam. 7: 12– 14)

- As Israel’s representative Messiah, Jesus is called to fulfill the work of God the Father.  How do you understand this unique, dynamic relationship, especially as it fulfills God’s covenant with David?

3. Here, the suffering and death of Jesus’s people is not simply the dark path they must tread because of the world’s continuing hostility toward Jesus and his message. It somehow has the more positive effect of carrying forward the redemptive effect of Jesus’s own death, not by adding to it, but by sharing in it. When we speak of the “finished work of the Messiah,” as the evangelists intend us to (as far as they were concerned, the story of Jesus was the unique turning point of all history), we are not ruling out, but rather laying the groundwork for, a missiology of kingdom and cross. Jesus has constituted his followers as those who share his work of kingdom inauguration; that is the point of his sending out of the Twelve, and then others again, even during his lifetime and far more so after his death and resurrection. But if they are to bring his kingdom in his way, they will be people who share his suffering.

- What are the burdens, risks, and joys of sharing in Jesus’ suffering?  Please consider all three outcomes.

4. In other words, the powers that put Jesus on the cross didn’t realize that by doing so they were in fact serving God’s purposes, unveiling the “wisdom” that lies at the heart of the universe. That is to say, when Jesus died on the cross he was winning the victory over “the rulers and authorities” who have carved up this world in their own violent and destructive way. The establishment of God’s kingdom means the dethroning of the world’s kingdoms, not in order to replace them with another one of basically the same sort (one that makes its way through superior force of arms), but in order to replace it with one whose power is the power of the servant and whose strength is the strength of love.

- Where have you witnessed such power and strength?  

- How did it change the way you perceived the work & presence of God?

5. All four dimensions— all four speakers, to continue our image— thus contribute to a richly layered narrative that we find, in different ways, in all four canonical gospels.  Getting to this point requires considerable mental effort in today’s world and church. We have to reconstruct this story step-by-step, because so many elements of it have been simply forgotten or ignored in so much Christianity, not least, paradoxically, in those parts of the church that like to think of themselves as “biblical.” But for the evangelists and their first audiences, the sounds that force us to strain our ears, to readjust our sound systems, would have come through loud and clear with little effort. This dense and dramatic fusion of ancient scripture and in-your-face pagan power, this coming together of the dream of YHWH’s return and the surprising launch of a quite new people— all this was their world.

- What similar challenges & opportunities await today’s Church?

- What excites you personally as a participant in this encounter?

How God Became King, by N.T. Wright

Chapter Eight

1. Near the heart of my purpose in this book is to suggest that not only have we misread the gospels, but that we have made them ordinary, have cut them down to size, have allowed them only to speak about the few concerns that happened to occupy our minds already, rather than setting them free to generate an entire world of meaning in all directions, a new world in which we would discover not only new life, but new vocation.

- What factors contribute to our “making the gospels ordinary?”

2. We have lived for many years now with “kingdom Christians” and “cross Christians” in opposite corners of the room, anxious that those on the other side are missing the point, the one group with its social-gospel agenda and the other with its saving-souls-for-heaven agenda. The four gospels bring these two viewpoints together into a unity that is much greater than the sum of their parts, and that is mostly what Part III is about. In fact, what we call “politics” and what we call “religion” (and for that matter what we call “culture,” “philosophy,” “theology,” and lots of other things besides) were not experienced or thought of in the first century as separable entities. This was just as true, actually, for the Greeks and the Romans as it was for the Jews.

- Looking back at Wright’s historical explanation, how did the Enlightenment contribute to the formation of kingdom/cross Christians?

3. So what has been the Christian reaction to all this? How have those who habitually read Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John responded to the challenge of modernity? In very mixed fashion.

- Review and discuss Wright’s appraisal of the churches’ four reactions.

4. So, to sum up this very long but necessary introduction. Judaism always assumed that the creator God wanted the world to be ordered and ruled by his image-bearing humans. The world, heaven and earth, was created as God’s temple, and his image-bearers were the key elements in that temple. But the world was out of joint through the failure of humans in general and Israel in particular, so God the creator would have to act in judgment and justice to hold them to account. And the sign of that coming judgment was that at the heart of the world God had placed his covenant people, gathered around the Temple, which was the microcosm of creation, to celebrate his true order and to pray for it to come on earth as in heaven.

- How does this context provide a fuller comprehension of the purpose of the four gospels?  What do we have in common with this context?

