The New Copernicans: Millennials and the Survival of the Church

by David John Seel Jr.

New Copernicans live their lives within an immanent frame: that is, they assume that their lives can be lived successfully within the natural order without any reference to the transcendent or God. The idea of God is not an operational part of their day-to-day life assumptions, and it is not a part of their vision for the good life.

Judeo-Christianity never defeated paganism, but rather drove it underground.”14 Now that Judeo-Christianity is in cultural decline, however, what was once underground is now resurfacing as a popular means of spiritual communion.

We would do well to reread C. S. Lewis: “Christians and pagans had much more in common with each other than either has with a post-Christian. The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as that between those who worship and those who do not.”

How, then, should the church respond to the growth of neo-paganism? First, we must humanize neo-pagan believers. We must get to know them as individual people and listen to their stories.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is attributed to have said, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but spiritual beings having a human experience.”

Second, we must recognize that the growth of neo-paganism is an indictment against the church. We must repent of our own spiritual and cultural culpability rather than reproach those who are attracted to a vital, nature-centric spirituality, which is in their mind more spiritually animated, more holistic, more experiential, and more compassionate in practice than the cognitively truncated, privately marginalized, politically judgmental religion of many evangelicals.

Third, we will not have anything to say to the neo-pagan if we don’t have a biblically strengthened view of creation and our stewardship of it.

Finally, we need to appropriate the reality of the incarnate Jesus in our daily lives. Theology that fails to be embodied in daily life fails to be theology rightly understood.

what is as important as an imagined future destination is the quality of our encounter on the path in the present.

It is the journey that will change us.

Most of us need to get off our self-righteous soapboxes and stop preaching. We need to join others on the damp and cold trail and simply listen to the stories of others.

When we preach, we need to acknowledge how strange some of the Bible seems to modern ears.

If we think that the essential task of our sermon is information transfer, we will preach in a certain manner. If, on the other hand, it is connecting our deepest longings with all our brokenness with the risen presence of Christ, it will take our sermons in a different direction.

There is nothing sadder than a Christian fellowship where every song must be victory, every prayer full of faith, every member always smiling and joyful. It is an exhausting pretense to keep up for long, and it condemns those who cannot hide from their fears to further pain of failure and inadequacy. It is actually dishonest. It means that we can never offer our tears as well as our smiles, our questions as well as our certainties, our wounds as well as our victories. It means that we are always keeping Christ out of the very places in our lives where we need him the most—the places of darkness, uncertainties, and fears.

what other aspects are important for a retail experience to be successful? Five come immediately to mind. The experience should be unique (even exotic), consequently memorable, photogenic, sharable, and relational.

Social media is the means by which experiences are shared relationally and validated personally.

It is also important to reemphasize that events cannot be transactional to be authentic. A transactional relationship has the expectation of something in return, an emphasis on what you get from the relationship. If the event has some other agenda that is not clearly stated at the outset, it will be rejected. In other words, do not offer events to get people to attend your church or to hear an evangelistic message. The event needs to be limited to...

Unique, exotic, photogenic, and relational—these are the kinds of experiences that New Copernicans crave.

We don’t really know how to be in a relationship without an agenda. Older adults may roll their eyes at young people “hanging out.” But isn’t this simply being with another person without an agenda, without a timetable, and without a script? New Copernicans demand better relationships.

We need to recapture the Celtic priority of belonging before believing, of building relationships first before demanding creedal affirmation.

Attitudes of judgment—which are presumed by all nonbelievers of believers—make churches and Christians something to be avoided rather than embraced.

This idealism is rooted in wanting to align one’s life with a meaning and story larger than oneself and in promoting businesses with a triple bottom line (people, planet, and profits). For New Copernicans this is the positive functional equivalent of a religious quest.

This is what secularity3 feels like from the inside: a nagging fear that there is a story, meaning, or spiritual world larger than oneself that is the final validation of one’s own personal plot.

