25-35 year olds for the most part are gaining ‘life-experience’. Pastors and church staff, for the most part, are not gaining that interaction with real life.

That’s just because the 25-35 year old is not spending all day in an air-conditioned office getting their PA to filter out all the calls from the nuffies and lining-up their next speaking engagement….So the 25-35 year old is more likely to encounter situations that you wouldn’t typically find in a church.

The 25-35 year old tends to become more ‘grown-up’ through their real-life experiences and they leapfrog the church pastors and staff in being able to apply real-world solutions to real-life situations and integrate that into their personal theology and their advice to others.

Because they have to. Life forces them to.

Church pastors and staff tend to gravitate more towards ‘dickhead experience’, whether that be through contact with other church people who also haven’t been forced to grow-up by real-life experience … or they learn directly through colleges of advanced dickhead education; (church-based bible colleges)

You know the type who runs churches. The ‘I’ve just come back from an awesome time of fruitful fellowship with Brother Brian’ type. Nobody talks or thinks like that in the real-world.

I still laugh when I hear radio ads for colleges like ‘Tabor’ that offer ‘real-life practical hands-on experience’.

What we’re getting is this huge gap between the 25-35 year olds who’ve been forced by life-experience to abandon their dickhead ways, and the dickhead culture upon which churches are based.

And of course it’s much easier to run away from a dickhead when you’re 30, than if you’re 15 and still living at home or you’re 23 and you’re only just realising that your entire circle of friends are dickheads.

The answer therefore is not to try and re-structure things in churches for the 25-35 year olds, but to find ways to give the dickheads who RUN churches some life-experience.

Here’s an example.

We know that the prosperity gospel is BS ..and very few people prosper under it (except those at the top..think Amway, think Ponzi scheme, think Pastor Brian H.)

For those who do prosper..it’s a co-incidence. It’s like saying, ’someone told me the Dockers are the best team and always win, the Dockers thrashed North Melbourne, therefore the Dockers will always win.’

Life-experience would suggest otherwise.

As life-experience would suggest that lots and lots and lots of people have lost their houses and financial livelihoods by swallowing the prosperity gospel.

Their church taught them something, but real-life proved that it wasn’t true.

If this happened to a 25-35 year old, then they would learn from the real-life consequences from the failure of what their faith taught them, and come to a more mature and balanced understanding of the teachings. And they would then then impart that more balanced and mature understanding to others.

Now let’s take the real-life example of Christian Sh*tty Church senior pastor Phil Pringle.

His church’s teaching that God prospers those who faithfully ‘tithe’..was contradicted when the church had a $2 million cost over-run on their new auditorium.

Instead of having abundant supply – as taught by their church – they found themselves two million dollars in the red.

Skubala.

So they went cap into the hand to a lender to get them out of the skubala and then put the hard-word on their congregation to cough-up the dough to cover the loan.

Today, they still teach the same ‘tithing causes prosperity’ crap …because……..

****the church culture/structure prevented them/saved them from experience the real-life consequences of the faulty church teaching******

What SHOULD have happened was a realisation in the church that …’ahhh…this teaching doesn’t work’.

But they effectively insulated themselves from learning from life-experience by plundering the congregation to save themselves from a visit by Mssrs IronKnuckles and Wheel Brace who want their money by 4 o’clock.

But the 25-35 year old who applies the prosperity principles and goes broke can’t appeal to a congregation to save their arse. They have no option but to learn from the real-life experience.

So what do you think?

Life experience for pastors and church staff. Make them do it every 3-5 years for 6-12 months at a time.

Call it ‘Community Outreach Leave’ if you need to get it through your Board of Dickheads…errr…Elders.

I know there won’t be much support for such a concept in the church world, but I thought I’d throw it out there because I’m sick of church types blaming 25-35 olds for growing-up.

“…The church accepts no responsibility for the increasing tide of disaffection, but rather wants to call into question the integrity of those who have been alienated…”

Then I worked for the same church for 6 years as a young adult pastor and discovered my family membership had been unknowingly replaced with an employer-employee relationship that delivered authentic but shallow, role-based work relationships.

The work relationship ended after I chose to wrestle out my personal “heretical” faith deconstruction in what was deemed to be an inappropriate forum. The result was not a return to family peace and union but rather a physical, emotional and spiritual shunning that was directed at not only me but my wife aswell.

The past four years has seen me reconcile the actions of my fellow work colleagues as simply that of a business transaction that had expired – something that makes sense in a corporate world but I’m convinced should have no place within a family.

Since being outside the walled city, I have encountered young adult after young adult that has explained similar experiences in their own journey – unfortunately, in some of the cases, these were young guys and girls I had pastored, and it was me that had done the shunning when they had not been able to fit our requirements of faithful young adult volunteer leaders.

However, it wasn’t until I had personally experienced the rejection that I could see how I had participated in the perpetuation of the same cycle. It has been a process that has been both humiliating and healing for me.

Many of us have begun to make our beds outside the walled city – in a place of exile from where we were once welcomed and celebrated. We are learning to reconnect with one another, to worship with one another, to risk to love again.

Young adults who leave the church have many good reasons to do so. Just because they no longer visit your programs and attend your services and volunteer in your youth groups and run your small groups doesn’t mean they have lost their way or rejected their faith in the One who has always kept his promise to them.

Rather than devise ways of getting these “lost” souls back inside, maybe some would be willing to dare come outside the city and sit with us in our shanty, make-shift places of gathering. To share that space like we shared the other for so long. Maybe….

But I’m guessing also something more exciting is out there – a group of 25-35 year olds who have ‘never’ experianced church in their youth and I know they are there – the emergent, incarnational, non attractional model of church holds great possibilities.

So why not podcast a great expository sermon from Driscoll or Bell or someone like that rather than sit through the tired old “7 steps to a great life” pap that is served up so frequently? IMHO the pornification that is spoken of is just as readily found in the “seeker” services that promise much yet deliver so little.