The year that I turned eighteen, I got a small tattoo just below my right ankle. If you look at it from the side, it looks like this: 71’0. That isn’t what it says, but that’s the closest I can come to writing Hebrew on an English-language keyboard. I’m not sure how to pronounce the word, which, I suppose, is fitting. It’s the Hebrew word for “mystery.”

I am a millennial—a person generally born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s; specifically, in my case, in 1985. I have a personal predilection toward certainty, and I was also raised in a generation that was taught, from the beginning, the importance of having our lives figured out. College was never not an option; trying your hardest was a given; hard work and passion would get you anywhere. This is partly a function of privilege, and partly a reflection of the times in which we were raised. When I turned eighteen, I wanted a bodily reminder that certainty wasn’t everything, and that God was greater than any plans I could make.

I am reticent to speak about my generation in generalities because broad strokes often paint an inaccurate picture. People in my generation love the church, work for it, fill its pews, teach its children—yet we are also hailed as the generation of the “nones,” as our numbers decrease in relationship to religious affiliation. We may be “spiritual but not religious,” or not spiritual at all. The church—historically a significant seat of social and communal experience—has lost much of its authority in the broader culture, and people have grown disillusioned. Whether that disillusionment is the result of too-high expectations, ecclesial hypocrisy, or shifting cultural sands, the reality is that there is no public space that is charged with the care of the whole person like the church. But as American society has evolved, it has fragmented into many more special-interest groups, and millennials are more likely to make a new friend at the yoga studio or coffee shop than at a church picnic. We create habits that worship something—leisure, money, freedom—just as the generations before us have done, and we seek transformation by those habits, both our own and that of the world. Many of us who grew up in the evangelical church find ourselves longing for a spiritual home that will give us new habits altogether.

Several years ago, I started reading a book called Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail with a group of friends. We were five young women recently graduated from a Christian liberal arts college, and we found ourselves interested in a different expression of Christianity than the more or less evangelical one we had all grown up in. I was working at an Episcopal church at the time—it was the first job I was offered out of college at a time when jobs were hard to come by—and I was struck by the repetition I found there every Sunday; the sameness, the history, the tradition. We participated not just by singing or raising our hands, but by reciting prayers and creeds together, and through weekly Communion. We didn’t just shake hands with newcomers, we “passed the peace.” This church had been formed by the force of its habits, and it made me curious: What had I been missing all my life?

In some ways, millennials who were raised in the evangelical church have gone down the Canterbury Trail because that’s what people do: They search out experiences that are different from the ones they were raised with. It’s an old story, a variation on the theme of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s thesis-antithesis-synthesis process, whose work on this topic was further refined by G. W. F. Hegel. The initial thesis, that the evangelical church, with its sleek programming and emphasis on certainty, was the best kind of church, met with resistance when it encountered Christians who were steeped in the mystery of the Catholic or Orthodox churches, people like Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen. The pendulum has swung from evangelicalism to Catholicism and often settles in the middle, in a happy synthesis somewhere in the Anglican or Episcopal or mainline church. If a generation is a group of people who are born around the same time and experience the same world together, it makes sense that some of them would draw similar conclusions about what was missing in the church when they were young: Mystery. Liturgy. Sacraments.

Of course, this is all anecdotal, and the plural of anecdote isn’t “data.” As far as I can tell, though there have been many studies documenting the rise of the “nones” and the decline of some mainline denominations, no polling organization has done research on how many millennials have gone from low-church to High-Church traditions. But the anecdotes are important, and the people involved are leaders within the Christian faith. Francis Beckwith, the erstwhile president of the Evangelical Theological Society, reconverted to Catholicism back in 2007. Rachel Held Evans, a popular Christian speaker and blogger, has started attending an Episcopal church in a state (Tennessee) where there are no shortage of megachurch options. Christian Smith, a professor of sociology at Notre Dame, wrote a book called How to Go from Being a Good Evangelical to a Committed Catholic in Ninety-Five Difficult Steps after his own experience doing the same. These people aren’t millennials but have paved the now well-trodden road from evangelicalism to Canterbury or Rome.

