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It is my pleasure to introduce Rachel Held Evans as the Robert F. Jones Lecturer for 2014 Midwinter Lecture Series at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. This lectureship was established in 1949 by the women of the church of First Presbyterian Church, Fort Worth, Texas, and these lectures are funded annually. Rachel is a New York Times best-selling author of Evolving in Monkey Town and A Year of Biblical Womanhood.

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Yesterday in her lecture and several other times around campus in conversations, she has insisted to us that she is just a blogger. But she's one who has been featured on NPR and Slate and the BBC and the Washington Post and the Huffington Post and on Oprah and was recently named one of Christianity Today's 50 Women to Watch. Yesterday, we heard about her questions and commitments that became the substance of her book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood. We heard about her neighbor, who, while working on his car in his driveway, finally had to ask why she was sitting on the roof of her house.

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We heard about why she could not dance with her husband or touch any mails about a particular wedding they attended. We heard about her not ignoring troubling texts. Rachel, we again look forward to your precision with words. to your humor that reveals, even as it prompts us to laughter, and to your valor that lets questions be a part of your journey of faith.

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Again, welcome. Thank you. Shout out to Overflow. So you guys, I totally changed the topic last minute.

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We evangelicals do this all the time. If it goes badly, we blame it on the Holy Spirit. So You'll just have to bear with me.

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I have been learning a lot this week, and I'm so grateful for the warm, warm welcome. I've been keeping a list of new words that I'm learning. And yesterday I learned I'm definitely not a supersessionist. Today I learned about perichoresis, which I'm going to work into a sentence, even though I'm still not entirely sure what it means.

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And my favorite word is liturgics. I knew what a liturgy was, I knew what liturgical was, but I've never heard it used as liturgics, which I guess that's what Jen does. And I like that because it sort of sounds like an exercise or some sort of machinery of some kind. But thank you all for just the great conversations we've had.

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I've learned a lot and it's just been such a blessing to be in your company. And I'm just grateful for you all and grateful for the welcome. So I decided to change my topic based on just conversations we were having in between sessions, and because of some other things I've written on this topic, about why young adults are leaving the church. And everyone knows this is a big topic, and obviously, because many of you are in church leadership, this is a topic that's important to you.

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So often I'm asked, as a young adult, why are young adults leaving the church, and how do we get them back? spoiler alert, I have no idea. I don't know why exactly young people leave the church, and I don't know exactly how to get them back. This is a topic that historians and sociologists, church leaders and statisticians can speak to with a lot more knowledge and authority than I can.

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And even the trends I'm going to talk about today are hotly contested by folks in the know who like to wrangle about how the questions are asked in the different surveys and about definitions of terms and sample size and history. And so the truth is nobody really knows for sure why young adults are leaving the church and how to to get them back. People leave churches for a lot of reasons, and many of them are deeply personal.

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So it would be irresponsible for me or anyone to speak definitively on this topic or to paint an entire generation with a broad brush. Now I barely count as a millennial. I was born in 1981, so I sort of have 1 foot in Generation X, 1 foot in the millennial generation. Basically,

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I grew up listening to Pearl Jam and Nirvana. I grew up where I knew all of my friends' phone numbers by heart. Do you remember that? And now I can't even call my husband without looking on my phone, right?

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So I sort of have lived with one foot in both generations, but I think I identify most with the ethos of the millennial generation. So while people can't really agree on exactly why young adults are leaving, everyone agrees that they are in fact leaving. especially here in the U.S. In the U.S., 59% of young people ages 18 to 29 with a Christian background have dropped out of church.

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And Among those who came of age around the year 2000, the so-called millennials, a solid quarter claimed no religious affiliation at all, making them significantly more disconnected from faith than members of Generation X, were at a comparable time in their lives and twice as disconnected as baby boomers were as young adults. So, you know, that's a trend that we tend to see, that people leave the church at this age, but my generation is leaving it at a much higher rate than generations previously.

