Faith Formation in a Secular Age : Volume 1 (Ministry in a Secular Age): Responding to the Church's Obsession with Youthfulness

We struggle with MTD because we have not realized that we’ve lost the essential nutrients of the believability of transcendence.

These young people had lived in the free space of childhood play and education given to them by the affluence of suburban mass society. This form of consumer space and education had made individual desire more innate to them than the dutiful submission to authority that mobilized their parents.

I wondered whether one of the reasons we continue to spin our wheels when it comes to faith formation is that we’ve yet to wrestle with our history, particularly the history that begins in “the days of the youth movement.” This history, I believe, not only produces in us an obsession with youthfulness, opening the church to a kind of idolatry, but

Youthfulness, then, is not necessarily the lived and concrete experience of young people, but a disposition or frame of mind that best delivers authenticity.

The church is critiqued in the age of authenticity for being boring, and there are ways that this is just a juvenile obsession with youthfulness, a kind of spoiled tantrum. But in another sense, this critique reveals that the church has not always created space for the depth of experience itself.

The age of authenticity has made everything natural, material, and cultural, leading us to seek robust, consequential, and vital processes of faith formation that persuade individuals to authentically choose the path of Christian faith over all the other paths before them.

Raised in the land of consumption and advertising, the youth of the late 1960s were led to see their individual drives to consume as central to the authenticity of their very self.

Charismatic and Pentecostal expressions of Christianity have fared much better in the age of authenticity because at a minimum they are entertaining, but at their best they create space for experience—most powerfully, experiences of transcendence.

Kristol wrote, an ‘amiable philistinism’ is inherent in bourgeois society. The high arts are not accorded a lot of respect, but popular culture flourishes (and every movie has a happy ending)”

I became aware that over the whole of our thirty-five-minute phone conversation not once did faith take on a dimension of divine action, nor did anyone (myself included) think to help us define what we actually