Ministry to Gen Zed

Reverend Dr. Todd Statham is a Christian Reformed campus director at the University of British Columbia on the Okanagan campus in Kelowna, British Columbia.

I’m a missionary to the university and a campus pastor, and both of those identities are very significant for me. I was trained to be a pastor, but God’s call took me deeper into academia rather than congregational ministry. I’m blessed now to be a pastor in the academic context of the university where these two callings of pastor and academic merge really wonderfully and add to that this kind of missionary identity. Every pastor, elder or Christian lay person is a missionary to some extent because congregations embody God’s mission in action, but a campus pastor is also a missionary as an extension of a local congregation, and the university or college is definitely a strategic mission field in 21st century Canada. There’s a great book written back in the 1950s by a Lebanese Christian named Charles Malik who was an integral part of the United Nations in the ’50s. His book offers a Christian perspective on the university, and he has an image that I like where he says the university is like a lever by which you move society, and I think he’s right. Universities are levers that can move our nation for good and bad because a lever can move things in the wrong direction, too. Post-secondary institutions shape our culture for good and bad. They form ideas, they perpetuate them, they fill young heads with them. The criticisms we hear right now by politicians and pundits about the declining value of a university degree are not without merit, but the university remains a lever. It’s hugely important in our society, and therefore, it’s a strategic mission field, not least because most people on the university campus are the younger generation who are the future of our nation and the future of our churches. So, we want Christ proclaimed on our campuses, and we want the biblical story to jostle for position with all the other stories that our pluralistic culture looks to for meaning. We want the next generation to be shaped to love God with their hearts, their souls and their minds. So, the campus is a strategic mission field, and I thank God for this calling to be a missionary to the undergraduates, graduate students, international students, faculty, and admin at UBC.

What else is there for students, for hearts to turn to and trust to find life and hope? What else is out there? It’s a wasteland.

So, what does this mission field look like right now? What does renewal look like among the so-called generation Zed? I’m going to share a few anecdotes and reflections, and I’ll qualify what I’m going to say by reminding you that my mission field is a single university campus. I’m not speaking for all campuses everywhere. So, I’m generalizing to an extent. Maybe that’s not your experience either. But I’m going to look a little bit at what the campus environment looks like right now and what that might say to people in congregations like yours who are hungering for God’s renewal of his kingdom, of his church, and of the spread of his kingdom. I’m going to approach this question of renewal through a biblical passage just to give us a little bit of structure. There’s a great passage of renewal from the prophet Jeremiah. And Jeremiah is nicknamed by tradition the weeping prophet, because he weeps so often. He gets down. He gets despondent, almost giving up hope on God’s judging, saving renewal of his people. Maybe Jeremiah is a good patron saint for the Renewal Fellowship as we weep and mourn over the state of the Presbyterian Church in Canada and pray for renewal. But before renewal comes decline. And Jeremiah starts there. So this is from chapter 17.

This is what the Lord says. Cursed is the one who trusts in man, who draws strength from mere flesh and whose heart turns away from the Lord. That person will be like a bush in the wastelands. They will not see prosperity when it comes. They will dwell in the parched places of the desert, in a salt land where no one lives. But blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when the heat comes. Its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit. Amen.

I find Jeremiah’s tree image here so resonant with a secular Canada full of hearts that have turned from the living God. Specifically, the person whose heart has turned from the Lord is like three things. Firstly, that person will be like a bush in the wastelands. They will dwell in the parched places of the desert in a salt land where no one lives. This is how Jeremiah says in longer form that the world is a mess, a bang-on description of our society right now, right here. It’s bleak. People are worried about the future, especially young people. Almost half of Gen Zed when surveyed said they weren’t planning to have children because the world is wrecked and it’s not going to get better. We’re in a wasteland.

Early in the term, I was speaking with a Christian student. I hadn’t seen her for a while and I asked where she’d been. She said she just took the fall term off from her classes, and I was sympathetic. I said, “Oh, were your classes too hard? You needed to take a break.” She said, “No, they weren’t too hard. They were too awful. I needed to take a break because they were awful.” She’s studying cultural studies, anthropology. Probably that’s her mistake. It’s not that she’s hearing professors criticize Christianity. That’s normal. She’s used to that. Her skin’s thickened. She was getting down because her professors were constantly criticizing humanity as a plague, as an infection on the world, regretting humanity as a scourge on the earth. This is a kind of secular gospel one is hearing increasingly on campus, that the only hope for our world is a kind of post-human future born out of either technological progress or some kind of cataclysmic environmental failure. Either way, the future is a post-human one. Humanity is to be dispensed with. That would get me down, too, if I were hearing that constantly from my lecturers. I organized a couple of lectures for Christian students last term, one on a Christian approach to artificial intelligence and the other by a friend of mine who teaches biology on bearing the image of God in an age of crisis. These were really appreciated by Christian undergraduates because this is the cutting edge of Christian apologetics right now in our time and place. A couple of generations ago, we might have been trying to argue with undergraduates that God exists. Now we have to argue with them that humankind exists and that it’s a good thing that we’re here.