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And it's estimated that 8 million young adults will leave the church before their 30th birthday. And as I'm sure you've heard, a large percentage of these young adults still consider themselves spiritual, just not religious, and many consider themselves followers of Jesus, just not in a church setting. So while secularism is certainly a part of this trend, it doesn't tell the whole story. There are plenty of millennials who understand themselves to be Christians, but for a lot of reasons have just lost their connection to church.

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This happened to me, too. I lost my connection to church for a while. So I've decided to entitle this lecture, Keep the Church Weird. And that's because when I got off the airplane here in Austin, one of the first things I saw in one of the stores in the airport was a tie-dye t-shirt that said, Keep Austin Weird, which I thought was pretty cool.

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Except did you guys know that Portland totally stole that from you? Yeah. I mean, I figured it was Texas's idea. I'm not going to...

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It's not Portland. They're such posers. But Portland has the same one. Keep Austin weird.

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Keep Portland weird. And I've called this lecture Keep the Church Weird, because I think the biggest mistake that church leaders make in trying to draw millennials back to the church is to try and sell it to them, to try and make the church cool. And I'm going to argue that that's actually the last thing millennials want. the last thing we want is to be sold another product.

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And that perhaps the best strategy for church leaders in responding to this crisis is to get out of the way and let Jesus do his thing, which might mean keeping the church a little weird. I'm going to start with a communion story. I don't really know what it's like to do what many of you do for a living. That is leading churches, being pastors, some of you are even youth pastors.

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But I got a little taste of the youth pastor world when I was invited to speak at a United Methodist youth group gathering of junior high students. Okay, now if you're at all familiar with my work, you know that junior high students aren't exactly like my target audience. I devoted an entire chapter of my last book to exploring what the Bible says about women on their periods. So I'm not, I don't have like a ton of suitable material just on hand.

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I'm also an introvert, and if anybody's ever been to a youth conference, you know that is just hell on earth for introverts. There's usually like lights and fog machines and bands. And at some point, somebody's going to say, everybody stand up and give a big hug to the person next to you. And all the introverts in the room are just like, no, please don't make me do this.

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So I knew I was going to be a little bit out of my comfort zone. I said, are you sure you want me to do this? I asked the Methodist. The Methodist said yes.

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I said, can you ensure there will not be a fog machine? The Methodist said they'd already ordered it. So If there's a fog machine, it's just, it's not really my speaking style, So I come out and I'm like, let's talk about the Greco-Roman household codes, kids.

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So I prepared for this for weeks. I stressed out about it. I slaved over the material. I wrote it and rewrote it and tried to whittle all my talks down to their essence.

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I called my old youth pastor for advice, talked to him for a couple of hours. I prayed about it night after night that I would find the right words. And then in a low moment, I got on the internet to sort of find out what the kids are into these days. And I had to Google Gangnam Style, which shows how out of the loop I was at the time.

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And I remember looking at Dan saying, I don't know whether they're enjoying this for real or ironically, I'm totally screwed. This is going to go really bad. So the day finally arrived and the event was at this beautiful camp in Lynchburg, Virginia. I spoke at four different sessions and before each session I prayed to God, just help me do right by these kids.

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Help me do right by these kids. Help me do right by these kids. I didn't completely blow it. I didn't talk about my period.

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And I came in under time. And I only noticed a few kids playing Angry Birds on their phones. So I thought, you know, it was pretty much a success. It wasn't great, but it wasn't a disaster.

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But after the last session, when all I wanted to do was go back to my room and curl up in the fetal position for a while, I was asked by the leaders of the event to help serve communion. And this is not something I do on a regular basis as a layperson, but I've been asked to help serve communion a few times, and every time it's been a very, very meaningful experience for me. And this was no exception. I was charged with handing out the bread.

