The media narrative has been established: the Religious Right, which has defined evangelicalism’s public witness since the early 1980s, is slowly being replaced by a younger generation of evangelicals that are less politically oriented, more focused on social justice, and more concerned with creating culture than critiquing it.
Gabe Lyons, the founder of Q Ideas and the co-author of unChristian, has become the standard bearer for this younger generation of Christians. His book The Next Christians serves as his public notice that younger evangelicals are “restoring confidence in their faith and turning ‘Christian’ into a label worthy of the one who has called them to restore.”
Unfortunately, the next Christians do not seem interested (yet) in restoring their relationship with their parents’ generation. The Next Christians’ overly self-congratulatory tone reinforces the unfortunate narrative that we younger folks are the only ones who “get it.” Lyons admits he’s amplifying the positives of this generation’s potential but makes no such qualification to his sour bent towards the previous.
We can understand why Lyons adopts this contentious narrative, given that he wrote the book that cemented it in everyone’s minds (for the alternative to unChristian, see Bradley Wright’s excellent Christians are Hate-Filled Hypocrites and Ten Other Lies You’ve Been Told about the Church). Yet the narrative leads Lyons into methodological paradoxes and confusions that undermine what might otherwise be an encouraging exposition of the emphases that make younger Christians unique in the religious landscape.
Lyons is convinced that “the death of yesterday becomes the birth of a great tomorrow, and the end of an era becomes a beautiful new beginning.” He may see the dawn coming, but Lyons gives us little reason beyond the work his friends are doing that it will break during our lifetime. What’s more, the statistics Lyons deploys make it difficult to share his hope. As he points out, most of the generation he calls “the next Christians” will leave the faith after high school. Christianity in America may be “entering a time of transformation on par with the Protestant Reformation,” but there may only be a remnant left to enjoy the fruits.
My critique is not that Lyons steps outside of statistics. The numbers never tell the whole story, and Lyons acknowledges that the next Christians are “bubbling just underneath the surface.” But the narrative of the decline of “Christian America” and the rise of the next Christians begs for further analysis. For instance, given that so many young people leave the faith, where did most of these “next Christians” come from? Christian Smith points out in Soul Searching that parents are “hugely important” in the formation of faith among 18-23 year olds. This research suggests that the next Christians have been raised by some pretty solid parents. If we are on the cusp of Lyons’ revolution, we may have mom and dad to thank.
Theologically, Lyons argues (briefly) that the next Christians are demarcated by an expansive understanding of the gospel to include the doctrines of creation and restoration. As Lyons puts it, “The next Christians believe that Christ’s death and Resurrection were not only meant to save people from something. He wanted to save Christians to something.” And that “something” is “partnering with God to breathe justice and mercy and peace and compassion and generosity into the world.” As Lyons puts it, “Christ’s redemption is not the end or even the goal of our stories; redemption is the beginning of our participation in God’s work of restoration in our lives and in the world.”
This expansive understanding of the gospel may make some readers nervous. Lyons is unambiguous and insistent that Christians keep this gospel at the center of their lives and practice. In one of his clearest and best sections, he channels C. S. Lewis’s distinction between first things and second things to argue, “The first thing for the Christian is to recover the gospel—to relearn and fall in love again with that historic, beautiful, redemptive, faithful, demanding, reconciling, all-powerful, atoning, grace-abounding, soul-quenching, spiritually fulfilling good news of God’s love.”
At the same time, Lyons’s account of the relationship between restoration and the gospel would have been significantly enhanced with more clarity on the relationship between restoration and the God of the gospel. In his most problematic passage, Lyons writes:
The [way things ought to be] is the prism through which [the next Christians] see their mission. This includes sharing the gospel so that men and women might enter into relationship with God, but it also goes beyond that. In the good garden there was no sickness or evil or pain. So these Christians set out to identify hurts, sickness, darkness, and evil, and then show up as a force of help, healing, and goodness. They have purposed to loose the strings of brokenness and set free God’s intention.
Lyons later affirms John Stott’s suggestion that evangelism and social action are partners, and that neither takes precedence. But as faithful Christians, we must insist that restoring “the way things ought to be” is not the motivating impulse. To frame our witness to the world around our response to its brokenness misses the theocentric nature of the kingdom of God: “Let your light so shine before men,” Jesus tells us in Matthew, “that they may glorify your father in heaven.”
