IN SEARCH OF OUR TRIBE

My wife and I have been on a hunt for years, looking for a church where we could find our tribe. Since I moved from the pulpit to the pew a number of years ago, it has made us feel like beached whales. So, we’ve become church orphans in search of “our people.” We are discovering that our “tribe” is not to be found in any single church, but in a scattering of tribespeople dispersed among various congregations, those rare souls who have been seasoned by life’s disciplines and spiritual battles but haven’t given up the good fight.

Our church shopping spree has recently landed us with a people who are generations younger than us, Portland Millennials, a species all its own. It’s not an exaggeration to say that this venture has submerged us into a foreign culture. We look like the church grandparents, but at least it’s a welcome reprieve from the painful pretending and tired smiles of the over-churched geriatrics we were used to. How these new people have avoided becoming “church people” says a lot about them and their church. And the preaching is philosophically rich, yet theologically sound, intellectually cool, more for thinkers than doers, but definitely not boring.

But it’s also a generation that’s been defrauded of the American Dream, inoculated with purposelessness, and afflicted with cultural schizophrenia. A generation robbed of its identity, driving them to update their wokeness credentials online, and forced to latch onto generational fads and Facebook “likes” for acceptance. Outside of a major move of God among them, I believe they are destined to become one of the most sincere, authentic, disillusioned, and directionless generations in modern American history.

But now, where they were once looked upon as a subspecies that had been cheated and discarded, God has begun to move. According to Barna research, Millennials have surpassed the more typical older generations in church attendance for the first time in decades, nearly doubling since the pandemic. And churches like our present discovery have been instrumental in making that happen.

All that to say is that we’re not rookies at adopting to new cultures, having spent seven years in Canada and eight in South Africa. In Canada, we learned that Canadians are very sensitive about being compared to Americans, but with an expression crossed between envy and jealousy, they would never dare to tell you so. It was necessary to reach them hardcore, through confrontational street meetings, as it seemed the only way they would yield to God. And in South Africa, where we established a church in an African township, we were challenged to navigate between several very distinct cultures, including both the apartheid oppressors and those they oppressed.

So, in this current church experience, I believe it shows we still have missionary hearts, as we’re willing to submerge ourselves yet again into another foreign culture.