Generation Y’s View of Religion
If you think technology will not affect religion, think again.
Back to School night at my son’s school was always an education. He is a college man now, but I remember the stark contrast to my own schooling I found when I entered his classroom every fall.
Today, very few classrooms are arranged with rows of desks and chairs facing a teacher’s desk and blackboard. In grade school the desks are clumped in little communities. Lessons are taught with the children sitting with their teachers on the floor. Furniture becomes more meaningful in older grades but is usually arranged in circles. A teacher’s desk is off in an obscure corner. Class discussions are more like an afternoon at Arthur’s Roundtable than a lecture hall. Assignments are often group projects with individuals responsible for the success of classmates.
Smartboards or laptops are the hub and spokes of the learning circle. The conversation can be broadened beyond the walls of the school with an effortless Skype or internet connection. Teachers are facilitators of learning more than relaters of factual information. This is the world our young people know five days a week.
Then, with decreasing frequency, they go to church on Sunday.
They encounter a service or liturgy with its roots in ancient times. If their family has brought them to church from their cradle days this is not a shock. To the uninitiated this is an aberration. Young people are asked to stand and sit and stand and sit and no one tells them why anymore. They settle back for a 20+-minute sermon when they’ve never before listened to any one person talk for more than five minutes.
The current coming-of-age generation (Generation Y) is not accustomed to the Church’s standard model for communicating the Gospel. They have not experienced it.
Faced with this as the only option for being part of religion, they find it easy — to use the term of the internet — to opt out.
How is the Church going to answer this new reality? We have some ideas. We are sure you do, too!
We will start exploring this topic this week. — Administrator, Judy Gotwald