Jeremiah’s second point is that we’re in a kind of wasteland. And it’s lonely out here in a salt land where no one lives. As we all know, loneliness troubles the extremes of our society, like the old folks and the younger people. Just before COVID, the CBC did a survey of Canadian campuses, and they found out that two-thirds of undergraduate students said they feel lonely most of the time. I cringe to think what that number would be now. I facilitate a faculty group for Christian faculty. We have a great time. There’s usually about eight to ten come. Five or six times a year we meet, and two of us among the group will give a talk on some of our research. We encourage the lecturers and professors to integrate faith and theology and religion into whatever they’re talking about into their research and presentations because we want to make this a kind of secure place for them to feel like they can be Christian academics. But really what we’re doing is creating a group of friends in a very lonely environment. So, we have great conversation, good wine, and growing friendships. It’s beautiful. Interestingly, in the last 18 months, two professors asked to join our faculty group who aren’t Christian at all. One of them is an atheist and the other is Muslim. I asked both of them, “Why would you want to join a faculty group that’s explicitly Christian and where we often give papers on things related to Christian theology?” And both men answered exactly the same way: “I’m really, really lonely.” This is a campus, a salt land where no one lives. This is my context, but your context is the same. It’s a lonely world we’re in. Don’t underestimate the attraction of even a small group of believers in this lonely world. We’re lonely and parched.

This is the third thing that Jeremiah says: Where do hearts turn now to see a vision of the good and the true and the beautiful, to hear words of comfort and hope? Now that Christianity has been devalued or dismissed, it’s all about trust. When we don’t trust the living God, we end up with no one to trust and nothing in which to put our trust. But we’ve got to trust something. And so, we see so-called “woke” students. It’s a kind of pseudo religion. But there’s also a revival of all sorts of weird religious paraphernalia among generation Zed. Horoscopes have made a comeback among young people. In a secular scientific age, they are into amulets, meditation, tarot cards, divination – really weird stuff, pagan stuff. If you’re interested, you can follow up with a book by Tara Isabella Burton, “Strange Rites”, which came out a couple of years ago. This is based on her doctoral research at Oxford. A really fascinating read on what Gen Zed is into spiritually. It’s all over the place. It’s crazy. I’ll give you an example.

Over the last five years, I’ve developed at UBC a spirituality room that’s embedded in the institution and offers faith support from a variety of religions to students of that demographic. After many years, we managed to get a room dedicated to spiritual and religious purposes on campus, and I have to oversee the room in my role as coordinating chaplain. I was contacted last year by a young woman who wanted to book the spirituality space, and she asked to perform a religious ritual just for herself. So here’s the loneliness I’m talking about: she wanted to set up a temporary altar in the room and burn a peanut butter and jam sandwich as a sacrifice to whatever spirit would listen to her. I’m not making this up. A peanut butter and jam offering. Now, in my university role, I have to support students of all spiritual needs, even when they’re crazy like that. But I actually had to decline her request because the spirituality room we have isn’t vented for burning anything. So, I got off on a technicality there, but my heart broke for her. A PBJ offering to whatever god would hear. I mean, this is a desperation that’s born of a heart weary in the wasteland, right? Searching for something. I come across this sort of Tik Tok spirituality all the time. A little bit of this and a little bit of that. It’s often silly. You know, John Calvin says famously that the human heart is a factory for idols. But where a couple of generations ago, we’d be more inclined to see the idols of money and career, now we’re seeing more explicitly religious idols. This is concerning, but at the same time, it shows that hearts are restless. And I think they’re restless for the real thing. St. Augustine said, “The heart is restless above all because it can find rest only in the real God.” And that’s our hope for renewal, in a sovereign God. And the fact is that the human heart, however rebellious, is still attuned to God, even as we’ve turned away from him. And it’s easy to despair of the state we’re in, like Jeremiah did. And like I said, Jeremiah came close to quitting on God a few times, but he didn’t. And nor should we. We’re people of hope and we’re people of faith. And like God says in Jeremiah 32, “I am the Lord, the God of all flesh. Is anything too hard for me?” To which the answer is a resounding “No”. We’re resurrection people. We can imagine beyond death. And faith gives us a sight for where God is active. And God is active right now. I’ll just give you a couple of examples of where I’m seeing God moving in renewal among Gen Zed on campus and specifically among students. Faculty are a different issue. They’re going to be a hard one to crack spiritually. You know, in one of Leonard Cohen’s last songs before he died, something like the blues, he sings, “There is no God in heaven, there is no hell below. So says the great professor of all there is to know.” He’s kind of poking his finger at the smugness of professors. But among students, something’s happening in our lonely, parched culture right now. And God is on the move.

