I’ve been thinking a lot about the second season of Shiny Happy People. The documentary series spent its first season on the Duggar family (of “19 Kids and Counting” fame) and the larger cultural and religious infrastructure around their particular practice of Christianity. The second season is about “Teen Mania,” the evangelical youth movement of the early 2000’s, built around an on-fire-for-Jesus, us-against-the-evil-world understanding of faith. 

I didn’t grow up in that world (or time, I’m just a little too young) but I felt its echo. I read books by Francis Chan and Shane Claiborne and Rob Bell as a teenager, and was caught up in the promise of a new, young, relevant and radical Christianity, one that rejected Sunday Morning niceness for whole-hearted devotion to a Jesus who spent his time with the poor and marginalized. It shaped my faith, and the faith of a lot of us now 30-something to 40-something millennials who have begun the shift from promising, potential-rich, young adulthood, to the nuanced, complex, responsibility-driven reality of adulthood proper. 

It was a beautiful, resonant, promise. That you were invited to give everything to Jesus, to spend your life dedicated to the poor and marginalized, that by sacrificing everything, truly dying to self, you could find life, more abundant, more real, and more full than you had ever known. In a cultural moment that seemed deeply defined by consumerism and glamour, where it was considered deeply uncool to care about anything, the counter-narrative was appealing. 

I was all in, as were a lot of my peers. I watched as my youth group friends and I joined missions, non-profits, did unpaid internships, and spent our summers in places like Jamaica and Cambodia and Ecuador and Uganda. We wore TOMS shoes and Warby Parker glasses and were sure we would save the world. 

And then it got… complicated. 

It turns out privileged, white college students aren’t really that useful in developing countries. It turns out that missional organizations can unintentionally create massive damage by parachuting into communities they don’t understand. It turns out that the call to save the world sold to idealistic young people was so intertwined with colonialist ideals that it was probably best if it had never been sold to them at all. 

We all had to reckon with it, with the reality that we weren’t going to save the world from poverty or injustice or hunger or any of the other things we so deeply cared about with the power of prayer and enthusiasm. And we had to figure out what to do next. The faith we had been taught was about sacrifice, devotion, crazy love, being willing to die for our faith. 

But how did we live with it? 

How were we supposed to make decisions about our futures, about where we lived, about what we did for work, about who we married and befriended? About how we raised our children? Selling all of our possessions to live among the poor worked for Shane Claiborne, but were we all supposed to do it? Forever? 

And if not, then what? What does a good life, an ethical life, a Christlike life, look like for all of those earnest, disillusioned, still hungry, middle-aged people the movement left behind? 

I’m talking about myself and my youth group friends, but I think I am talking about a lot of other people too. The people that sit in your pews, who have returned to your churches with their young children, wondering if the fire that caught in them, that had them dedicating to their lives to Jesus at summer camp (often multiple Summers in a row) was real, and if it has anything to say to them now. 

It does. Of course it does. The call to save the world stays, it just looks different. It’s messier, more complicated, more local, smaller, and slower. It looks like school boards and community advocacy, like raising kids to be kind. It looks like Sunday School classrooms and service projects as a family, like compost bins and flowers for the pollinators. 

When we lead our organizations, when we think about innovation, about starting new things, I hope we can learn from these paths that our faith has walked in the last couple decades. I hope when we pitch our ideas and see hesitation in the eyes of those 30-something adults, we can have curiosity about whether its really apathy, or the distrust of someone who’s burned before. I hope we can cast a vision that adds a little oxygen and kindling to the coals that still burn in them. I hope we can see that the fire’s not out, it just might need a little tending.

I hope we can earnestly relight that flame of the call that is on people’s hearts, and use that fire, not towards massive, out of scale undertakings, but towards creating a warm glow of the Holy Spirit’s movement in our communities, in-breaking the love of God right in our own neighborhoods. I hope we can find a path forward that reflects God’s radical, all-consuming, love, and also the complex, responsibility-laden lives that we lead. It’s challenging, but you are exactly the people I trust to do it.