Rachel Held Evans has caused quite a stir with her article posted in CNN’s Religion section on why Millennials aren’t represented well in churches. It’s a discussion that interests many of us.

Rachel Held Evans

Of course, the context is the US, but I think her main points carry across to New Zealand as well. This section of her article caught my attention.

Time and again, the assumption among Christian leaders, and evangelical leaders in particular, is that the key to drawing twenty-somethings back to church is simply to make a few style updates – edgier music, more casual services, a coffee shop in the fellowship hall, a pastor who wears skinny jeans, an updated Web site that includes online giving.

But here’s the thing: Having been advertised to our whole lives, we millennials have highly sensitive BS meters, and we’re not easily impressed with consumerism or performances.

In fact, I would argue that church-as-performance is just one more thing driving us away from the church, and evangelicalism in particular.

Many of us, myself included, are finding ourselves increasingly drawn to high church traditions – Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, the Episcopal Church, etc. – precisely because the ancient forms of liturgy seem so unpretentious, so unconcerned with being “cool,” and we find that refreshingly authentic.

What millennials really want from the church is not a change in style but a change in substance.

We want an end to the culture wars. We want a truce between science and faith. We want to be known for what we stand for, not what we are against.

We want to ask questions that don’t have predetermined answers.

We want churches that emphasize an allegiance to the kingdom of God over an allegiance to a single political party or a single nation.

We want our LGBT friends to feel truly welcome in our faith communities.

We want to be challenged to live lives of holiness, not only when it comes to sex, but also when it comes to living simply, caring for the poor and oppressed, pursuing reconciliation, engaging in creation care and becoming peacemakers.

You can’t hand us a latte and then go about business as usual and expect us to stick around. We’re not leaving the church because we don’t find the cool factor there; we’re leaving the church because we don’t find Jesus there.

That sense of trying to push the ‘cool’ factor is on show in all its glory in New Zealand at the moment with conference season in full swing for evangelicals. Every conference, in order to get attendees, wants to sound as hip, relevant, cool and exciting as they possibility can – promoting their event as a life changing opportunity that will help the attendee get the life they’ve always wanted. My soul groans at this time of year every year as the promotion for these events and their Christian celebrity speakers kicks in. Now don’t get me wrong, each conference has something worth offering and I have no doubt that many people have significant experiences at these events, but the events themselves are beholden to the need to be cool and relevant. Performance is at the heart of this pursuit.

In the big scheme of things though, such events and their pursuit to be cool and relevant can’t compare to the humble leader who’ll take the time to have a coffee with someone who just wants someone else to come alongside them in life. They can’t compare to the hard graft of cultivating a genuine faith in union with God. These things don’t need all the bells and whistles – they just need Christian leaders to give up trying to be cool, to just love Jesus and offer their vulnerable selves in the process. Authenticity and a genuine love for God are what this world truly needs and it’s in giving up that pursuit of relevance that we actually become relevant.

Liturgy has something to offer precisely because it strips away the pretentious bravado of ‘cool’, makes it less about specific personalities and places the spotlight on God. I’m not sold out to any one form though – though I am sold out to Holy Communion as the ultimate communal Christian practice – what I’m interested in is what enables us to strip away the desire and meaningless pursuit of cool so that our union with God becomes front and center. Ironically it’s the pursuit of relevance that makes us irrelevant. Doing what it takes to be formed into the image of Christ through union with God is what our life is to be about. When we get that right, everything else falls into place and we have volumes to say to a world that desperately needs us to be the Church rather than the cool club or concert venue down the street that just happens to talk about Jesus a bit.