In 2011, David Kinnaman published a book called You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church… and Rethinking Faith. Based on research conducted by the Barna Group, You Lost Me speaks to the exodus of people ages sixteen to twenty-nine from institutional church and attempts to cast a vision for how to equip these folks with the kind of faith that can last a lifetime. In 2013, the Barna Group updated its research by broadly categorizing those who had “left” the church into three groups: nomads, those who have left institutional church but still consider themselves broadly Christian; prodigals, those who have both left the church and Christianity as a whole; and exiles, those who still attend an institutional church of some kind but consider themselves outside of the structure as a whole.Barna Group. (May 9, 2013), “Three Spiritual Journeys of Millennials”. https://www.barna. org/barna-update/teens-nextgen/612-three-spiritual-journeys-of-millennials#.VfmSACBVikr

As one who journeys alongside millennials in spiritual direction, I find these categories to be a useful sketch of the commonly experienced struggles and orientation of a generation. Prodigals often get the most attention (both from the broken hearts of those who have been spiritual parents and from those who are seeking to call them home), in part because the story of the prodigal is one of the stories at the heart of Christianity. Our faith says that the father is always there, willing to welcome the son home with open arms,See Luke 15:11–32. and as a result, we too continue to scan the horizon for those who have walked away from belief in Christ, yearning to run across the distance and embrace those who feel cloaked only in shame and failure.

Generally speaking, the prodigals of the millennial generation are not seeking companionship or return. They are on their own paths, and companionship for them means leaving them to live their story—and praying for God to woo them with God’s profligate love. In the meantime, the nomads and exiles are earnestly searching for guides along the Way who will see them as they are, validate their spiritual journey, and companion them as they search for God in ways both ancient and modern.

To be alongside involves both acknowledging the power of category to normalize experience (there is much comfort to be had in knowing there is a biblical and historical precedent to the nomadic life) and holding those categorizes as incomplete. As I attend to the stories of this generation, I find it helpful to remember that these categories are just the beginning of a picture that millennials themselves are viewing, shaping, and reshaping as they come to understand themselves in an era that empowers this kind of self-reflection at unprecedented levels.

In fact, most of those who sit down on my office—or on the other side of a Skype or Google Hangouts call— are tired of being boxed in by the term millennial, which has come to be used in popular culture as a synonym for whiny, entitled, and self-absorbed. These kind-hearted, earnest, deeply engaged individuals are in some ways victims of statistics (they have been mined for market research since the day they were born), and in other ways they are setting out to defy the very systems that have sought to enslave them for their own purposes.

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01.  What’s in a Word

In the Book of Exodus, Moses is sent repeatedly to Pharaoh to command him to let God’s people go. If you’re reading the New International Version, you’ll hear that call finished up with the words “so that they may worship me” (Exod. 9:1, NIVScripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™). In versions like the English Standard or King James, you’ll find a slightly different translation of that same—key—word: “that they may serve me” (Exod. 9:1, ESVScripture quotations marked (ESV) are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version^® (ESV^®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.).

In Hebrew the root of the word that’s used here is transliterated as abad, and it means to work, to serve, to be slave to, to worship. All at the same time. Which explains both why translators choose different English words when translating this and similar verses in the story of Exodus, and why we have such a hard time seeing the idea of exodus as a valuable part of the spiritual journey of the millennial (or any) generation. It is difficult for us to believe that our ways of relating to God might be slavery to another, and we often become invested in protecting those ways of relating rather than investing in living service to God. In the text, God is making it clear that we are either a slave to Pharaoh or a slave to God. We either worship Pharaoh or we worship God. Pharaoh’s domain is a place of food and water security, a place of relative comfort and ease, even if you’re a slave. Egypt (which translates almost directly as “the narrow place”) is a kingdom of stability, a kingdom where we understand the rules, a kingdom where we can get by, even if we can’t be with God.

