Month: June 2018

Koinonia

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When Naysa Modi missed the word “bewusstseinslage” in the championship round of the Scripps National Spelling Bee a month ago, (she omitted an “s”) it opened the door for Karthik Nemmani to win. But he first had to spell two more words correctly. Karthik correctly spelled “haecceitas,” then came the championship word: “koinonia.”

The Bee’s official definition of “koinonia” was, “An intimate spiritual communion and participative sharing in a common religious commitment and spiritual community.” One news report describing the winning round of the Bee called “koinonia,” “an obscure word of Greek origin.”

In the weeks since the Bee, Christian writers have been trying to make sense of this. “Koinonia” is part of the routine vocabulary of many churches. There are “Koinonia” groups, “Koinonia” classes, praise bands named “Koinonia” and so on. The word is so familiar to so many Christians that it’s hard to fathom how it could be used in the championship round of the National Spelling Bee.

“Koinonia” was the word used by Luke to describe the distinctive community of the early church. Acts 2:42 says, “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship (koinonia), to the breaking of bread and to prayer.”

Christians tend to overuse the word “fellowship.” It gets reduced to describing the hospitality time after worship on Sunday. But “koinonia” is much more than that. It’s the intimate, interdependent set of relations among people who together are being transformed by their relationship with Jesus Christ.

So when the news describes “koinonia” as an “obscure” word, it makes me both sad and hopeful. This “obscure” thing is what the church of Jesus Christ uniquely has to offer. It’s also precisely what the world needs.

Silent Epidemic

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The suicide of celebrity chef and TV travel host Anthony Bourdain, 61, hit a lot of people hard, especially people my age. Here was someone who seemed to have it all together. He lived a life people dream about, travelling the world visiting exotic places. And yet Bourdain was a recovering addict. Whatever despair he was experiencing didn’t come across to viewers. One middle-aged fan of Bourdain said, “His death is a reminder that we just don’t know what people are going through unless we ask them.”

For two years now, life expectancy in the US has been dropping. The reasons seem to be suicide, substance abuse, and despair. The risk of suicide among men ages 55-62 has increased 55% since the year 2000. One researcher called this “the silent epidemic,” an epidemic that is “under-researched and under-reported.”

When God created everything and pronounced it “good,” there was one aspect of creation that God said was “not good.” It was “not good” for the man to be alone. So, God created someone to keep the man company.

Many years later, Paul, the early Christian missionary, wrote that “we belong to each other.” God designed us to be connected to each other the way the parts of the human body are connected, with no part more important than another. This happens supernaturally through Jesus Christ.

This means that the church has something that nothing else has, and it’s what people today desperately need. We’re a community of four generations, joined together by the God who made us. God gave us the church to be the place where people who care about you know what you’re going through.

You can travel to exotic places, and you won’t find anything better than that.

Growing young

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It’s well documented that young people are leaving the Christian church at an unprecedented rate. One study estimates that by the year 2050, 35 million young people who were raised in the church will have abandoned the faith. The reason is usually not a crisis of faith. They simply aren’t interested in the Christian life they saw lived out in church.

But there’s hope. Fuller Seminary has documented the results of a four-year study of hundreds of churches in the book, Growing Young: Six Essential Strategies to Help Young People Discover and Love Your Church. It turns out that many churches are growing, and growing with young people. And it’s not just churches with hip music and edgy youth programs. All different kinds of churches are growing.

This week, I committed our church to take part in a year-long study of Growing Young with other like-minded churches in Pittsburgh. The average age of our church is 65, a generation older than the average of our downtown Pittsburgh neighborhood. We could use some members of the church who are passionate about young people to join us.

The folks at Fuller believe that when a congregation commits to growing young, it’s not at the expense of older generations. Young people bring energy to an entire congregation. As a congregation grows younger, other priorities gain momentum.

When I look in the mirror, I notice that I’m not getting any younger, and there’s nothing I can do about it. It doesn’t have to be that way with our church.

35 million

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That’s the number of young people who were raised in Christian households who will walk away from the Christian faith by 2050. So reports Vincent Burens, President and CEO of the Coalition for Christian Outreach. The US is “currently experiencing the fastest decline in religious affiliation in the history of this country.” The majority didn’t have a crisis of faith or reject church teachings. “They left because they just weren’t interested in the Christian life they saw.”

And remember, Burens is talking about young people who were raised in the Christian faith. The 35 million does not include those who have no Christian experience or reference point.

Burens calls this, “The largest mission opportunity in the history of America.”

This really isn’t new. It was documented in the 1970s by the Rev. Lesslie Newbigin, a Presbyterian minister from England who served for 27 years in the mission field in India. Returning to England in 1974, he discovered that the churches of Europe were mostly empty. Europe, once the source of missionaries, had become the mission field.

Another study, published in 1982 in the Christian Encyclopedia, estimated that 29,000 Christians in Europe and North America were leaving the faith every week.

It’s possible for individual churches to experience this decline (85 percent are either declining or stagnant; only 15 percent are growing.) and miss the mission opportunity this paradigm shift represents. The reason is that declining churches become more intimate, more comfortable, more homogeneous.

Our ancestors at First Presbyterian Church crossed an ocean and a wilderness to plant this church on the frontier.

When paradigms shifted, and needs changed downtown, they dug up the cemetery where their own saints were buried to build new church buildings.

If any church in America can meet the great mission opportunity of our day, it’s us.