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And as the music played, hundreds and hundreds of junior high students, there were about 7, or I think it was 400 junior high students in the first group, came up to me with their parents and their youth group leaders with their hands cupped together like this, which isn't that a vulnerable position to be in, to be asking to receive? Oh, such a vulnerable moment there. And I handed each one of them a piece of bread, and because this was the Methodist and this is how they said it, I said, this is Christ's body broken for you.

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Christ's body broken for you. Christ's body broken for you. Or as you all would probably prefer, the body of Christ, bread of heaven. The body of Christ, bread of heaven.

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The body of Christ, bread of heaven. And I said it over and over and over again to each person who came by, the ones who shuffled by and avoided my gaze, the ones who had tears falling down their face, The ones who reached out to me for a spontaneous hug. The kid in line who said, roll tide under his breath.

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The ones who giggled in line with their friends and the ones who came alone. The body of Christ, the bread of heaven. The body of Christ, the bread of heaven. The body of Christ, the bread of heaven.

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There are some in designer jeans, some in their pajamas, some with braces. They were the ones I could tell were athletes, the ones I could tell were class clowns, and the ones I could tell were probably picked on in school. And as the Methodists would say, this is Christ's body broken for you. This is Christ's body broken for you.

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Christ's body broken for you. And I looked in their faces and I saw shyness, anxiety, boredom, peace, vulnerability, hope. I saw broken families, conflicts with friends, Questions about sexuality, doubts about God, insecurities about that van ride home.

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Christ's body, bread of heaven. Christ's body, the bread of heaven. Christ's body, the bread of heaven. And after I said it about 300 or 400 times, I finally got it.

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Oh, this is enough. This gift of God to the people of God is enough. It isn't about me doing right by these kids. It's not about me being cool or likable or funny or relatable.

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It's about Jesus having already done right by them and continuing to do right by them. In fact, my insufficiency is kind of the point, right? Our insufficiency is kind of the point. God's strength is made perfect in our weakness.

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It's not about being up to the task. It's about getting out of the way. and letting Jesus do his thing because Jesus is always enough. Then after communion, we had a dance party because that's how the Methodist roll.

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It was awesome. I broke out some of my best moves. But we do this sometimes, don't we? make Christianity so much more complicated than it needs to be, especially when we're feeling discouraged, when we're feeling out of place, and when we're feeling over our heads or threatened.

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We try so hard to compensate for what we lack, we forget that our insufficiency is kind of the point, that our strength is made perfect in weakness, and that these gifts of God for the people of God are enough. I like how Barbara Brown Taylor puts it. I think it's in an altar in the world. In an age of information overload, the last thing any of us need is more information about God.

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We need the practice of incarnation, by which God saves the lives of those whose intellectual ascent has turned them dry as dust, who have run frighteningly low on the bread of life, who are dying to know more God in their bodies, not more about God, more God. So how does this relate to young adults and the church? Well, I think sometimes in our rush to try and get them back, we make the mistake of getting in our own way. We try too hard to be cool and it ends up backfiring on us.

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I'm often asked to speak on this topic to church leaders, usually evangelical church leaders. Although back when I first started, I was invited to speak to the United Church of Christ on this topic. And at the time, because I was new, I didn't know the difference between Churches of Christ and United Church of Christ. And there's kind of an ocean of difference between those two groups.

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So I'm like telling them, hey, we need to get past this young earth creationism thing. And they're like, yeah, you don't know who we are. So I've started reading the doctrinal statements of every group I speak to since then. And I have learned a lot about denominations.

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But since I'm technically a millennial and since I write about this on the blog so much, folks from all sorts of denominations will ask me to come in and tell them why my people are leaving, why my friends are leaving the church. And so I tell them a little bit about my own story, about growing up in the church, about getting frustrated with it, leaving for a while, and then finding my way back. And I talk about how this is a time in life when a lot of young adults have traditionally left the church, and conventional wisdom says they'll be back when they get married and they have kids, which may be true. And I confess that consumerism does play a role in all of this.

