Subject: Clash of generations? (was Re: Church....Why do we need it?)
Date: 26 Jan 1999 12:35:37 GMT
From:  (Andrew Bromage)
Newsgroups: aus.religion.christian

G'day all.

"Mick Harvey" <> writes:

>I've been a Christian for about 10 years so I'm no newbie....but in the last
>few years I've found church harder and harder.

>I feel like I don't really fit in at church because church people just don't
>seem real enough.  I have legitimate doubts and questions but feel like they
>are not taken seriously (I just get the usual wrote answers) The only
>problem is that I feel like I don't fully belong anywhere else due to my
>belief in God.

A lot of people feel similarly.  If I may ask, what age bracket are
you in?  I've heard reports that the post-baby boomer generation are
particularly disenchanted with the culture in many denominations.

Here's a posting from a mailing list that I'm on which describes one
person's dilemma.  Names have been deleted to protect the innocent.
BTW, the woman who wrote it is a post-doctoral research fellow in
media and journalism, so she gets a bit analytical at times...

Cheers,
Andrew Bromage

-----------------------------

This past weekend as I was listening to one side of a phone conversation between
my husband and his father (a retired Presbyterian minister), it occurred to me
that I was witnessing a clash between the spirituality of Generation X and that
of a different generation. [...]

The subject of the phone call was a proposed baptism ceremony for my 3-month-old
son [...].  My husband [...] and I were both raised in the Presbyterian church
but we don't go anywhere right now. We still have religion as part of our
identity, however, and are glad to attend church services with our family
members, all of whom are very involved in their respective church bodies.  We
figure we'll rejoin some church someday but we have found other sources of
community, spirituality, and justice for the moment.  (I guess I should admit
that this "moment" has lasted five years!)

Probably because we're the ones that live furthest away, we're the most likely to
be at some other family member's church during the holidays. This holiday we'll
be at [my husband]'s family's, so we thought it would e great if we could have
[our son] baptized.  But we didn't really envision it needing to be in a church,
since, as my husband [...] explained to his dad, we've never even been in the
churches he's pastoring as a retired supply pastor and thus they're not
"meaningful" for us.  Unless, of course, the church is empty and it's just family
anyway.  That might be ok.

We want [our son] to be baptized into the family of God: specifically, into HIS
family, which happens to be the source of *our* religious identity. We love that
part of our family and are glad we can give it to him and want to recognize that.

After some discussion about whether or not the baptism would "count" because it
has to be recorded in Presbyterian minutes somewhere (which we really aren't too
concerned about - couldn't we just re=Baptize him later when we join a church,
[my husband] asked his dad?), we all decided we'd think about it for a while.  We
really don't want to ask the family to do something they're uncomfortable with,
after all (and it was clear in the phone conversation that there was a clash of
paradigms).

The issues this incident has raised for me as possible Generational shifts are:

the "re-invention" or reclamation/reframing of rituals, rather loosely tied to
tradition (but still tied to it, after all -- a fairly postmodern practice I
guess)

the importance of the "chosen" community as a context for identity and ritual (in
our case it's family but for a lot of Gen Xers it's friends)

the lack of concern for protocol, obviously (not unique to Gen Xers)

the importance of finding a space that is meaningful

and overall (and perhaps here's the tie to pop culture or the denigrated aspects
of religion) I admit, the thing we're proposing is conducive to sentimentality
and nostalgia

oh, and I just remembered - my husband also wanted to make sure it was in a space
where he could control the lighting and sound, not only to enhance the meaning of
the moment, but for the videotaping so that [our son] can watch it and witness it
when he's older.

I'm not always comfortable with the "generational" distinctions (or my own
identification with them!), but then again, this experience has made me wonder.
[...]