Generational challenge confronts global church

                                      

(PHOTO) SEARCHING FOR ANSWERS—In a Cairo neighborhood, a child walks by an Egyptian flag painted on a wall — with apparent symbols of a Muslim crescent and Christian cross added. As the often-violent struggle for freedom continues in Egypt and other countries, larger demographic forces are at work. Sixty percent of all Egyptians are under 25. The total population of the Middle East and North Africa surpassed 430 million in 2007 and likely will top 700 million by 2050. One in every three people in the region is between 10 and 24. About one in every five people on earth is between the ages of 15 and 24. They want jobs and better lives, but prosperity alone isn’t enough. They want something more. “People here are craving life,” said a mission leader in the Middle East. “They’re craving change and not just political and economic change. Their deep heart cry is for answers.” PHOTO by Joseph Rose


The global spread of democracy doesn’t look nearly as promising as it once did.

High hopes for lasting freedom appear to be fading in Russia, Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Egypt and Tunisia, to name a few countries where authoritarians, extremists, corruption and other forces have undermined fledgling democratic institutions. Dictators have fallen like bowling pins in some places, but the vacuum they left behind hasn’t necessarily been filled by freedom. Elsewhere, police states have proven surprisingly resilient in the face of challenges from globalization, demands for change and the spread of social media.

In the Middle East, epicenter of massive movements for change, “observers are increasingly cynical about the prospects for democracy, arguing that the Arab Spring has turned into an Islamist winter,” reports the journal Foreign Affairs. Radical Islamism is the biggest threat to liberty in the region. However, Foreign Affairs argued that “instead of fretting over Islamists, the international community needs to have a more nuanced conception of political transition in the Arab world and should strive to bolster institutions and economic reforms in post-Arab Spring countries.”

Maybe, but diplomats and democracy activists said the same thing when now-deposed dictators were still in power. Building durable democratic institutions and reforming national economies take time, even under favorable conditions.

Meanwhile, there are larger demographic forces at work worldwide.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently compared three major countries: China, India and Egypt. Very different societies, very different governments. “But there is one thing that all three have in common: gigantic youth bulges under the age of 30, increasingly connected by technology but very unevenly educated,” Friedman wrote. “[T]he one that will thrive the most in the 21st century will be the one that is most successful at converting its youth bulge into a ‘demographic dividend’ that keeps paying off every decade, as opposed to a ‘demographic bomb’ that keeps going off every decade. That will be the society that provides more of its youth with the education, jobs and voice they seek to realize their full potential.”
India counted 560 million people under the age of 25 in 2011. Of that number, 225 million were between the ages of 10 and 19. In Egypt, the largest country in the Middle East, a million people are born every nine months, according to one estimate. Sixty percent of all Egyptians are under 25. The total population of the Middle East and North Africa surpassed 430 million in 2007. It’s expected to top 700 million by 2050. One in every three people in the region is between 10 and 24. Asia, by far the largest demographic region of the globe with more than 4 billion people, likely will increase to 5.3 billion by mid-century.

About one in every five people on earth is between the ages of 15 and 24. Eight in 10 of them live in Africa and Asia. As population growth rates stabilize or even decline in the West — particularly Europe — future growth will come almost entirely in the global East and South. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing. The “demographic dividend” Friedman identified could benefit many countries — if young workers can fuel productivity and prosperity in once-poor areas of the global East and South.

They want jobs. They want better lives. But prosperity alone isn’t enough for them. Even freedom and democracy aren’t enough. They want something more — and they are absorbing ideas from all directions.

“We’re sitting on a tectonic plate that is shifting,” a mission leader in the Middle East told me last year. “If expectations continue not to be met, we'll see another [political] earthquake. But this is a really good time for anybody who wants to discuss ideas. The marketplace of ideas has changed radically. For the Gospel, we need to be in the conversation.”

Another Christian worker in the region put it this way: “People here are craving life. They’re craving change and not just political and economic change. Their deep heart cry is for answers. What they grew up with is not giving them answers. [The current political turmoil eventually] will create even more of a spiritual harvest. What men meant for evil, God will use for good.”

Most of the people groups currently unreached or unengaged by the Gospel live in the vast eastern and southern regions experiencing rapid population growth. Most of the countries in those regions have a high percentage of children, teens and young adults.