5. And it was, of course, to those first-century Jews that the evangelists saw Jesus coming with his message of God’s kingdom. As we turn now,

none too soon, to consider the themes of kingdom and cross, we note that for all the evangelists, as for Paul, there is no sense of the kingdom not after all having appeared. Yes, it has been redefined. Yes, there is still more to do, as long as evil continues to stalk the earth. But the early Christians all believed that with Jesus’s death and resurrection the kingdom had indeed come in power, even if it didn’t look at all like they imagined it would. The hope had been realized, even though it had been quite drastically redefined in the process. A new theocracy had indeed been inaugurated, because the Temple where God lived among his people had been radically redefined. A new empire had been launched that would trump Caesar’s empire and all those like it, not by superior force but by a completely different sort of power altogether. And the place where this vision is set out is, to the great surprise of many who at one level know these documents well, the collection of the four gospels we find in the New Testament.

-  How does this portrayal of the arrival of God’s kingdom in the four gospels give you hope in the midst of contemporary chaos and upheaval?

- Where do you encounter that kingdom and how does it sustain you?

How God Became King, by N.T. Wright

Chapter Seven

1. Come back, for more detail, to the first of our four speakers. The entire story of Israel, on one level at least, is the story of how Israel’s God is taking on the arrogant tyrants of the world, overthrowing their power, and rescuing his people from under its cruel weight. Think back quickly through the great stories. (These include the stories of Babel in Genesis; of Pharaoh in Exodus; of Isaiah and Daniel; Psalms 2 & 89.)

- Specifically, what do ancient & contemporary tyrants have in common?

2. But the hope persists, and psalm after psalm brings it to expression. The gods of the nations are but idols, but Israel’s God made the heavens. God reigns over the nations, God sits on his holy seat; the princes of the people gather as the people of the God of Abraham, who has subdued peoples and nations. God has established his city, and the powers of wicked pagans will not prevail against it. Again and again it comes, shaping the hearts and imaginations of God’s people even in the many centuries when these songs of praise and triumph bore no relation to the sociopolitical reality in which they were living. This is the world in which we are to hear what the gospels are trying to tell us about the story of Jesus seen as the focal point of the story of God and Caesar.

- What do these biblical stories have in common with our life stories?

3. This points forward to the larger power, Rome itself, which will close in at the end, only to be symbolically overthrown as the Roman guards at the tomb fail to prevent Jesus’s resurrection. Luke has Herod in Jerusalem at this time as well, in league at last with Pontius Pilate (23: 1– 12). The sense is the same: the powers of the world are waiting there, in the wings, mostly offstage, but ready to pounce at a moment’s notice. If this really is the story of God’s kingdom arriving on earth as in heaven, sooner or later there will be a confrontation. Again, it doesn’t take a Ph.D. in political psychology to know what the world’s powers will do to those who act and speak to bring about God’s kingdom. As well as all the other elements in the gospel story, we must recognize this for what it is, a telling of the story of Jesus as the clash between the kingdom of God and the kingdoms of the world.

- Where do you witness this clash of kingdoms today?

4. If this story of Jesus is the story of Israel reaching its climax, it is inescapably political and will raise questions the Western world has chosen not to raise, let alone face, throughout the period of so-called critical scholarship. The post-Enlightenment world was born out of a movement that split church and state apart and has arranged even its would-be historical scholarship accordingly; and that same Enlightenment insisted that Judaism was the wrong kind of religion, far too gross, too material. Rejection, from the start, of a “political” reading of the gospels and of a “Jewish” reading went together. Fortunately, genuine history— the actual study of the actual sources— can sometimes strike back and insist that what a previous generation turned off this generation can at last turn back on. It is time, and long past time, to reread the gospels as what we can only call political theology— not because they are not after all about God and spirituality and new birth and holiness and all the rest, but precisely because they are.

- How do you understand Wright’s explanation of “political theology?”

5. The point about truth, and about Jesus and his followers bearing witness to it, is that truth is what happens when humans use words to reflect God’s wise ordering of the world and so shine light into its dark corners, bringing judgment and mercy where it is badly needed. Empires can’t cope with this. They make their own “truth,” creating “facts on the ground” in the depressingly normal way of violence and injustice.

-  Where is this tragically happening today? How are we responding?

6. The four gospel writers, each in his own way, tell the story of Jesus as the story of the new and ultimate exodus. What our present fourfold exercise has done is to draw out the various dimensions of that new exodus and to highlight their significance. The gospels all insist that it was Jesus’s own choice to make Passover the moment for his decisive action. This, they are saying, was his own chosen grid of interpretation. And all four gospels together, once we have learned to listen to their four dimensions, bequeath to Jesus’s followers the task of being the people in and through whom the achievement of Jesus is implemented in the world. That is why the story told by the gospels is not only incomplete without two millennia of backdrop (the story of ancient Israel), which they assume we will know and which we in our generation often have to supply with considerable pedagogic effort. The story is also incomplete because it points forward to a future yet to come.

- How has this chapter further shaped your understanding of the role of the four gospels?