By Jessyka Albert
When we aim to make our churches “youth friendly,” we are often missing the point. Does that mean that a church can be friendly without being youth friendly and vice versa? The first step toward making a church youth friendly is being a friendly church. If you feel your church is friendly, keep it up—and keep reading. If your church is struggling with this abstract, hard-to-grasp concept of kindness, drop your Mountain Views right now and do everything in your power to fix that. No amount of youth friendliness can fill the gaping hole of an inauthentic church.
Friendly churches are flexible churches. Friendly churches can replace the word “youth” with any age group, gender, race, or walk of life. The issue is not friendliness, but rather who and what we value. It is an issue our church continues to wrestle with. Do we value our youth? Do we value different cultures? Do we value women?
Jesus understood that this issue transcends time and culture. He broke with the status quo. He said things like, “Let the little children come to me.” He entrusted the gospel first to a woman. He associated and dined with some of the lowest of the low. And He continues to challenge our social norms today.
It is easy to be “friendly” to someone. A smile here, a compliment there, but it gets really difficult when we begin to value someone. Valuing people takes much more intentionality and it sometimes requires us to step past our pride. Pride that is threatened when younger generations come up with innovative ideas we never even dreamed of. Pride when a woman is able to lead in the name of Jesus just as well as any man. Pride when a little child shows more forgiveness and grace than our hardened adult hearts could ever muster.
The world already has friendly. There are plenty of places that I would consider friendly. Personally, I think Chick-fil-A is one of the friendliness places on earth. (and their shakes measure up as well!) So what makes the Seventh-day Adventist Church different from Chick-fil-A? Plenty of places can harness the virtue of friendliness with little to no effort, but we as a church need to move above and beyond what this world has to offer. We need to represent the name of Jesus in stepping past friendliness into value. Instead of letting the world lead us in friendliness, we need to let Jesus lead us in the virtue of value.
So yes, friendliness is important, but it is also too easy. It can cause us to become lazy Christians who feel that we are doing “good enough” just being a friendly church. But when I think of what I want from my church, I want a Christian community that goes beyond small talk by being genuinely invested in one another’s lives. A church where members value each other and push the world to do the same. A church that takes the lead—because we are following so close to Jesus—rather than falling behind.
–Jessyka Albert is discipleship pastor at Boulder Adventist Church.