Living in the Moment

I love the fact that our personas as youth workers often are marked by a willingness to be creative and entrepreneurial. Tradition and history can become idolatrous (Matt. 15:2). We all know people in our congregations who still are trying to cling to an empty ritual or experience that happened "...years ago when I was justified, sanctified and petrified..." That kind of backward look is unhealthy for the church, and unattractive to our students who seek a faith that is real in the present.

As G.K. Chesterton pointed out, "Tradition is the democracy of the dead." Merely outvoting the experiences and ideas of those who have gone before us just because they are dead puts us in a position of dangerous arrogance. When we blow off the voices of history and tradition as un-hip or old, we sound like adolescents who are so unaware of how much we don't know that we think we know it all. As Ravi Zacharias comments, "The only thing worse than nostalgia is amnesia."

A few years ago, I heard a 30-something youth worker describe digital media as "the next big thing in the church," how we were on the verge of Reformation.com; but, his remarks reminded me of someone who, having never been on a beach before, might describe his first experience of high tide. "Quick, move the town, evacuate the beach, relocate the church! A flood is coming!" I felt like saying, "It's OK, Dude. Just sit tight. I've been here on the beach a while, and this tide will go back out, and it will come back in, and it will go back out. If we keep relocating with every tide, we're not going to have much of a foundation."

I'm concerned that our youth ministry culture has the same kind of adolescent arrogance that 30 years ago led to the maxim, "Never trust anyone over 30," except that now it's, "Never trust anyone who doesn't self-define as postmodern." Unfortunately, that kind of narrow chronological and ideological landscape leaves us vulnerable to momentary fads and fashions.

Maybe it's just because I am over 30—way over! Maybe it's because I'm a little skeptical about much of the postmodern rhetoric; but in an article titled "Tradition, History and Sequoias" (First Things 13, March 2003: 41-47), I think historian, Wilfred M. McClay makes a valid point:

"Christian faith requires one to take account of the past as something real, as something in which one is unavoidably embedded and to which one is profoundly connected—indeed, as something that has a certain measure of authority over the present and future...A religion that asks its adherents to walk by faith and not sight, and to order their lives around revelations and events that occurred at least two millennia ago, is a religion that places an enormous value upon the authority of the past...For Christians, the past really has something to teach."

Impulsive