Bearing Fruit

"Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing." John 15:4-5

What's driving me to drink is lowered expectations. I read a book this past year called Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers is Telling the American Church. It's a book based on the National Study of Youth and Religion, the most recent statistical study of what teens in America actually believe. The good news is, most teens in America actually do have faith of some kind. The bad news is, the kind of faith many teens have (including teens who are very active in Christian congregations), is not what you could properly call Christianity. Rather, it's what the study's authors call, "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism." Here are some of its basic tenets:
1.A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over life on earth.
2. God wants people to be good, nice and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and most other world religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and feel good about oneself.
4. God is not involved in my life except when I need to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, although it is believed by many who call themselves Christian, is not centered in the cross of Jesus. It is apparently not in the least concerned, or even aware of, human sinfulness. But most disturbing to me, it expects exactly zero of its practitioners. It casts God as the one who turns on the Go-cart track, announces over the P.A., "Have fun kids. Be nice. Don't get hurt." then proceeds to go out for a sandwich--perhaps ducking in now and then if ever someone gets into a serious jam. A God who stays out of our business and out of our life.

What's worse, the study finds that it's not that teens are "not getting the message" through the youth programming provided by Christian congregations across the country. They're getting the message loud and clear. From adults.

God's very first commandment to humankind, fresh from the clay that God had formed in God's own image, was,"Be fruitful and multiply." Now bear with me a minute, because I fully realize this may seem like a REALLY bad commandment to be teaching our kids about. :-) What many students of Genesis have said about this passage is that God is asking humankind to do more than simply "reproduce." God is asking humanity to tend the garden: to form a relationship with the creation, and to be God's stewards, using our creativity and imagination--God's image within us--to make a good creation an even more lively and wondrous place. This was bearing fruit in the Garden.

In the River Jordan, John the Baptist again called Israel to "bear fruit worthy of repentance." To stop assuming that ancestral connections are all that it takes to be in right relationship with God. To stop thinking of ourselves as "customers" in God's general store of blessings: consumers of a religious product, free to wander in and out when we please, but expecting to be first in line at the counter when a crisis hits and we need some grace.

Discipleship of Jesus involves bearing fruit. In fact, bearing fruit is a natural result of following Jesus. You can't not do it. It's just what happens when you're following Jesus. It's NOT what saves us: Jesus has already done that on the cross. It's just what happens when we accept that he has accepted us.

I'm happy to tell you that, by the Spirit's power, Delaware and Maryland Youth bore a lot of fruit at the Roadtrip retreat in Ocean City, Maryland last month. Here's what it looked like:

*Over three hundred kids and dozens of adult volunteers, worshiping together in the name of the Triune God.

*Dozens of school kits being put together for Lutheran World Relief, letters written to homebound church members, and quilt squares cut for LWR quilts.

*Small Groups of kids from across two states, dealing with real questions of faith, and learning to tell their own faith stories.

*Youth, standing before hundreds of their brothers and sisters in Christ, testifying to what God has done for them.

*A whole lot of good clean fun!

And in all of this--from worship, to service, to learning to testifying--it was fellow students who were taking the lead, through the LYO (Lutheran Youth Organization). My partner in leading a small group was in 12th grade. We were greeted as soon as we registered by a team of kids whose job it was to answer questions and make people feel welcome. Every service project was chosen and orchestrated by the kids. And closing worship was planned and lead by the kids.

Maybe this kind of "fruit-bearing" is the exception to the rule. But maybe it's catching on. And maybe we, as adults in the faith, can fan the flames, by asking ourselves the question: "How am I bearing fruit?"