Southern Baptists, as a rule, do not drink. But once a month, young congregants of the Journey, a Baptist church here, and their friends get together in the back room of a sprawling brew pub called the Schlafly Bottleworks to talk about the big questions: President Bush, faith and war, the meaning of life, and “what’s wrong with religion.”
“That’s where people are having their conversations about things that matter,” the Rev. Darrin Patrick, senior pastor and founder of the Journey, said about the talks in the bar. “We go where people are because we feel like Jesus went to the people.”
The Journey, a megachurch of mostly younger evangelicals, is representative of a new generation that refuses to put politics at the center of its faith and rejects identification with the religious right.
They say they are tired of the culture wars. They say they do not want the test of their faith to be the fight against gay rights. They say they want to broaden the traditional evangelical anti-abortion agenda to include care for the poor, the environment, immigrants and people with H.I.V., according to experts on younger evangelicals and the young people themselves.
I’m sorry, but while the goals seem noble on the surface, it sounds more like a possible surrender to the popular culture.
Care for the poor? That’s something that the Christian community worldwide has been doing for centuries, and better than anyone else.
The environment? The mother earthers and their sycophants in the congress and the media don’t need the help of young evangelicals, though I think that they will regard them as useful idiots.
Immigrants? People with HIV? How so, if I may ask?
I don’t mean to throw a wet blanket over the enthusiasm of youth; its natural for every new generation to want to change the world-but such efforts had better be guided by strict adherence to the dictates of the word of God, with an undiluted gospel as its centerpiece, lest these young people end up bowing down at the alter of Americas MDGs.
There’s no better way to dilute the witness on a clear issue like abortion than by throwing it in with a myriad of other issues with no clear Christian position.
The Best line is “Southern Baptists as a rule do not drink” as someone who married into a big multi generational Southern Baptist Family – with dozens of Southern Baptist friends, living in a Southern baptis stronghold that makes me hysterical. Not drinking or dancing is to the average SB what Not using Birth Control is to the average Catholic…. ignored.
(that is not an attack on Catholics or Baptists, just an observation)
I have a Southern Baptist aunt and uncle who actually don’t drink or dance. The rest of the family do, however (and we won’t get to the divorce rate in that family).
I have been thinking about this article yesterday. The first thing to note is that young people generally need to differentiate themselves from their parent’s generation. And let’s face it, concerning yourself with the New York Times list of Cardinal Virtues is a good way to get a positive article written about you and feel good about yourself. I mean, who wouldn’t rather be “green” than have to think about sucking the brains out of babies and crushing their skulls?