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My generation is indeed so accustomed to living life on demand, tailoring our media work and even our friends to our specific needs, that we find the messy, arduous business of the local church a bit too slow and cumbersome. So instead we listen to sermons on podcasts and we have our church via social media, which isn't an entirely bad thing, but I don't think it's enough. And then I step on a few toes and I explain some of the reasons why millennials like myself say we are leaving the church.

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So when we're asked, why do we say we're leaving? And this is based on research by the Barna Group and also Pew Research Center. We say that we're tired of the culture wars. We want to be known for what we're for and not just what we're against.

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We say we're tired of infighting within denominations. and we're finding that whole process exhausting and discouraging. We report that we feel like what happens in church is irrelevant to our everyday lives. Young adults say they feel like they have to choose between science and faith or between their intellectual integrity and following Jesus.

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And if you doubt that this is still a problem, keep in mind that last night while we were all gathered here, Bill Nye and Ken Ham, the creationist, had a debate that was broadcasted on the internet and 500,000 people tuned into that debate. So that's still happening. And for a lot of folks like me who grew up in that culture, we feel that a lot of this tension of, do I have to choose between my faith and believing science and believing this data?

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So that's still a big reason why young people leave. My generation says that we want the church to be a safe place to doubt, a safe place to wrestle with tough questions about everything from science to sexuality to biblical interpretation, instead of a place where church questions are treated with shame and suspicion. We want our gay and lesbian friends to feel totally welcome and affirmed in the church at all levels, not treated as second-class citizens in the kingdom, We want our faith to be more than just a set of beliefs to defend or rules to obey, but a lifestyle to live.

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We care about social justice and creation care and racial reconciliation and gender equality. We also love the Bible and we want the church to care about those things too. We want the church to look less like a social club or an ideology and more like Jesus. So invariably, after I've gone through this sort of litany of things, somebody in the back will raise his hand and say, so we're thinking of adding a coffee shop.

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They'll come back when we do that, right? And I proceed to bang my head on the podium. Because there's this idea that if we learn to make specialty coffee drinks, they will come back in droves. If we bring in a cooler worship band, they'll come back, right?

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And time and again, the assumption among church leaders is that the key to drawing millennials back to the church is to make a few style updates. A better band, more programs maybe, a coffee shop, that one comes up all the time. Updated technology, which yes, please make your websites functional, but that's not, they don't have to be flashy. But here's the thing, we millennials have been advertised to our entire lives.

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Everyone is trying to sell us something. Everyone is trying to convince us that their idea or their product is the next big thing. Everyone wants to go viral. Everyone's trying to entertain us.

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And because of this, we have very finely tuned BS meters. And they go off like crazy the moment somebody tries to sell us something. Church is the last place we want to be sold another product. It's the last place we want to be entertained.

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We're not looking for changes in style. We're looking for changes in substance. We're not looking for a hipper Christianity. We're looking for a truer Christianity, a more authentic Christianity.

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Like every generation before ours and every generation after, we're just looking for Jesus. And the thing is, you all know where to find Jesus. We know where Jesus is. We encounter Jesus in the Word.

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We encounter Jesus in communion. We encounter Him in suffering, where two or three are gathered in His name. We encounter Him in baptism, and we encounter Him in the least of these, the poor, the sick, the marginalized, the lonely, and the left out. This isn't new stuff.

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We encounter God in all the ordinary, unglamorous, everyday things that God uses to reach out to us, in bread, in wine, tears, touch, poetry, poverty, water, words, in confession, in the company of other believers. The God of the universe reaches out to us through these ordinary things, these things we can touch and taste and feel and hear, and yet we really sometimes don't believe that they're enough, do we? don't think that they're sufficient.

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So we panic. We make it all about ourselves. We try too hard to be cool. We add new programs and new rules and regulations.

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We make it about theology or denominationalism or numbers or branding. And we end up getting in our own way. Why do we do this? Well, I don't know.

