Millennials & Church SYMPOSIUM Part 3: Matter Matters

on April 2, 2014

This is Part 3 in an IRD Symposium on Millennials in the Church. Here is Part 1, Part 2, Part 4, Part 5Part 6, and Part 7.

On the heels of World Vision USA reversing its decision to employ Christians in legally recognized same sex marriages, bloggers Tony Jones and Rachel Held Evans make the bold claim that the Evangelical churches in America have alienated an entire generation of young people from Christianity. Why? Because supposedly all young people are not going to hear the Gospel unless it lines up with their belief that homosexual relationships are not different ethically from monogamous heterosexual marriage. By their account, Christians who stick to traditional sexual ethics are leaving young people no other choice but to become “nones,” the rising demographic of people who identify with no particular religion.

Though I myself was a “none” for most of my life and I have found safe haven in the Orthodox Church — a church that affirms that marriage can only be between one man and one woman for life — my existence does not speak necessarily of a larger trend. However, there seems to be some indication of a trend towards High Church traditions whether they are Anglican, Catholic, or Orthodox. Instead of millennials leaving the church because the Church isn’t keeping up fast enough, a significant number of young people are leaving superficial and shallow worship and wishy-washy teaching for spiritual nourishment that has fed Christians for centuries in the forms of the liturgy and the sacraments. In their view, many American churches, even those relatively conservative in theology, are moving too fast and capitulating too easily to the culture in the ways in which they worship.

The crisis of worship and the crisis on moral teaching in churches today are not separate issues. I do not think it is an accident that the churches that have preserved forms of worship that can be traced back over 2000 years are also the ones that have kept the same teachings on sexual ethics. I will only speak for myself, but what drew me to the Orthodox Church was its sense of having preserved something that can be traced all the way back to the Apostles. If I’m willing to accept the beauty of the Liturgy and trust in the wisdom of the Church and her keepers of the faith (bishops, priests, deacons, other orders of clergy), is it really my place to think they erred on sexual ethics? If I believe the canon of Scripture is correct, is it really reasonable to believe that the opinions of all those men were merely subject to their time and place? Wouldn’t that open the Bible up to the same judgment?

In addition to Tradition, another significant feature of high church worship is the importance of our bodies. In the Orthodox church our bodies are constantly involved. When we aren’t eating the Body and Blood of Christ, we are crossing ourselves, smelling incense, kissing icons, and prostrating. The Church in her wisdom realizes that we human beings are embodied and that our spiritual lives are not separate and distinct from our material existence. That I am made of matter, matters!

Implicit in this then is the idea that my biological sex matters. My being male is not inconsequential. Male and femaleness are part of what it means to be human, and to be human is to reflect the image and likeness of God. Our complementary nature is a reflection of the interpersonal personal relations of the Triune God. To say that our biological sex does not determine our “gender” then is to deny the significance of our bodies. Being biologically male, in the eyes of the proponents of the normativity of homosexuality, is of no consequence to who I “really” am. I find this to be an unacceptable divorce of spiritual and material faculties in man. Of course, in the fallen world, we find people with our material and spiritual qualities all mixed up and in contradiction. But that does not mean that is the way it ought to be.

Those are my reasons World Vision and the ongoing battle in many American denominations over same sex marriage are not going to affect my decision to stay put. The traditional worship in the Orthodox Church, reflective of God’s unchanging will for us and of embodied nature, is the reason I came to her in the first place and it will be the reason I stay.

  1. Comment by BV on April 2, 2014 at 12:10 pm

    Poignant, direct, concise, hard-hitting, clear, and sharp. I think you’ve presented an excellent explanation as to why younger generations will not necessarily leave the church for the reasons described by Evans (among others).

    I think it’s also important to note that a confession of the Resurrection brings with it certain obligations to those of us who make this confession. God has revealed to us a definition of marriage, and I believe that we (confessors) are obligated to submit to His disclosure.

    With regard to God’s revealed definition of marriage, I think we who confess the Resurrection are obligated to submit to this definition.

  2. Comment by Will Shetterly on April 2, 2014 at 4:06 pm

    “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”

  3. Comment by Greg Harbaugh on April 7, 2014 at 10:54 am

    The last item in Paul’s list is actually “not male and female”
    and, yes, it breaks the parallelism of the first two which also brings it into focus. Perhaps it might be rendered “not (only) male and female” as a way to include the single, celibate life that Paul himself lived, as did Jesus.

  4. Comment by Mikhail Ramendik on April 3, 2014 at 10:14 pm

    Well, this observation about worship and moral views is far from universal. Here in the (Anglican) Church of Ireland I find many liberal high churchmen who are more or less ok with same sex relationships, but never ok with throwing out the prayer book or the chants!

    And while I actually agree with you on same sex marriage, I do not agree with you on the theology of the body thing, which despite your Orthodox loyalty sounds much like John Paul II. Being male is just a quality of the body, and if we let it define the person, then other qualities of the body – like being tall or short, thin or fat, healthy or with any particular sickness or disability – also define the person!

    I believe that neither our bodies nor, indeed, our current sexual preference for other bodies (what is called “orientation” by secular and liberal authors) really define us. Not only Christ transcends them but even humanity as such transcends them (and encompasses them, and importantly humanity in our current state includes sinfulness).

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