Leadership Journal

Everyone is asking the question: "What will we do with these upcoming generations who simply will not give money to the church as their parents did?" It comes with some serious hand wringing. From the tone, you'd think you were on the Titanic's bridge just after that meeting with the iceberg.

It's not an idle question, but my objection is that this seems to be the only question churches ask these days about money and younger people. It leads to rhetoric like "They won't give to institutions, but to causes" or "They are motivated when they see where their money goes." Such insights may help a church stay "mission focused" during a fundraising campaign, but they ignore the real issue, at least as I see it.

Many of the church's younger people are begging for a different relationship with money. That's the real issue. An entire generation, maybe two, are consumed by money and debt and consumerism. They need to see money in a new way, a biblical way; but, because the church is also bogged in consumerism, younger people believe the church is of little value in helping them out of the quagmire.

It can be heard in coffee shops, clubs, classrooms, and certainly at every Ralph Nader and anti-WTO rally: "Consumerism is crushing America" and "There must be more than birth, consumption, and death."

At times it's even more blatant. I was driving through downtown Minneapolis with a 31-year-old advertising executive. We approached a new shopping, hotel, and entertainment complex. "Look at that enormous blight on the landscape," she said. Or in the words of a pastor's son, when I asked if he had been to the Mall of America, "I hate shopping malls and all the consumerism crap that goes with them."

This sentiment is not so much about the stuff sold in these places as it is in the unending call to be consumers of it all. Young people are not against stuff. We have more stuff than any generation before, and we have the bills to prove it.

In our lifetime, debt has become the norm. It's not uncommon for many young adults to have student loans, credit card debt, a cell phone bill, and a big car note and insurance premiums. Many young adults know more about moving their debt between multiple no-interest credit cards than they know about God's view of money.

Yet amid this growing crisis of personal debt, the church wants only to talk about how to motivate people to give more.

The Bible shows us that God's people are not to be mere consumers. That is the reason for the tithe and the Sabbath. We're to depend on God and trust God to provide. While other nations worked seven days a week, Israel was to work six and trust God for the seventh. While other nations exacted what was owed them with interest, Israel was to practice a year of the jubilee, when debts were forgiven.

There is certainly need for this story today, and for the church to be a peculiar people living according to a different economy, people who give and rest and do not see their lives simply as ...