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01.  Toward and Away

For those of us who are millennials, the attraction to more mystical forms of Christianity is born out of two impulses: The impulse away from how we were raised and the impulse toward connection with the universal church. These are large, sweeping generalizations; but then again, so is all generational thinking. In their book, Millennials Rising, Neil Howe and William Strauss identify seven traits millennials have in common: We are “special, sheltered, confident, team-oriented, conventional, pressured, and achieving.” We have grown up with the understanding that we need to work hard to follow our hearts and our dreams will come true (how’s that for a cliché-ridden sentence)—or, at least, they would until we graduated college and were immediately hit with a recession that left many of us underemployed and wondering how our life’s calling squared away with making lattes or entering data. The push toward certainty and security was revealed for many of us to be flimsy when hard work and passion weren’t enough to conjure a career out of thin air. Many of us couldn’t even conjure a full-time job.

We needed to replace our reliance on certainty with other habits, and we were ready to learn that the world wasn’t quite as simple as we had made it out to be. The small Episcopal church I went to did something I found interesting: They took Communion every week, in the middle of the service. People stood up in their pews and walked down the center aisle to dip a small piece of bread into a large chalice of wine and listen to the pastor remind us that this was Christ’s body and blood, broken and shed for us. In my evangelical experience, communion had been a sporadic event done individually, a tray passed with squares of bread and plastic cups of grape juice. This—the heaviness of the chalice, the constant exposure to mystery—was attractive to me. I appreciated my evangelical upbringing greatly, and wouldn’t change it for anything. But still, I noticed the pull of these holy habits of the Christian church on my heart. I found more of this sort of thing—Communion, meditation, centering prayer—in churches with roots that went further back than the evangelical church did. I found a body that was larger than my individual preferences and was grateful for the lack of well-programed transitions, neon lights, and fog machines. The trappings looked different at an Episcopal church from at an evangelical one, and though neither has a corner on doing church services “right,” there is something very good about experiencing a different kind of Christian community from the one you grew up in.

The pendulum swings for millennials from certainty to mystery in large part because those of us who grew up in the evangelical tradition were raised on certainty. Evangelicalism’s emphasis on conversion as “asking Jesus into your heart” puts a great deal of weight on naming one moment in time as the moment when you went from nonbeliever to believer, from pagan to Christian. That narrative isn’t bad, but it also doesn’t fit every experience. I know several Christians who would say that they lived their way into their Christianity over the course of months and years, and didn’t have one particular moment when everything changed. This is part of the impulse away from what we grew up with that leads us somewhere new. In his book Beyond Smells and Bells, Christianity Today editor Mark Galli talks about the appeal of liturgy:

 

In an individualistic culture, the liturgy helps us live a communal life. In a culture that values spontaneity, the liturgy grounds us in something enduring. In a culture that assumes that truth is a product of the mind, the liturgy helps us experience truth in both mind and body.Mark Galli, Beyond Smells and Bells: The Wonder and Power of Christian Liturgy (Orleans, MA: Paraclete Press, 2008), 11.

 

That Galli, the editor in chief of evangelicalism’s bellwether publication, would write a book praising liturgy is a sign of its ascendant popularity in the contemporary Christian conversation.

Millennials want liturgy because we want to move away from the rootlessness that plagues some evangelical churches and toward the rich history that means so much in our tradition. We want to know that, as my friend and writer Micha Boyett has said, “We do not have to perform our salvation for God but that God gives us something more powerful than we could ever perform for Him, and the liturgy is a reminder of what God gives us.” When I say, “I believe in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth,” as part of the Apostles’ Creed every Sunday morning, I am reminded that my faith is greater than my understanding and that the world depends not on my performance but on the one who created and sustains it. When I take Communion, I remember that what Jesus did on the cross is more comprehensive than any prayer I could pray, any sermon I could hear, any assurance I could give to God. Saying the creed and participating in Communion and praying with the larger church body are all means through which I am connected with the larger church. Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 3 reminds us that we do not pray alone, but that we are praying together with “all the saints.”

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02.  In Praise of Less

As millennials, our secular liturgy revolves around things to which we have instant access—our smartphones, social media, and apps that let us order dinner with the touch of a button. We are often disconnected from our larger communities, and technology continues to develop in a way that allows us to get whatever we want to come to us, precluding the need for all kinds of conversations we would otherwise be having. Our habits are shaped by that immediacy, that urgency, that sense that we shouldn’t have to wait for anything. For some of us, our spiritual lives have been so affected by this sense of urgency that we have recognized the need to slow down. We are attracted to liturgical churches and expressions of faith precisely because we have enough hustle in our daily lives. We want our churches to be the places where we learn to “ruthlessly eliminate hurry,” in the words of Dallas Willard, not places where we are pressed even more into a bunch of behavioral demands. Perhaps it is most important to pay attention to the place where liturgy, on the one hand, meets the need of the millennials, and on the other, to turn away from conspicuous consumption. More than any other trait I would attribute to our cohort, millennials are suspicious of the American tendency to take comfort in excess. We have seen that excess—money, possessions, homes—didn’t save our country when the economy tanked in 2008. In fact, you could convincingly argue that the pursuit of excess caused the Great Recession. Evangelicalism has too often aligned itself with the American dream, suggesting that exceptionalism and individualism are the best ways forward for both our country and our churches. So when we millennials see a church that cares for the poor and marginalized, that preaches the gospel without washing it down, that takes church history seriously—we are deeply attracted to that kind of a place. We want to be part of it.