Jesus promises us that the foundations of every life will be eventually tested (Matt. 7:24–27). Every person will have a natural affinity to one or more of these portals. Theologian N. T. Wright describes these as “echoes of a voice: the longing for justice, the quest for spirituality, the hunger for relationships, and the delight in beauty.”8 These points of longing are valuable on-ramps for spiritual conversation and further progress on one’s spiritual pilgrimage.

Christianity is the answer to a real existential longing. Its interpretive power is not found in a philosophical argument so much as in the living of life and particularly living in the midst of one’s deepest longings.

Before moral debates about sexuality, we need to ask the bigger framing question: What is the purpose of sexuality? What is the purpose of my body? Theological and ethical arguments over sexuality rarely move or influence a person. Learning the contours of love from the reality of relationships with their longings and loss is a far better teacher.

As soon as sex is involved, people in the church get an empathy cramp. • The longing for love is among the strongest and most important relational longings, one that exceeds sex but includes it. • We must be able to talk about the desire for love apart from further discussions about its design and destiny. • We don’t have to say everything or agree on anything to be loving.

This raises the general question: How do churches effectively reach New Copernicans? My assessment is that churches need to provide authentic experiences of following Jesus into the arenas of their deepest longings (justice, beauty, love, and spirit), giving them an opportunity to connect their personal story with a larger narrative of meaning, particularly couched in a relationally humble 3-D posture. Millennials want to see that you practice what you preach, that you love the world you live in through your work and not just your words.

It is not that followers of Jesus have arrived and we are calling others to our settled destination—which is the typical closed transcendent framing of evangelism. That is not the picture to have if we are to be effective in connecting with the contemporary nonbeliever. We must hold in our minds the picture of joining together on a shared spiritual pilgrimage to a yet undeclared destination. It is less important that we are conceptually heading in the same direction or going the same speed, but that we are on a shared trail together and that our paths have for this moment meaningfully crossed. What is important is to make this path crossing, however long or short, deeply meaningful, genuinely human, aesthetically beautiful, and hopefully memorable.

What is the role of the Bible in these shared pilgrimages? Its role is significant, but in a manner that is markedly different from the way it has been used in the past. The emphasis needs to be on the story of the Bible, rather than on the Bible as a book. We must learn to picture the narrative arc of the Bible in a manner that captures the imagination, rather than using the Bible as a source of modernistic proof texts. We must learn to embed our lives within the larger biblical drama.

New Copernicans desire and look for a personal encounter with spiritual reality. There is no conceivable reason why an ordinary apprentice of Jesus who is indwelt by the Holy Spirit can’t become for that seeker a Wi-Fi hotspot for the kingdom of God.10 The central message of Jesus is that the “kingdom of God has come near” (Mark 1:15). He meant by this that all around us is God’s presence and power and that his spiritual presence and power is available to us as we acknowledge him in all that we do. Writer Madeleine L’Engle reminds us of the obvious: “We draw people to Christ not by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.”11 By God’s grace and because of our humble reliance on him, God’s presence, God’s love, God’s forgiveness, and God’s reality should be evident in who we are, if we have entered into a personal relationship with Jesus and have apprenticed our lives to him. It is for this reason that our “being” is more important than our “talking.”

American evangelical public engagement is shaped by five characteristics, each reflective of a particular period of American history. At least five can be identified: reign, revival, resentment, retreat, and reassertion. Here we will only give a brief overview of the evangelical habitus (for more information, see The Evangelical Forfeit4).

Third, we can take cautious, incremental steps in this new direction. This is the approach I recommend. Focus initially on becoming the kind of person that New Copernicans would find an authentic example of faith, someone they would feel comfortable turning to with their most pressing questions.

The New Copernican frame shift is finally a call to a more radical apprenticeship to Jesus and a more accurate assessment of human nature and reality. We do well to celebrate the shift and the millennial carriers of this shift.

He blogs three times per week on issues pertaining to millennials at www.ncconversations.com.