But getting by isn’t good enough. Not for the people of God. Not for the millennial generation. Putting your head down and making bricks wasn’t sustainable then, and it isn’t now. Whether it’s bricks for a building campaign or bricks in a spiritual fortress of “spiritual holiness,” this brickmaking has the possibility of enslaving us to a god (a big church, a great reputation) that isn’t the true God. It’s a form of worship, as well as slavery, and when we wake up to that worship, to that slavery, and to the choice we have as to who or what enslaves us, it’s time for a journey into the wilderness. Millennials have been waking up to that slavery for a while now, and their choices to leave what—for them—is Egypt also bring with them the invitation for us to see exodus as a valuable part of the story of God.

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02.  Normalizing Exodus

I could tell by his posture that he was carrying shame. We’d been meeting for spiritual direction for nearly six months, and it had taken just as long for him to begin to see the edges of what was burdening him so heavily. That day, he chose to trust God and our companionship enough to put words to the weight.

“I know I should… I should be in church,” he began, before he noticed he was already shaming himself. “I mean, I just need God. But I don’t know what God looks like any more. Church isn’t helping me to see. I feel so trapped.”

“So, what’s wrong with leaving?” I probed, gently. “But, what if? What if I don’t come back?”

“Isn’t that up to you and God?” “But how can leaving be okay?”

“Who do you worship?” I knew I was pushing, but did so based on the trust of the Holy Spirit attending us. “Do you worship church or do you worship Jesus?”

His shoulders dropped. He took a deep breath and rested his head in his hands for a few minutes. When he looked up, there were tears in his eyes.

“You know, I don’t really know.”

 

Spirituality of the Wilderness

We are understandably uneasy with the idea that young people are leaving church and sometimes leaving Christianity as a whole. The rise of the “nones” (those unaffiliated with any religion in census-polls) has been the subject of much study and speculation. But if we want to be alongside, to truly be with a generation who has been labeled and studied and boxed in almost to death (and in some ways to real spiritual death), we need to be willing to walk not only out of Egypt with them but also into the deep wilderness, a wilderness that might frighten or overwhelm us but is full of the presence and power of the Triune God.

Wilderness spirituality is woven deeply into the heart of Scripture, and it also an important way to understand the spiritual journey of this generation. The wilderness represents many things in the Bible—barrenness, solitude, transition, and austerity, to name a few—but it is also the place that God takes God’s people in order that they may both hear and worship. The word for wilderness—midbar—can be translated “place of speech.” In the exodus, God leads the people from slavery into a place where they can hear the voice of God for the first time in generations. The wilderness is a hearing place.

This kind of spiritual dissonance, a barren place where God is nonetheless present, is both comfortable and natural to those millennials I’ve had the privilege of journeying alongside.Rhesa Higgins and Julene Tegerstrand. “Spiritual Direction and Millennials” (webinar), (July 29, 2015). SDI webinar series, http://www.sdiworld.org/educational-event/sdi-webinar-spiritual-direction-and-millennials. Instead of hurrying them back to the narrow places that they have left, either intentionally or unintentionally, being with them involves acknowledging that they may be following God away from what seems like a place of spiritual abundance into a place that may appear spiritually bereft.

The nomads of this generation, those who have left church but consider themselves Christians, need to know that the wilderness is also a hearing place and that they are preceded into that space by Christ.See Matthew 4:1–11, Mark 1:12–13, Luke 4:1–13. Many of them have practiced great courage to leave places where they were no longer able to hear or serve God authentically, while at the same time they have either been labeled as “falling away” or have judged themselves as failures for being unable to continue in the faith forms handed down to them by their parents. By empowering them (either directly or indirectly) to see the scriptural narrative as normalizing of their own story with God, we can begin the process of peeling away the shame that paralyzes these pilgrims from moving farther and deeper into their own hearing places with God.

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03.  Room for Grief

In the same way that the biblical account of the Exodus takes a clear-eyed look at what a change as major as freedom from generations of slavery can mean for a people, those alongside this generation need to make space for the “thrashing” that happens as old ways of knowing are supplanted by more mysterious means of provision (manna is sometimes translated as “what is it?”). As pilgrims in the desert, there is a necessary grieving to take place as they begin to embrace the fullness of what it means to have left the narrow place behind. Many of their comfortable ways of sustaining their spiritual experiences (whether it was worship services or prayer times, small groups or service) are no longer available, and there is an attendant loss that must be acknowledged and experienced before they are able to truly be present to their current journey.