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I mean, I think, why do I do this? I find myself doing this too. Sometimes I think it's because we're scared. I think we're scared that if we get out of the way, God might use people and methods we don't approve of, which God has a very nasty habit of doing.

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We're scared that if we get out of the way, things might get a little out of our control. We're scared that if we get out of the way, this grace thing might get out of hand. Well, guess what? It already has.

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Grace got out of hand the moment the God of the universe hung on a cross and said, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. Grace has been totally out of hand for 2,000 years, so we best get used to it. So we started with a story about communion, and I want to conclude with a story about baptism. And it's really, it's two stories.

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So everybody knows John the Baptist, right? You can always pick him out of a lineup of saints because he looks super scary. He's got like the crazy wild hair and He's got like locusts and sometimes there's a head on the platter, but he's still there and you're not really sure how that worked out.

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But it's like crazy eyes. I love John the Baptist. He's great. I mean, I know very little about saints, but I can always pick him out.

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But most people probably didn't expect John to turn out quite like this. Maybe they expected him to turn out more like his father, Zechariah, who was a temple priest. At the time, Jewish folks would go to the temple where they would receive this ritual cleansing in special baths in preparation for the sacrifices and festivals and that sort of thing. And John probably would have observed his father doing this as part of his priestly duties.

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But John didn't stay in the temple. John went into the wilderness and baptized people in rivers. And he did this to embody the prophecy of Isaiah, who declared that every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill will be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God. Prepare the way of the Lord, John the Baptist told the people.

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Make his paths straight. In other words, God's doing something big. God's doing something new. Get out of the way.

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Make a straight path. And I wonder if these words were going through Philip's mind when he encountered the Ethiopian eunuch. This is another crazy story from the Bible, which I love. After Jesus had risen from the dead and ascended into heaven, Philip, who was an evangelist, is sent by the Holy Spirit to the wilderness Rd.

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from Jerusalem to Gaza. And there Philip encountered a royal eunuch from Ethiopia who's reading Hebrew scripture from the back of his chariot, which I always wonder how the logistics of this worked out. Like he's reading in the back of the chariot, like how did Philip kind of like get up there and then they're talking about it and then it just seems like really a bumpy way to read scripture. Now understand,

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As a eunuch, this man would have been prohibited from entering the temple grounds, much less participating in temple rituals. He was a sexual and ethnic minority, and as such, he would have been excluded from the religious community in Jerusalem. So Philip approaches the chariot, again, I don't know how this worked out, and asks the eunuch if he understood the passage he was reading. And it was a passage about suffering.

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So they talk about it together, and Philip tells the eunuch about Jesus and about how when God became flesh, God suffered too. Overcome with joy, the eunuch looks out on the landscape around him and shouts, and this is so beautiful and vulnerable, look, here is water, what is to prevent me from being baptized? Perhaps for a moment Philip thought to himself, well, your anatomy for one thing, your ethnicity, your lack of knowledge, your status as an outsider, But maybe Philip remembered those words of John, prepare the way of the Lord, make his path straight.

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Because without another word, Philip baptizes the Ethiopian eunuch in the first body of water they could find. It may have been a puddle on the road. He got out of the way. But we religious types aren't very good at getting out of the way, are we?

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No. We're much better at building walls and retreating into temples. We're better at making mountains out of our ideologies and rules and our screwed up notions of who's in and who's out. But there's a voice in the wilderness calling us to repentance.

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It's not that hard. Just get out of the way. Prepare the way of the Lord. Make his path straight.

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Tear down the mountains and smooth out a path. Get out of the way and God will move. And sometimes I wonder if this is what Jesus meant when he said that with enough faith we can move mountains. Because most of the time, the hardest mountains to move are the ones of our own making, right?

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I'm going to conclude with a reading from my new book, which isn't finished. It was due in January. And I'm at the halfway point, which is just, oh, this isn't like on the internet or anything because my editor's unaware of that situation. It's amazing how long you can get away with almost done.

