I believe in God, but not the Church

In J. Harold Ellens' Understanding Religious Experiences: What the Bible Says about Spirituality he suggests that the new generation can't worship via the same forms of the previous generation without first seriously studying the questions, formulations, and spiritual expressions to internalize and relate to them personally. As such, he categorizes three reactions: drop out, settle, or redefine.

Drop out is obvious, of settle he writes:

a generation that wearies of trying to reinvent the wheel and so immerses itself in the historic formulations and practices and finds therein something of the meaning that their forebears found there. This is a convenient shortcut in the individual’s spiritual journey. However, it runs the risk of being inauthentic if the younger merely embrace the form of their tradition without grasping its depth of meaning and the reasons for it being what it is

The redefiners are the ones he praises:

those bright and honest folks who have lots of energy, motivation, and vigor for their spiritual quest, inform themselves well on human psychology and spirituality, review honestly and learn the positives and negatives from those traditions of spirituality and religion they are setting aside or moving beyond, and are creative enough to formulate genuine new ways to fashion religious expressions that both feed and fruit their consequent inner spiritual fullness.

Maybe the frustration of this large segment is a sign some of the bold among them need to start something new.

/r/Christianity Thread Parent