One Sunday, I was in a youth-oriented church service where cheers greeted the announcement that there would be no sermon that night. The members of the congregation seemed pleased to have no sermon during the evening because, as one young man later told me, “sermons wreck the flow of the night.” Many of the church attendees apparently see sermons, and the instructive reading of biblical texts during a worship service, as interruptions to an authentic “experience of God’s presence.” Meanwhile, the congregation leapt to their feet to engage in loud, postmodern choruses, some of which contained messages of questionable theological content.
At best, some of the postmodern Christians at this church dutifully accept sermons as an important part of the worship service, while they engage most enthusiastically with (what they believed to be) God through the worship music. Many describe sermons and worship singing as two distinct, and even conflicting, entities. When the above-mentioned service does have sermons, they are given in the contemporary language, history, and culture of the audience, but they often lack any real depth of exegetical respect for the actual texts of Scripture.
I have been a full-time evangelist through Young Life of Canada for over twenty years; for more than a decade, I have also been working as a teaching pastor with a church plant called ‘The Place’. This is an alternative congregation of Lambrick Park Church in Victoria, British Columbia, attracting over 300 college-aged young people to a weekly Sunday-night service. This is most remarkable for a Canadian church. The purpose of Young Life is to proclaim the basic gospel message to unchurched teenagers in their contemporary language, history, and culture. The purpose of ‘The Place’ is to be a church. The Church is an ancient institution, which, like the community of Israel before it, is the community of God’s people that gathers weekly to listen to the Word of God read, sung, prayed, and preached for corporate and individual Spiritual formation.
Many teenagers have been introduced to Christ through the Young Life ministry, and have subsequently joined ‘The Place’ as their church and as a place to grow in Christ. There is a difference between evangelism to those without any church involvement and the formative nurturing of Christians within churches. Some descriptions of what churches are doing, or are being encouraged to do, in our contemporary context are more akin to Young Life evangelism than a church. If emerging churches in the West are merely outreach vehicles, then where and how will the lifelong Spiritual formation of God’s people happen?