I detect no appetite among young seekers for diluted forms of Christianity, watered-down gospels.

I was chatting just before Christmas with a graduate student who had just started attending church. And of course, I wanted to know why she was attending church. She says, “Well, in every single one of my classes, professors are constantly slamming Christianity.” She’s in social work, which is very hostile to Christianity. So, she says, “I’m hearing repeatedly that the church is responsible for everything wrong in society, but I figured I should experience firsthand just how awful Christianity is.” So, she bought a Bible and she started reading it. And then she went to church one Sunday and she hasn’t stopped doing either of those since then. It’s amazing. This is how God is at work. In the Christian Reformed Church, we have a contemporary testimony of faith called “Our world belongs to God”. It’s like “Living Faith” in the Presbyterian Church, but it’s actually much better. There’s a line in it that says, “God holds this world with fierce love.” And I go back to that line a lot, that God holds this world with fierce love. And I marvel at how fierce his resolve is in a university context that’s just saturated with prejudice and hostility. There are signs of life out there. Through my Bible study that I had last winter term, we had about 20 students coming, and a quarter of them weren’t Christians or were just on the cusp of faith. They weren’t committed entirely, but they were deeply interested. A number of them got baptized in the summer. What else is there for students, for hearts to turn to and trust to find life and hope? What else is out there? It’s a wasteland. People are parched. Sometimes we hear people talking about a quiet revival among Gen Zed. You might have heard of this, that there’s an uptick in church attendance and interest. Anecdotally that definitely strikes a chord with me. I don’t see big numbers. I definitely see an increase in participation. But it’s more the earnestness of the students that blows me away. Students are interested in truth and in beauty. They’re interested in things that last because they’ve been raised in an era of deep fakes and ephemeral social media. This term, I’m doing a small group with my student leader who’s in the fine arts program, and she really wanted to do a small group centred around a novel which I’ve never done before. We chose one of the most demanding, greatest Christian novels there is, which is Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 19th century novel, “Crime and Punishment”. It’s an extremely demanding novel that is centred around a murder. It’s dark. It’s gloomy. And there’s this thread of resurrection running through it. I thought we’d get maybe two or three students coming out to read a 700-page novel. But we have 15 students who come every week to work through this massive novel. Two of those students aren’t Christians, but they’re absolutely captivated with the Christian moral vision. To put it technically, they would say they can’t quite commit to our metaphysics, but they love the moral vision of the Christian faith. This to me is a good example of just the earnestness of this generation as they seek. G.K. Chesterton wrote in orthodoxy over 100 years ago how we’re always rushing around to create our own systems, and then we turn around and we find Christianity sitting up there shining in the sunlight thousands of years old. And I do think that this return to ancient truths might just be offering what the modern institutions and ideologies have failed to provide for young people.

Blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out it sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes. It leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought, never fails to bear fruit.

So, a couple of years ago, my wife and I were gifted with a trip to the Middle East to Egypt, Jordan, and Israel. And when we were in Jordan, in a place called Wadi Rum, we saw a magnificent tree out in the desert, in the middle of the Wadi: this tree with green leaves and deep, deep roots that can withstand the desert heat and drought. And this tree is Jeremiah’s tree, right? This is the heart that has responded to trusting in Christ our Saviour. A heart that’s nourished by prayer, Scripture, sacraments, worship, and acts of loving service to our neighbour – all those things that bind us close to God. Blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord. No matter where we were as we hiked around in that desert, our eyes kept getting drawn back laser focused on this tree. No matter where we were, amidst all the death, we kept seeing this sign of green life. And I think in a cultural wasteland, the one that we’re living in right now, we shouldn’t wonder if people, particularly young people, have their eyes drawn to this living tree, this green tree. This is the beauty of hearts that are trusting in God, a sign of life in the wasteland that we’re in.

Why the hell would I go to a church that looks like a disco? If I was going to go to a church, I’d go to a church.

