With his short-cropped hair, beard, and Sunday-not-go-to-meetin’ wardrobe of sneakers, baggy jeans, and a bland shirt, 24-year-old Chris Seay looks more like the lead singer for an alternative rock band than the pastor of one of the most successful new churches in Texas.
But that’s just fine for the hundreds of young people who attend University Baptist Church in Waco, Texas, every Sunday. And it’s fine for Seay, a third-generation Baptist minister who says the thought of being a pastor once looked “pretty revolting.” Seay’s views have changed, however. He has accepted the calling to take the gospel to the so-called Generation X, that much-maligned group of 40 million young people between the ages of 18 and 34.
Open to God, not church“They’re open to the God thing,” says Seay (pronounced “see”), “but they’re not into the church thing.” Nor are they into the typical hymn-and-sermon routine, if a recent Sunday at the church, which meets in Waco’s downtown Hippodrome Theatre, is any indication.
Instead of laid-back, Jesus movement-style praise choruses, a seven-piece band belts out aggressive Christian rock, while young congregants sing and sway. Unable to find songs they like in the contemporary Christian praise genre, the band writes its own, like “There’s No Chain,” which captures the congregation’s hunger for authentic spirituality: “There’s no heart too wounded. No heart so broken that he can’t mend. No life so hopeless. No life so empty Jesus can’t fill.”
After the musicians lay down their instruments and take their seats, Seay strides to a stool in the middle of the pulpitless stage, sits down, props his feet on a nearby speaker, takes a drink from a bottle of Snapple, and launches into a meandering monologue based on the R-rated Richard Gere movie Primal Fear.
Before long, Seay has used the movie’s plot elements of dishonesty and intrigue to bring his audience around to a Socratic inquiry on truth. For Seay and most others in his congregation, truth lies somewhere beyond familiar platitudes or the mundane churchianity of their youth. “We can spout Sunday-school answers,” he says, “but when it comes to reality, it doesn’t really flesh out in our lives.”
Seay leads his listeners through a series of questions: Can truth be found in the church, an institution that has supported prejudice, corruption, slavery, and the Crusades? Can truth be found in humanity’s tired traditions? Or can truth be found in the Bible?
“Some of you say you don’t believe the Bible,” says Seay, “but we’ll read it anyway and see if there’s anything interesting in it.”
Delivering his talk in a spontaneous and self-deprecating style, borrowed in part from TV’s David Letterman, Seay tells his congregation not to base their lives on pop culture icons like Oprah Winfrey, Susan Powter, or Tony Robbins, but to trust “this really cool gift from God, the Word of God.”
It is an approach that connects with the church’s youthful members. “When he gives his messages, it’s like he’s talking right to you,” says Brandy, a marketing major at Baylor University. “He’s the same age as us, and he has the same hurts as us.”
Doing church the new wayA new way of doing church, University Baptist Church was launched in January 1995, and within weeks, large crowds forced the congregation out of its original cinder-block church building. Last October, nearly 1,100 young people showed up for Sunday worship.
Services do have some similarities to those held at more traditional churches; they feature periods of worship, preaching, and prayer as well as Sunday bulletins and offering baskets. And there are additional similarities to the seeker-sensitive, baby-boomer ministry model. But that is where the similarities end.
While services at Willow Creek Community Church in suburban Chicago start promptly, are tightly scripted, and feature musicians and actors whose clothes are color-coordinated, services at University Baptist start late, follow no obvious schedule, and feel more thrown-together than choreographed.
“When you coordinate the color of your shirts to the color of your lights, people don’t see that as authentic,” says Seay. Authenticity is an important concept for Seay and members of his flock because they see the lack of authenticity as a huge problem for some churches and their leaders. Seay believes that unless Christians are truly open and honest about their own shortcomings, unchurched Gen Xers will view believers as hypocritical and self-righteous.
Seay learned what it means to live an authentic Christian life from his mom, who is the daughter of a Baptist minister, and his dad, who has been a minister for decades. “Some of my colleagues in the ministry use their children to build up their own image,” says Ed Seay, pastor of First Baptist Church in Magnolia, Texas. “But mostly we resisted the temptation to try to fit them into our mold.” Chris Seay is glad his parents gave him the freedom to be himself.
“They gave me their permission to color outside the lines,” says Seay, whose sister Jennifer and brother Robbie are part of the University Baptist worship team. Seay extends the same kind of grace to his flock. Although he does not shy away from proclaiming moral absolutes, and recently preached a series of sermons on sex, drugs, and alcohol, Seay handles these topics and his interactions with people in a gracious way. He frequently shatters the clergy-laity chasm by confessing his own sins and weaknesses to his church.
“Chris struggles with you,” says one Baylor student who attends University Baptist. “He knows what people go through. He isn’t appalled by some of the stuff we’ve done. And he doesn’t condemn us.”
Seay’s University Baptist is not alone in trying to translate the gospel into a language that is relevant for the baby busters. Other successful Gen X churches in southern California, Las Vegas, and Virginia are showing positive signs that, whatever else people might say about this generation, it is not going to stand idly by as Christianity becomes extinct.
“When we’re hearing so many war stories about this generation’s lethargy and how you can’t get them into churches, students are in this church,” says Paul Stripling, executive director of the Waco Baptist Association, which gave University Baptist most of its start-up funds. “And that’s the bottom line.”
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