Sing A Song Of Grapes

Isaiah 5:1-7

About a dozen years ago I attended a half-day workshop that talked about the present course of Youth Ministry. The workshop took an honest look at how the youth of the early 2000's were, or were not, actively participating in their church's overall worship experience. The data they presented was alarming but not yet tangible, so we took the information with us and put it in a drawer.

As most things we "put in a drawer" it was forgotten about and when the time came to clean out the desk it was looked at and believed to be not important. In the year 2013 I see how a lot of the information given to us on that day is valid now. If we had taken what was given to us a little more seriously maybe we wouldn't be in the place we are in today's churches.

The workshop pointed out that one of two things had to happen if we wanted mainline churches to have any kind of sustained growth. Either churches had to begin holding services that closely reflected youth worship or youth worship had to begin reflecting the style of worship our churches were having. The workshop went on to help us realize that it is no longer a good thing to have the youth separated from the rest of the church.

In those days we called it the one-eared Mickey Mouse theory. If you drew an outline of Mickey Mouse with one ear connected and one ear disconnected you could label the 3 circles in this way: the large circle would be the church, the smaller circle that was joined to the head was all other ministries, the disconnected circle was the youth group.

The point of workshop was to help those coming to the age of millennial-worshipers understand that if we continue to build a wall around our youth we are encouraging them to never be able to find a church that replicates their current experiences as they move on in their lives.

The truth is that with the upbeat music, multimedia presentations, and comedic-like messages all we have done to/with our youth is provide such a specific type of experience that they aren't comfortable with anything else. We had forgotten that the best way to honor our God is to honor the true meaning of what being Christian is - to be inviting, not invited.

To use the language from today's passage we have built a great vineyard and now that the grapes have come to fruition we see that they are wild grapes, or grapes not suitable for either wine-making or eating.

The question for us today is what are we to do? Isaiah's answer was to clear the entire vineyard and start over. I don't think we need to go that far - not yet. I do think we need to take a very good look at how we cultivate the soil from this point forward, though. We do this by honoring God's love by living God's grace; be unconditionally accepting of all people and go out of your way to help those who are oppressed.

And, if you want better grapes at the next harvest, teach our youth to do the same. This time try it without the multimedia and comedic-messages.