Nomads often feel bereft of ways of knowing that guided them previously and find themselves searching externally for a way to “know God’s will” or “get things right.” That their experience of God’s will may be more like following a pillar of cloud or one of fire will carry with it a sense of longing for what once was certain and codified (and may have even been a form of performance-based love). This longing can be embraced as a form of grieving, even if it feels like it has little identifiable source. Acknowledging their sorrow can help nomads enter more fully into the wilderness experience as a valid and transforming spiritual journey.

For exiles, grief is an ever-present reality. They may attend the church of their youth, or find a place in a denomination different than they grew up in, but they still experience themselves as marginalized, ignored, or stereotyped. While the nomads have left Egypt for the desert, the exiles find themselves as strangers in a place they once knew as home. The ache is a daily, living thing. Often there is no place for their questions (or, worse, there is a place, but they are unable to perceive it), no place for their reimagining what it means to walk with Christ, no place for them to exercise the parts of their faith that matter most deeply to them. In this, they feel constant loss, the rub of what is and what could be, and yet they have the kind of hope that keeps them returning in search of communion.

Eventually the tension between what they hope for and the realities in which they live spiritually will drive these exiles into a wilderness both similar and different from that of the nomads. For these exiles, the wilderness is Hagar’s desert—a place that they are compelled toward because they no longer fit in systems not designed for them, because their questions threaten established ways of doing things, or remind people of places of growth that they’d rather ignore. These ones marginalized in spaces that were previously safe can be invited to see themselves in Hagar’s story, asked by God in the same gentle way that God asked Hagar, “Where have you come from, and where are you going?” (Gen. 16:8, NIV).

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04.  Knowing the Markers without Forcing the Path

Both the exiles and nomads can come to spiritual direction, spiritual friendship or discipleship with a desire to be either “fixed” or told what to do. But for anyone who has spent any time in the spiritual wilderness at all, the calling to companion bears with it a responsibility to let the Holy Spirit be the one who leads and guides. This can be frustrating for anyone, let alone millennials, but it is this very unwillingness to prescribe the path that will lead them to discover some of their key strengths, strengths that bring a further beauty to the body of Christ as a whole.

In the Exodus, God brings the nomad nation of Israel to the foot of Mount Sinai, the very place where Moses met Yahweh at the burning bush, and begins to shape in them a communal identity—they are becoming the people of God. Yahweh dwells in the tabernacle in the midst of their camp, and together the people begin to learn what it means to look through God at one another. This, too, is one of the gifts of the nomads for the church today. Their commitment to authenticity may have driven them from the institutional church to begin with, but it also drives them to know and be known—an expression of God’s intention for us since Genesis. As they find companionship in spiritual direction or elsewhere, they will find themselves drawn toward community as well, whatever the expression of that community may be. The spirituality of the tabernacle looks much different from that of the temple, and it is important both for nomads and for us to make space for those differences without censuring them.

At the spring in the desert, exiles can hear God’s questions to them—where have you come from? where are you going?—and begin to explore the answers deep within their souls. If they are given the space to truly hear these questions, they most often respond with transparency that is needed both for themselves and their communities.

In the face of Hagar’s transparency, God speaks over her an identity and a future, and she—an outsider, a slave, and a woman—does something radical. She names God. El Roi, the God who sees me. This is the deep need of millennial exiles: to know that they are seen and given a future by God. It is only in accompanying them into their deserts of grief and alienation, only in valuing their sense of exile and marginalization as things important to God, that the noise of expectation and the buzz of cynicism will be cleared away for them to hear the questions God is inviting them to respond to out of their whole hearts.

And like Hagar, these exiles will have names for God that will enrich and enliven the whole body of Christ in ways both ancient and new. If we can allow them to inhabit their griefs, if we can companion them on the way to the spring at Shur, we will be given the honor of hearing God speak vision and value to a generation whose ways of seeing will help us all see God more clearly, more fully.