While we might wish for more precision in his method and clarity in his exegesis, The Next Christians is still important as an example of the ethos that makes young evangelicals fascinating to so many observers. It is a handy reference for understanding the narratives that motivate younger Christians, and the ambiguities that we thrive on. For all the differences between the generations, the “next Christians” Lyons describes are simply Christians, making a muck of things and trusting that by the mercy of God in Jesus Christ “the people of God will continue forward as they’ve been doing for two millennia so long as we keep the foundations of our faith grounded in the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
Tags: Evangelicalism
This is a great treatment of these issues. Thanks for your work on Lyons’ book!
Matt: You’ve written a review that rightly emphasizes the need for inter-generational relationships and the debt of gratitude we our to those who have, in the words of the prophet, walked “the ancient paths” (Jer. 6:16). As you anticipated, Lyon’s “expansive understanding of the gospel may make some readers nervous,” including this one because, like so many American Christians who are influenced by the neo-Calvinist distortion that collapses the two-kingdoms –common and redemptive – into one, he mistakenly argues that we are carrying on the cultural mandate of Adam when the last Adam – Jesus Christ – has already fulfilled it. We are not continuing God’s redemptive work, as if the new creation depends on it, because that work is complete. As David VanDrunen says, “We are not little Adams.” Instead, we are little Christs insofar as are called to be light and salt in the world, which is why I appreciate how you subordinate restoration to the proclamation of the gospel. Well done.
@Benson: I’m surprised you’ve been so quickly swayed by 2kers. Yes, we are little Christs, and Christ was the second Adam. God’s redemptive work is indeed complete in Christ–and that redemption is precisely what enables us to carry out our culture-making well (though it certainly doesn’t guarantee we’ll do so). To reject this is to really reject the creational importance of history. Creation did not come pre-loaded with schools and farms and art museums. Creation is an invitation to unpack this potential. One of the problems with 2K theory is that it seems inattentive to how the so-called “common” kingdom is disordered in its culture-making. What else would we call the re-ordering of that culture-making impulse except the “redemption” of it?
Thanks for the write-up. I just picked up the book last week and have started to read it. My experience with Lyons has not been positive. I find his material to be dark. Its not that I don’t want to hear the negative side of Christian culture, its that I feel sad and discouraged that one could look so poorly upon those laboring for the Gospel. I also wonder if it is as bad as Gabe speaks of. My experience on secular college campuses tells me otherwise. 90% of the students I witness to on our campuses are grateful to have talked to me. Many of them are confused about their faith and religion and to have someone help them understand what Christianity and the Gospel is, has been received with a positive response. Maybe this is just the grace of God in our ministry at this season, who knows. Several of our church staff members have read UnChristian and felt discouraged as well. I’m weary about this book and am not closed off to putting it down and picking up something else for my pastoral development.
A standard bearer for newer-cooler-youthy Christianity has a “self-congratulatory tone”? I am shocked!
[...] Lee Anderson has written pretty good review of Gabe Lyons’ buzzed-about book, The Next Christians. I haven’t read it, so I [...]
@Smith: “quickly swayed by 2kers,” eh? Did you assume I was once a transformationalist and now I’m a two-kingdom advocate? I’ve always been uneasy with neo-Kuyperian transformationalism. David VanDrunen has equipped me to better articulate that uneasiness. A few points. First, I think it’s preferable to talk about Christ as the “last Adam” rather than the “second Adam,” as if there were Adams ad infinitum. Second, I don’t see how two-kingdom theology “reject[s] the creational importance of history.” Instead, it affirms that God rules over the common kingdom as creator and sustainer. History matters, yes, but not as much as eternity. Third, your concern about unpacking the potential of creation seems to assume that redemption is “creation regained,” whereas two-kingdom advocates insist that redemption is “re-creation gained.” Fourth, your concern about “disordered” culture-making in the common kingdom seems to assume that we, as individual Christians, belong only to this kingdom when, of course, we also belong to the spiritual kingdom, where we’re reordered to obey the double movement of love: toward God and neighbor. Jonathan Leeman puts it well in his 9Marks review of Timothy Keller’s GENEROUS JUSTICE. The work of justice, performed by the organic church as opposed to institutional church, “does not redeem or usher in the final kingdom per se, but it signifies our citizenship before Christ the King as we seek to ensure that his redemptive rule extends in every area of our lives, physical and spiritual, secular and sacred” (http://www.9marks.org/books/book-review-generous-justice).