Making disciples among them is the great generational challenge facing the 21st-century church.

Cheap liberty and costly grace

Listen to an audio version of this post at http://media1.imbresources.org/files/113/11350/11350-61910.mp3

With Independence Day come and gone, I recommend two recently published books for your summer reading list. Both will challenge your ideas about freedom and how you use it:

-- Radical by David Platt (Multnomah, 2010)

Platt, the popular young pastor of The Church at Brook Hills in Birmingham, Ala., is using his expanding national platform to urge Christians to rethink the “American dream,” their faith — and whether the two can co-exist.

A gifted Bible scholar and preacher, Platt quickly achieved the mega-church leadership many ambitious pastors seek. But his heart longed for something more. He realized he was “on a collision course with an American church culture where success is defined by bigger crowds, bigger budgets and bigger buildings.”

His visits to underground house churches in East Asia, where persecuted believers meet for fervent worship, drove him to reexamine the Jesus of the Gospels. The encounter convinced him that Jesus still demands what He demanded of His earliest disciples: that we take up our crosses and follow Him in radical obedience.

Such obedience requires daily self-sacrifice, surrender of our “rights,” suffering of one form or another, poverty (at least in comparison to the riches many of us enjoy), perhaps death.

The Jesus who told prospective disciples to leave their homes and families, to sell their possessions in order to follow Him into a lost and hurting world has not changed. “But we don’t want to believe it,” Platt writes. “We are afraid of what it might mean for our lives. So we rationalize those passages away. … And this is where we need to pause. Because we are starting to redefine Christianity. We are giving in to the dangerous temptation to take the Jesus of the Bible and twist Him into a version of Jesus we are more comfortable with.

“A nice, middle-class, American Jesus. A Jesus who doesn’t mind materialism and who would never call us to give away everything we have. A Jesus who would not expect us to forsake our closest relationships so that He receives all our affection. A Jesus who is fine with nominal devotion that does not infringe on our comforts because, after all, He loves us just the way we are. A Jesus who wants us to be balanced, who wants us to avoid dangerous extremes, and who, for that matter, wants us to avoid danger altogether. A Jesus who brings us comfort and prosperity as we live out our Christian spin on the American dream.”

Such a Jesus, Platt contends, is not Jesus at all, but an idol molded in our own image. It’s high time we take “an honest look at the Jesus of the Bible and dare to ask what the consequences might be if we really believed Him and really obeyed Him.”

Platt cites one Christian who dared: Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The German pastor and theologian was hanged by the Nazis 65 years ago, at age 39, for publicly resisting their criminal rule. He bravely denounced Nazi usurpation of the German church — and even participated in a failed plot to assassinate Hitler — while many fellow believers stayed silent and did nothing. Platt quotes a famous line from Bonhoeffer’s classic, The Cost of Discipleship: “When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die.”

My second recommendation for summer reading:

-- Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas (Thomas Nelson, 2010)

This powerful biography shines new light on one of the giants of the 20th century. A bespectacled intellectual, Bonhoeffer was no revolutionary early on. But he rejected passive religion separated from action. And he despised what he called “cheap grace” — the grace we accept with our minds but not with our hearts or our wills, the grace that demands nothing from us. He considered it the “deadly enemy” of the church.

“Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate,” Bonhoeffer wrote in The Cost of Discipleship. “Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ. It remains an abstract idea, a myth which has a place for the Fatherhood of God, but omits Christ as the living Son.”

“Costly grace,” on the other hand, “is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of His Son … and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. … Costly grace is the Incarnation of God.”

Bonhoeffer not only believed in costly grace, he lived and died by it.

On July 4, a missionary who serves in one of the least-free nations on earth preached at my church. The people in the land where he works are oppressed by poverty, superstition, tyranny and terrorism, but they are seeking freedom. Not just political and social freedom — spiritual freedom.

“It’s great to be here in America on ‘Freedom Day,’” he said. “As kingdom people first and Americans second, we rejoice in liberty.”

But he reminded his listeners that followers of Christ have been given liberty for a purpose: to bless all nations with the news of salvation. If we don’t use it for that purpose, we don’t deserve it.

Bonhoeffer probably would call it “cheap liberty.” God help us to trade it for costly grace.