Andrew Byers sees a growing number of cynical Christians in the church:
For many young believers, including evangelicals, cynicism is becoming characteristic of a hip new way to be “spiritual.” Disillusionment with God and the church is serving as a rite of passage for a new version of spirituality. Jaded young cynics want to “stick it to the man” and break free from authoritative figures and institutional structures. But what if “the man” is actually God himself, and what if the institution is the church for whom his Son died?
Cynicism arises from bitter disappointment. Think about those land mines that have suddenly exploded in your life, bursting long-held ideas and expectations into shards and shrapnel. Sometimes the disappointment is less abrupt. Rather than violent collisions, we may imperceptibly ingest some disturbing reality over a long period of time until one day we wake up and wonder how we became so dour and disillusioned.
He says cynics have arisen due to “Christian idealism” in the church:
Many Western Christians have anchored their hopes in optimistic ideals that could only come from a God who wields a magic wand and brings a kingdom that strangely resembles the Magic Kingdom. This “Christian” idealism embraces the legitimate biblical realities of triumph, strength, deliverance, joy, and happiness without also embracing the equally biblical (and often more immediate) realities of suffering, pain, struggle, and weakness. By embracing such a triumphalistic understanding of Christianity, we inadvertently populate our pews with jaded cynics, because idealism just does not hold water in this world. Our unrealistic expectations of what it means to live as people of faith in a fractured, dystopian realm bears wind for the sails of many whose faith is on the edge of shipwreck.
Instead of these two unbiblical extremes, he believes we should be “hopeful realists”:
This is a perspective that embraces the dual realities of contemporary evil and forthcoming redemption. It lives in the tension of a groaning creation and its imminent restoration. Idealists claim that we are in the suburbs of Eden. Cynics claim that Eden is a farce. Hopeful realists claim with joy that a new Eden looms just around the corner and that fresh green sprouts faintly push up through the cracks and crevices even now. If we truly embrace the biblical teaching that new creation is in the works and on the way, then a daring hopefulness will infuse our experience of daily reality, even when that reality is steeped in the broken mess of the old age, kicking and screaming in its waning hour.
Read the whole article here.