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I mean, it's kind of relative. And this book that I'm writing now is about church and my journey with church and wrestling with church and struggling with it and finding my way back. And as I was trying to figure out how I wanted to write this book, I decided to write it in seven sections around the sacraments. And this is not a theological statement or political or anything like that, because what I liked about arranging it around

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the sacraments was coming more from a literary perspective. I love the sacraments because they give us things to taste and touch and feel and smell. And as a writer, you need that stuff. You need that stuff of everyday life.

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And so I kind of wrote my story around the seven sacraments because even in churches that are not highly sacramental, we see those exhibited in the body of Christ in its various forms. Some form of communion, some form of confession, some form of baptism. And so this reading is from the section on baptism, and it's called Naked on Easter.

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In the early 1920s, archaeologists exploring the desert ruins of Dura Europos, a Roman border city in modern-day Syria, uncovered a series of crude frescoes on the walls of a Roman home. The frescoes surrounded a bathing pool and depicted several distinct scenes. A shepherd carrying a lamb on his shoulders, a woman at a well, two figures walking across the sea as their comrades watched from a ship, three women approaching a tomb.

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The archaeologists had discovered the baptistry of what remains the oldest known church building in the world. Nearly 2,000 years earlier, on Easter morning, just before the sun rose, flickering lamplight would have illuminated the drawings as new converts to Christianity kneeled, stark naked, in the water of the baptistry. One by one, the men separated from the women, each publicly affirmed the tenets of the faith and renounced Satan and his demons before being submerged three times in cold water. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

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Dost thou renounce Satan and all his angels and all his works and all his services and all his pride? Orthodox priests ask adult converts to this day. I do, says the convert. Dost thou unite thyself to Christ?

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I do. bow down also before him. I bow down before the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. After baptism, converts were given white robes to signify their new life in Christ and anointed with oil, marking them as members of the royal priesthood.

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They then joined their fellow believers to celebrate the Eucharistic meal for the first time. The process was repeated every year after several days of fasting and at the culmination of the solemn Easter vigil. Now these days, most churches don't begin their resurrection services with a bunch of wet, naked people renouncing Satan and his demons at 6 o'clock in the morning. Such an approach would draw far fewer visitors than elaborate passion plays and Easter egg hunts promising cash prizes.

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Yet historically, the Christian life began with the public acknowledgement of two uncomfortable realities, evil and death. And in baptism, the Christian makes the audacious claim that neither one has the final word. Now I'm as comfortable as the next Honda driving NPR listening in New York Times reading Progressive with the notion of exorcising demons. When I get to those stories in the New Testament, I'm inclined to take the sophisticated approach and assume the people who had demons cast out of them were healed of mental illness or epilepsy or something like that.

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which, when you think about it, simply requires exchanging one highly implausible story for another. But lately, I've been wondering if this leaves something important out, something true about the shape and nature of evil, which Alexander Schumann puts it, is not merely an absence of good, but the presence of a dark, irrational power. Indeed, our sins, hate, fear, greed, jealousy, lust, materialism, pride, can at times take such distinct forms in our lives that we recognize them in the faces of the gargoyles and grotesques that guard our cathedral doors.

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And these sins join in a chorus, you might even say a legion of voices locked in an ongoing battle with God to lay claim over our identity, to convince us we belong to them, that they have the right to name us. Where God calls the baptized beloved, demons call her addict, slut, sinner, failure, baker, screw-up. Where God calls her child, the demons beckon with rich, powerful, pretty, important, religious, esteemed, accomplished, right. It is no coincidence that when Satan tempted Jesus after his baptism, he began his entreaties with, if you are the Son of God.

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We all long for someone to tell us who we are. The great struggle of the Christian life is to take God's name for us, to believe we are beloved, and to believe that that's enough. Whether they come from within us or outside of us, whether they represent distinct personalities or the sins and systems that compete for our allegiance, demons are as real as the competing identities that seek to possess us. that rather than casting them out of our churches, we tend to invite them in, where they tell us that we'll be children of God when.

