Here is a fragment from my son’s latest sermon. I hope this will motivate you to read the entire text of the sermon on his blog.
If we take a closer look at most of our churches, we will probably notice that we are missing a significant generational chunk. On average we are missing people between the age of 20 and 45, give or take a few years up or down. That is a significant generational gap. It should make us wonder why this is happening. Everyone has theories around that, and obviously I have my own. I’m not going to bore you with my theory, because we could be here all day.
But I believe one of the main issues connected to this generational gap is the way we currently relate to the territory of doubt. Or to put this in more practical terms, it is about the process of learning and making sense of reality. If we take a close look at the way we do church today, we will probably notice that on the whole one person is speaking and all the others are listening. The seating arrangement shows this clearly.
That used to be the generally accepted model of learning in lower and higher educational environments. We have the specialist or the expert standing behind the desk or pulpit, sometimes ‘five feet above contradiction’, and then we have the crowd who are ignorant and need to be enlightened. The expert has all the answers, or most of them anyway, and his or her role is to translate those answers from their head into the heads of the crowd. This way of learning must sound very familiar to many of us who went to school at least 10 years ago.
In this kind of educational model, doubt is a serious problem, especially if it is directed at the expert behind the desk. If you buy into this model, you have to accept that the specialist has the answers, and that you need those answers. Thus all you have to do is to appropriate and learn the answers. Expressing any kind of doubt regarding the answers which are provided for you, raises serious questions about the competence of the expert. Doubt is a big problem for this way of learning.
You may find the sermon HERE.
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