So, what might all this mean for your congregation and where you’re at? I want to just throw out in closing a couple of thoughts and some practical way markers for PCC congregations as you engage or not with Gen Zed. If your congregation is this green tree, what might Gen Zed notice about it with their eyes on you? Although I could say more, I’m just going to throw out three things.

The first thing to notice if this tree is green and alive is that your congregation is a place where the gospel is central, where the Bible is being preached in its fullness, and where rigorous discipleship habits are front and centre. We want congregations to be spiritually accessible, but we don’t want them to take it easy on Gen Zed. I detect no appetite among young seekers for diluted forms of Christianity, watered-down gospels. I think that’s good news for people in the Renewal Fellowship. Young people want the Christian faith in totality. They want the whole Bible as the great story of the whole world. This has often been a mistake historically when Presbyterian churches have engaged in ecumenical campus ministry or chaplaincy, partnered with the United Church and the Anglican Church. In my experience, many of these ecumenical connections are often beholden to university ideologies. They’re not presenting the robust gospel, the one that calls people to repentance and offers them new life. I don’t think there’s much appetite among young people for that right now, if there ever was. They can get those ideologies on campus. We want to offer them something different. So be robust in your biblical theology and unashamed of the gospel. People want to hear it.

Secondly, I would say that these green trees in the desert that eyes are being drawn to have worship and liturgy that is relevant and meaningful but not trendy. I guess there’s a kind of balance here. As some of my best and brightest students come to faith and grow, they’re often attracted to becoming Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, or even Anglican, in part because those churches offer liturgies that are vertical and horizontal. They have to do not just with me and the people around me, but they have to do with me and God. These are liturgies that draw us up to God. And they’re often beautiful, too.

I was just talking to a student a couple of months ago who’s interested in Christianity. He’s not a Christian yet. He said, “You know, I think as I’m interested in faith, I want to grow. What should I do?” And I said, “Well, you should get connected to a local church. That’s the best place to explore faith.” He said, “Okay, so what’s the most beautiful church in Kelowna?” And I was taken aback by that, and I said, “Well, I’m not sure that’s probably the first question you should ask.” I would say, as a reformed Christian, where’s the best preaching? But I found that fascinating in his secular mind. He wants to explore God, and he immediately connects it to beauty. Isn’t that remarkable? We have a cold, ugly, secular world. And for him, Christian faith and God instinctively are related to beauty.

We want to be intentional about liturgy and worship. I don’t even think it’s about having contemporary worship versus traditional. It’s just about being excellent. Excellent worship and liturgy that’s intentional, that’s God-focused, and that’s not trendy. I’ll give you one more example during orientation back in September. Orientation is the big event on campus when all the new students come, and they get exposed to all the clubs and activities, and a number of community organizations can come up during this orientation day. So a number of churches came up and had a booth, which is great. Good for them. One of the big churches near the campus which is very trendy, very hyper-contemporary, has the worship service that’s kind of concert-like with smoke machines and lights and a rock band. They were handing out flyers inviting people to their church service. Good for them, but the flyer said something like, “We’re a church, but we’re really like a disco.” And it had a kind of cool ’70s theme. A kid was walking by my chaplaincy table with this flyer in his hand, and he was talking to his friend, clearly not a churchgoer, and he says, “Why the hell would I go to a church that looks like a disco? If I was going to go to a church, I’d go to a church.” As a Presbyterian/Reformed guy, I just love that because you don’t do disco in the Renewal Fellowship. Presbyterians can’t do disco, nor should we, but we can do church. And if that church is traditional, there’s lots of promise for that for young people.

The last thing is that these green trees in the desert are going to be hospitable communities. They’re going to be communities where young people are welcomed in as they are, with all their questions and doubts and all the messiness of their faith. There’s a remarkable hunger among Gen Zed for mentorship and discipleship. This is a very, very teachable generation, not like my generation which wouldn’t listen to our elders or seek their advice or wisdom. Gen Zed indeed covet relationships with older people who are people of faith and can share from their wisdom and experience. This is a lonely generation. They’re adrift. They’re addicted to their phones. They get all this information that’s running through them at hyper-speed. Conversations with people who’ve been around and can share godly wisdom from their experience is a gift. That’s a gift that the PCC can share with younger people because you are an aging demographic. But that gray hair can be the gift of silver wisdom to our young people nowadays. I see this desire for mentorship especially among young men who are really almost a lost generation but also among young women, too. So think of your aging congregation as a kind of spiritual resource practising hospitality by deeply investing in their lives.