Tim Wood of Ad Crucem News has a thought-provoking piece entitled “Are Your Pews Filling With Young and New Christians?” It is a look at recent trends in Christianity, which ACN calls “three partly overlapping Christian revivals underway across the world.”

The word “revival” is, of course, not used in the sense of tent-meetings and faith-healing roadshows. Rather, we are seeing a renewal of actual Christianity among celebrities, in the public square, and among young people.

Mr. Wood lists a sample of twenty recent conversions to Christianity, about two-thirds of which are to traditional and liturgical church bodies. The renewal of the Christian faith of a traditionalist and liturgical bent is found among young Christians - including younger LCMS Christians.

As a teacher of Lutheran high school students, I can certainly vouch for this observation. And my teaching of both Christian and non-Christian teenagers in a secular context also confirms the observations of ACN regarding this demographic cultural shift.

As usual, the “Church Growth Movement” (CGM) - including its modern incarnation focusing on “leadership” and “best practices” and outflanking the seminaries - has it all backward. In trying to reach the youth, they are clinging to their moldy-oldy “Ditch the Liturgy” methodology. In my opinion, this is wrongheaded on a number of levels, the least of their transgressions being that it is demographically foolish. In trying to cash in on our culture’s current rampant secularism and disconnection with the church, they overlook the fact that those who are currently connecting with the church are rejecting the very things that the modern CGM is pushing. The church-growthers are hopelessly living in the past, and they don’t know what time it is.

In other words, those who are coming to the Christian faith in this current revival are overwhelmingly looking for depth over shallowness, communion over “relationships,” meaning over emotionalism, truth over sales and marketing and manipulation. They are looking for expressions of Christianity that are real and profound and rooted in both the historical and the transcendent.

In the past, the assumption was that young people wanted something new, something that rejected the old, something that broke away from history and heritage and formality. But today’s youth culture is different. They have seen the devastating results of loose sexuality, marriage laxity, “do what thou wilt” libertinism, and churches that embrace this secular (and Satanic) worldview. They don’t want this for themselves or for their children. And they do indeed want children, and see being parents - including being mothers - as noble and good and godly, not a mere speedbump on the way to “more important” (and worldly status-bearing) work outside the home, more prestigious lifestyles based on the world’s adoration and adulation.

Young people are rebels against the rebellion. And in the words of the YouTube commentator Paul Joseph Watson, “Conservatism is the new counter-culture.” And this conservatism doesn’t manifest itself in the tepid, slightly right-of-center moderate neo-conservatism of their grandparents who think of the Bushes as flag-bearers of the right wing. They are cut of a different cloth.

Again, those who are paying attention to this sort of thing will notice that young people, as well as those leaving the secular faith for the greener pastures of Christendom, are not interested in ginned-up emotionalism, programs, pop-music, shallow expressions of “worship,” vapid “praise songs,” and goofy preaching by unimpressive clowns who make the Christian faith just one more thing that people are running away from.

In the LCMS, we have all of the things these revivals want:

• We are a historical, catholic communion grounded in a serious, cruciform theology.

• Our worship, in the authentic Article 24 expressions of our tradition, is unabashedly liturgical.

• We have hymnody that combines gravitas with grandeur, theological rigor with artistic excellence, time-tested confessions of the faith (fides quae) that bolster our faith (fides qua), and deliver comfort even in the face of death.

• Our pastors are traditionally well-educated, forged by intellectually rigorous seminary formation, and respected by theologians throughout Christendom.

• We are catholic, orthodox, and evangelical, embracing both the primacy of Scripture and the freedom to make use of ancient liturgical tradition.

• We have a heritage of beautiful art, magnificently constructed sanctuaries, reverent reception of sacraments, and a high view of preaching.

• At at the center of it all is Jesus Christ crucified: the atoning sacrifice not offered to a mere few, not dependent upon personal decisions, but a forensic justification for all, won at the cross, confirmed in the tomb, and received by faith by means of Word and Sacrament.

In short, we have the very thing that the world wants, and needs, as evidenced by this multifaceted revival. And while there are some folks coming to us, why aren’t there more?

I argue that it is because so many of our pastors and churches have traded away our birthright for a deceptive pottage of lust - of casting covetous eyes upon the non-denominational megachurch and its numbers. I also think that some of our pastors and churches have simply fallen away from the rigorous Christian expression of, in the words of the sainted Kenneth Korby, “our catholic Book of Concord.”

As a recent example, a friend of mine from outside the United States is considering flying into a certain city. He was inquiring about churches there. Using the LCMS locator, I checked out the websites of each one. To my horror and disappointment - but sad to say, not to my surprise - there was not a single LCMS church in that city that I could recommend. And all of them are - surprisingly - liturgical. But they are sloppy and weak. The hymns chosen for Divine Service were the most feeble in the hymnal. The liturgy was conducted in such a slovenly and careless way that suggests that the pastor and people don’t really believe this stuff, and are just going through the motions. The preaching was wretched, and the pastors were cracking jokes and yammering on without actually proclaiming the Gospel. These men did not impress. They were not Ambrose of Milan in the pulpit. They were not Augustine or Luther in their presentation and articulation of the faith. They were not Bo Giertz at the altar. There was no sense that they were raising the dead, or that anything supernatural was happening. It just looked like people going to work. Every single church had women readers. What’s up with that? When did our pastors become so lazy that they quit doing their jobs? If they are trying to resurrect the ancient clerical office of subdeacon or lector, why are these minor offices of the clergy being filled by the fairer sex? And why are we aping Vatican II and its feminist nonsense?

So, I could not recommend any LCMS congregation in this city. Maybe there is something better in the ‘burbs, but having asked in the past, I don’t think so. The good news is that the pastors and the laity in these churches are chronologically advanced. The younger people coming behind them are more likely to take (and express) the faith seriously. We need our seminaries, our professors, our “influencers,” our authors, and yes, our ministerium and our praesidium, to actively discourage the “playing church” that is all-too-common, and intentionally model what we are called to be, and what we confess to be: liturgical, confessional, evangelical catholics - who are serious about what we believe, and are willing to stake eternity on this confession. We need to make this happen now, and we need to be intentional and unabashed in doing so.

If we continue on the current path in the midst of this revival, we will be judged, and people will just overlook us and go elsewhere - and they themselves will be the poorer for it. May it not be so!

Tim Wood hits the bullseye with this observation:

Parts of the LCMS seem unnerved by the young men. This is unsurprising because the Synod also mirrors its national cultural context, which is distrustful of and cynical about young men, especially when they wear crucifixes visibly and proudly. Likewise, the Synod seems more inclined to be hospitable to heavily tattooed single mothers than pious young ladies sporting mantillas, hoping to mother several braces of unvaccinated tallow-fed children and who are hostile to female ordination.

As an aside, I’m not against hospitality to “heavily tattooed single mothers” by any means. And I don’t believe Tim Wood is either. But I get his point. I have heard from enough young women, and from pastors, that I’m certain that there is often more angst and discomfort in our congregations over young women wearing skirts and veils than over young women in revealing tops and tight jeans. Maybe we’re just not quite ready for the rebellion against the rebellion.

Wood concludes with these wise words for us to ponder:

Our Synod is amid a tremendous opportunity to revitalize our congregations and do long-term demographic rehabilitation. Evangelize and catechize the youngsters, pair them, marry them, find them jobs, and baptize their many children!

Ad Crucem News has its finger on the pulse of where our faith meets the culture.