I was at my parent’s church this morning and felt some of the reasons the modern church isn’t able to connect with many of the young people of this generation. I’m not suggesting they should change. What they have going works for them, continues to exist and thrive for them and I appreciated singing the hymns I remember from my days in that environment (yeah, we literally sang 6 stanzas to one hymn). The steady number of people who attend that church let me know this traditional model has worked and still works for those who know and respect this tradition (yet many of them in this congregation are senior citizens). For someone like me who grew up in this type of church, hearing the way the gospel was presented, I remembered why this model bothered me and why I look back to church ancestor Wesley’s (we like him, right?) “quadrilateral” and think about the theology formation involved in modern ministry. When we think about who scripture was written to, we rarely think of the individual, largely written to groups of people, but we currently ask the individual to take it personally.

My parent’s pastor kept emphasizing the message of Jesus as a personal decision and accepting Jesus as your “personal savior.” I question this appeal to a selfish decision, although at an early age I made a decision to believe and have been seeking continually on the journey to figure how I can be Jesus incarnate through who I am to my friends, family, neighbors, and strangers. I make the decision constantly to be a Jesus-follower (it’s a repetitious decision for me) and it’s becoming less and less about my personal salvation, but collectively how my faith effects my community. Everyone around me should benefit from my faith, and that’s my understanding of how the church started: small groups of believers concerned with following Jesus while keeping their culture. Their understanding of scripture was often decided community by community. I think without this understanding, we wouldn’t have Christmas or Easter as redeemed pagan celebrations from different redeemed cultures.

Back to the individual, if we follow Jesus’ example and love our neighbors, strangers, and others, our ultimate goal is to have those others benefit their community by following Jesus also. I felt the warmth from the believers at my parents church. As I said previously, it works for them: it’s not a broken system for the people who function in it. But I think to reach people who use new media, and know and question more than the general public has at any time in history, we need to look through the lens of the Wesleyan quadrilateral and see what scripture said to the people of that time, what it says to the people of our time and how we apply it to our cultural context.

I personally would like to see what develops through the next 50 or so years as people read scripture and look at it through the lens of our time and community through reason and tradition.