My first encounter with the word repent was during college. A street preacher was pointing his finger at me and shouting it. He was very animated and angry. The world was also written on his sign surrounded by bright red flames.
Despite using the word a lot, the street preachers I saw never bothered to explain what repent actually meant. I was left to conclude that it was a terrible thing. I associated it with hell, sin, punishment, and extreme forms of fundamentalist Christianity—making it easy for me, and many other young people, to dismiss.
Now, many years later, I lead a church full of college students and young adults in their twenties, and they often respond very favorably when called to repent—which happens in one form or another almost every week.
Not long ago a 20-year-old student approached me after a worship gathering. He sat down on the floor of the storage room we use for prayer and said, “I just prayed for forgiveness and I wanted to tell you.” It was his first time at our church and I’d never met him before. His emotions poured out as he confessed his sins which had become obvious to him during the worship gathering. He came to see how Jesus paid for his sins on the cross, and he expressed belief in God’s love for him.
As I listened to this broken young man on the floor, I sensed repentance. But it didn’t come through shouting, finger pointing, or by painting large letters on red flaming signs. He saw repentance as something beautiful to embrace, not something dreadful to fear.
There are some who believe young people in our culture are not interested in repentance. They think speaking about truth or sin is taboo, and a call to “repent” is too negative. I disagree. I have found it very easy to express the reality and need for repentance among the emerging generation. And many of them don’t require much convincing. The key has been helping them understand repentance as something positive rather than negative.
We recently showed a clip from The Shawshank Redemption where Tim Robbins’ character escapes from prison through a sewage pipe. It was a great metaphor for the messes we’ve made of our lives. But then he bursts out of the pipe and dives into the river. He rises from the water cleansed and lifting his hands to heaven. I used the image as a symbol of repentance. “When we repent,” I said, “we are washed by God through what Jesus has accomplished on the cross. Acts 3:19 says ‘Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord.'”
Rather than presenting repentance as a scary, negative threat, I want them to see it as a positive invitation: a call to align ourselves with Jesus and his ways and to turn away from the things that are destroying our lives.
When they understand repentance this way, as part of God’s love for us, I’ve found that many young people desire it. They want “times of refreshing.” They want a clean start. They want change in their lives that only God can bring. In fact, they want to repent so much that it has become an ongoing practice in our church. During Communion we will invite people to kneel as a posture of surrender to God’s will and to express their repentance. They use the time to examine their lives and return to his way if necessary. They don’t see repentance as a single action for salvation, but as an ongoing part of the Christian life.
I wonder if those who believe the young are turned off by talk of repentance have tried to redefine it for them. Like me, some may associate repentance with images of angry street preachers holding flaming signs. But if this image is replaced with a vision rooted in God’s kindness and Jesus’ healing power, you might be surprised by how many young people are ready to repent.
Dan Kimball is the pastor of Vintage Faith Church in Santa Cruz, California.
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