A Millennial Speaks …

June 18, 2014

This piece from Laura Cowan deserves attention from Catholic, Mainline and Evangelical readers … Quotable:
This:

The moral of this story might surprise you: Millennials leaving the Church is a good thing, in my opinion. For me the GOOD news is that my generation HAS refused to put up with gross distortions of Christianity. These behaviors we’re talking about are not compatible with the Christian faith. They’re not Christian behaviors at all, though we all behave in ways that aren’t consistent with our beliefs from time to time. But I think this situation with millennials leaving means they’re paying attention and they’re following their consciences and refusing to compromise their morality in order to belong to religious institutions. The pressure that used to be there to conform to religious norms isn’t there to the same degree anymore in our society, it’s true, but my hope is for a generation that walks away from the distorted practices of the Church and then walks right into Jesus’s arms somewhere else, creating an entirely new form of Christian spirituality we’ve never seen before. There are a lot of ways Christianity could take shape that don’t involve what church on Sunday looks like today. You’ll find the beginnings of hope for this in the emergent and social justice and creation care movements, and hopefully with those millennials who say they’re spiritual but not religious. Those are the people I serve with my life’s work: the brokenhearted, the abused, the people who are looking for light in the world and can’t find it. I’m grateful for the experiences of my youth, if only because they’ve given me the education I needed to understand this human woundedness that leads to such abuse. I am dedicating my life to not only stopping this dynamic from continuing in my family line, but to reversing it in my culture. It is not okay, it is not Christian, and so far as anything comes through me, it stops here.

And this: