Church Headed for Millennial Iceberg: Author of The New Copernicans

I had a chance to talk about church with a couple of evangelical millennials recently.

During the conversation, they expressed a deep commitment to their faith. But they weren’t so sure about the churches they attend.

The way church is being done today just doesn’t seem to be doing it for them—especially the emphasis on the sermon. Services felt too much like educational programs, with a few songs thrown in.

“I can get all the information I need about faith on this,” said one, pointing to his phone.

So what did they want from church instead?

“I want to experience the presence of God,” he said, as the other agreed.

They aren’t alone. Growing numbers of younger Christians feel the same way says John Seel, author of the new book The New Copernicans: Millennials and the Survival of the Church.

Seel, who directs the New Copernican Empowerment Dialogues at The Sider Center at Eastern University in St. David’s PA, uses the experience of 16^th century astronomer Nicolas Copernicus as the central theme of this book.

Just as Copernicus posited the then-heretical idea that the earth revolves around the sun, today’s new Christian Copernicans see the world of faith different from what their elders are telling them.

For Seel, 65, and a father of three millennials, the book is a warning to church leaders—especially evangelical leaders—to start making space for this new way of believing.

“There is a looming cultural frame shift, largely carried by millennials, which if ignored is poised to threaten the evangelical church,” he writes, adding this shift also affects mainline churches and Roman Catholicism.

According to Seel, this shift is marked by how millennials reject enlightenment and analytical ways of practicing faith—a binary approach where things are either/or, true/false and right/wrong—to a more intuitive, exploratory, non-judgmental and inclusive approach.

It’s also a rejection of the more propositional approach to faith characteristic of so many churches, a way that starts with the head before moving to the heart and hands.

Millennials, he says, do it the other way around.

They “prioritize lived experience over abstract reflection,” he says, not the “intellectualist model of education” which many churches continue to promote today.

They are also more open to different ways to ascertaining truth, he says.

For them, faith is “an uneasy and ever-changing mix of viewpoints and perspectives . . . more opaque angles than straightforward reasons, more picture than proposition, more poetry than prose.”

Their spiritual journey is “best understood as trust, rather than merely a cognitive category associated with certainty . . . more open road than mental fortress,” he states.

If churches that still have youth want to keep them, they will need to create space for them to share their views and find ways to accommodate new ways of thinking about faith, he says—not double-down on biblical absolutes, doctrines and moral codes.

And if they don’t?

Then millennials will drift away, he states, noting that the ranks of the “nones” are already being filled by many young people who no longer feel welcome in established churches.

For me, the book resonates with my experience with many millennial Christians—and with older Christians, too.

It makes me think that being a new Copernican isn’t a matter of age; more and more Christians of all ages are feeling a sense of dis-ease about the way Christian faith is taught, promoted and practiced by many churches today.

One thing that surprised me about the book was how few references there were to the LGBTQ issue. This has become a demarcation line between many younger and older Christians, today.

When I asked Seel about that, he acknowledged it’s a key issue. But he didn’t write much about it, he said, because of the polarizing way it is framed by many evangelicals today.

To spend too much time on it would have distracted from the main point of the book, he suggested—and maybe prevented some from reading it altogether.

Another thing I wonder is how sociologists and historians might view Seel's sweeping view of history and philosophy—about the change from enlightenment thinking to how many view the world today..

Not being a scholar of either of those disciplines, it's hard for me to tell if his observations are correct.

Yet I share Seel's conviction that something is different today—something has indeed, shifted in the way many North Americans see the church and their Christian faith.

Along with Copernicus, another image Seel uses in the book is the Titanic.

Just as the captain of that doomed ship believed it was unsinkable, some church leaders today are overly-confident of the future of their way of practicing faith.

But there are icebergs ahead, Seel writes, so they better take heed of the danger.

The iceberg presented by millennials, he says, “isn’t going anywhere, the only question is how soon we will have to face it.”

From the August 5, 2018 Winnipeg Free Press. 

Click here to read a follow-up interview with the author, John Seel.