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we beat the addiction, when we sign the doctrinal statement, when we help out with the children's ministry, when we get our act together, when we tithe, when we play by the rules, when we believe without doubt, when we are married, when we are straight, when we are religious, when we are good. But the first act of the Christian life, says Schumann, is a renunciation, a challenge. In baptism, the Christian stands naked and unashamed before all these demons, all these impulses and temptations, sins and failures, empty sales pitches and screwy labels, and says, I am a beloved child of God, and I renounce anyone who says otherwise. In some Orthodox tradition, the convert literally spits in the face of evil before going under the water.

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It's a brave, defiant thing to do, and Christians ought to do it more often, if not in our baptisms, than maybe in our remembrances of them, or maybe every time we take a shower. In addition to proclaiming God's power over principalities, the oldest baptism rites declared God's power over death. Many of the first baptismal fonts were shaped as coffins, and baptism took place just before sunrise on Easter morning to recall Christ's triumph over the grave. The Christian's descent into the water represents a surrender, a death to the old way of living.

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Emergence represents a resurrection, a starting over again. Don't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death, the Apostle Paul wrote the Romans. We're therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. Cyril of Jerusalem told the newly baptized that by this action you died and you were born, and for you the saving water was at once a grave and the womb of a mother.

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Luther described baptism as the drowning of the old sinful self, which he notes is a mighty good swimmer. And Argentinian preacher Juan Carlos Ortiz has been known to use the startling baptismal formula, I kill you in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit, and I make you born into the kingdom of God to serve Him and please Him. Death and resurrection. It's the impossibility around which every impossibility of the Christian life orbits.

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Baptism declares that God is in the business of bringing dead things back to life. So if you want to end on God's business, you better prepare to follow God to all the rock bottom, scorched earth, dead on our rival corners of this world, including those in your own heart. Because that's where God works. That's where God gardens.

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Baptism reminds us that there's no ladder to holiness to climb, no self-improvement plan to follow. It's just death and resurrection over and over again, day after day, as God reaches down into our deepest graves and with the same power that raised Jesus from the dead, wrests us from our pride, our apathy, our fear, our prejudice, our anger, our hurt, and our despair. Most days, I don't know which is harder for me to believe, that God reanimated the brain functions of a man 3 days dead,

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or that God can bring back to life all the beautiful things we have killed. Both seem pretty unlikely to me. Everyone's got an opinion these days about why people are leaving the church. Some wish to solve the problem by making Christianity a little more palatable.

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You know, cut out all this weird mystical stuff about sin, demons, death, and resurrection, and replace it with some self-help books, or politics, or fancy theological systems, or hip coffee shops. But sometimes I think that what the church needs most is to recover some of its weird. There's no sense in sending her through the makeover montage of the chick flick when she'll always be that strange, awkward girl who only gets invited to prom on a dare. In the ritual of baptism, our ancestors acted out the bizarre truth of the Christian identity.

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We are people who stand totally exposed before evil and death and declare them powerless against love. There's nothing normal about that. And so my hope with that chapter and with this work that I'm doing on the next book is to remind people that we have the tools we need to be the church to young adults. I think the problem is sometimes we just get in our own way.

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We try to make it about more than the simple things. We try to dress it up and make it a little cooler, make it a little more palatable, make it a little less mystical and scary. But I think one of the reasons many of my evangelical friends are finding their ways back to church through more liturgical traditions and high church traditions is we don't feel like we're getting sold anything in those settings.

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You don't feel like anybody's trying to sell you something at a Catholic mass. You know, you feel that there's an authenticity to it, a simplicity to it. And so I think that what I encourage you today to go away with is that you have the tools you need. We've had them for thousands of years.

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And that maybe the trick is just getting out of the way and let Jesus work through these things that Jesus has always worked through. So I think we've got time for a few questions.