Liturgy gives us the ability to put our feelings in the right place. The rise of individualism in modern times has meant the primacy of my own emotional experience. I see the world through the lens of my thoughts and feelings, and oftentimes low-church traditions encourage this point of view. They tell us that we are closest to God when we can most feel God’s presence, as if God radiates at a certain emotional frequency that only the best Christians can pick up on. Dallas Willard talks about this in his book Renovation of the Heart, after reflecting on a time when Leo Tolstoy observed himself becoming jealous of the laborers in his town and the significance of their lives:

 

The peasants whom Tolstoy admired so much were not yet swallowed up in modernity. They had solid traditions of faith and community that provided a ritual form of life—and of death. The result was that they knew what was good to do without regard to their feelings. Good was not determined for them by how they “felt” or by what they thought was the “best deal.”Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2002), 127.

In the liturgy, I pray both out of my emotional state and the reality that God is there regardless of how I feel about him. When the people in my church take Communion together every week and pray the same prayer of confession, we are acknowledging that God’s presence is consistent and independent of our feelings. Generational thinking elides easy truths, but if we observe long enough, we will learn to see the smaller realities. We think we are the first people in a long while who have discovered Benedictine spirituality, or practiced centering prayer, or sought spiritual direction. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. The truth is that the millennial generation is not so different from Gen X before it and will not be so different from the generation to come after it. At bottom, we all want meaning. We want to know we are known and loved. We will search for that knowledge whenever we feel like what is being offered is not the whole picture, just like people have done for millennia. And just like they have done, we will find Jesus, who was waiting for us all along. We will take the best from church tradition and from contemporary worship, and walk forward to prepare the way for the next generation to come.

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03.  Praying the Creeds

• First, put away your cell phone.
• Take out your Book of Common Prayer. Don’t have one? Buy it later. For now, look up the Apostles’ Creed online, and write it out by hand. Then close your computer.
• Sit somewhere comfortable—a favorite couch or chair, or a spot outside, or your kitchen table.
• Bring to mind the thousands of Christians who have prayed these words before you. You are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses whose chorus you are now joining.
• Breathe in and out a few times, and offer your mind and body to God, a living sacrifice.
• Begin to pray. Notice which words or phrases stand out to you. Pause at them, and ask God to reveal what he might want you to learn in them.
• Release the need to feel anything or produce anything.
• Thank God for what he has given you, even if it was just a few moments of silence.
• Amen.

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04.  How to Visit a Liturgical Church

• Visiting any church for the first time can be daunting. At some churches, you find your individual chair right away, sit on your own, and get up only at the end when it’s time to go.
• Liturgical churches usually involve a bit more—you generally sit in pews, rather than a chair; you stand and sit for certain prayers; you come down the aisle for Communion.
• It’s always worth a visit to the church’s website before you go. Some of them, in their “about” sections, will have information on what to expect when you arrive. In general, when you arrive, get a worship folder/bulletin. These will give you helpful information—song lyrics, prayers, when to stand, and so on. Most pastors or worship leaders will be aware of new folks in their midst and will ask people to rise or come forward for Communion when the time comes.
• Pews can be intimidating, because we aren’t used to sharing our private space with other people! There is no right or wrong place to sit—this isn’t the nineteenth century when families owned pews in churches—so find a place you feel most comfortable, and introduce yourself to the people nearby.
• Remember that, just like the songs we sing, the prayers we pray together have a kind of unifying effect. Read the words, study them, and say what you can. Don’t feel pressure to do anything inauthentic.
• The Communion is probably wine, so if you’re used to grape juice, you might be in for a shock. Many congregations serve grape juice as an alternative.
• Mostly, though, look around. Meet new friends, read new prayers, and sing new songs. By participating in liturgy you are participating in a gathering of Christian words, songs, and people that is far older than you or me. That’s a gift.