Last month I traveled to Traverse City, Mich., to visit the theologian Walter Brueggemann and his wife, Tia. In one conversation, he mentioned the difference he experienced growing up between Missouri Synod (Lutheran) congregations and those of his own German Evangelical tradition. Members of both groups had been neighbors in Prussia. His had embraced a merger of Reformed and Lutheran churches. 

The Missouri Synod was made up of descendants of people who had rejected the union. They migrated to Missouri together, remained neighbors, built congregations near the other. But deep animosity existed. 

One day a new Missouri Synod pastor came to Blackburn, Mo. Brueggemann’s pastor-father went to visit, but the new pastor refused to meet with him. 

“My dad got called to help with many ‘mixed marriages’ between members of these two groups,” Brueggemann said. “Missouri Synod folks relied on tests of faithfulness rather than testimony of God’s faithfulness.”

Over the past two decades, denomination after denomination has declined and splintered, mostly over tests of faithfulness that we apply to others. But what has happened to the stories of God’s faithfulness? In the midst of our infighting and lament about others’ unfaithfulness, we have lost the stories of God’s faithfulness. 

It’s no wonder our children are walking away from the church. I don’t blame them. Too often the church has been a testing ground for their failures rather than sacred ground for testimonies of a loving God whose faithfulness knows no bounds.

When I was 20, I lived with a peasant family in Ecuador — and developed an irrational fear that they were going to force me to marry their daughter and not allow me to return home. Of course, that wasn’t the case, but the fear was real. 

We feel fear when our culture changes. It’s like standing on a cliff, looking into the abyss. We are accustomed to fighting or fleeing when we are afraid, but either choice might take us over the edge. So, we freeze. 

The church, by and large, has frozen. Why? Because we are old. I said this in Road Signs for the Journey, my 2007 study of Mennonite churchgoers. Our average age is going up, we’re having fewer kids, the kids we have are fleeing the church, our rural neighborhoods are graying. We are freezing in place. 

And we don’t know what to do except what we’ve always done. 

But we have not been abandoned. The cliff is not where the story ends. That’s because we follow Jesus, the one who, for the joy set before him, endured the greatest of all abysses (Hebrews 12:2). 

When we stare into the abyss, it is time to remember, as the people of Israel did, that God does not abandon us. Once we were slaves in Egypt, but God brought us out with a mighty hand (Deuteronomy 6:21).

What we must not do is be like King Hezekiah, who, when told by the prophet Isaiah that the Babylonians would take Judah into exile after his death, breathed a sigh of relief and said, essentially: Thank God it will not happen in my lifetime (2 Kings 20:19).

The church has been hoping we could get through this era of history without having to depend on God to lead us away from the cliff. But God wouldn’t have it that way. 

So here we are on the edge of the abyss, frozen. Yet our children are energetic, engaged, adapting and ready for whatever the future brings. The cliff is much less frightening when you are young and your culture hasn’t solidified. 

Hezekiah didn’t care whether the temple was desecrated or not. He just didn’t want to lose the cultural map he had known. Why do you think God waited 40 years to allow the people of Israel to enter the promised land? Because the old cultural maps had to die, and their carriers with them. 

The passing of a generation creates space for younger generations to get off the cliff. The problem for the church is that so few of our youth want what the church is offering — and much of the church doesn’t want who our youth are. It is the culture that divides us — not the gospel, not the kingdom, not Jesus. 

When I taught at Elizabethtown ­College, I was blessed to hang out with 18- to 22-year-olds. Some were churched, others unchurched, dechurched, never churched, don’t-want-to-be-churched. I talked with them about Jesus, the kingdom and the gospel. These things made sense to them, even when the church didn’t. That’s the cultural map where I feel at home. That’s where I find hope.