A piece in Living Lutheran this week names something a lot of us have been noticing from different angles. A pastor there says one reason young adults are showing up in their congregations is the historic liturgy and the old theology. Not the newest thing. The oldest thing in the room.
That is worth sitting with for a minute, especially in a church like ours, where we lift our hands and expect the Holy Spirit to actually do something on a Wednesday. Because the easy read is that young adults are tired of hype and want something quiet and formal instead. I don't think that is quite it. I think they are hungry for something that was true before they got here and will still be true after they leave.
The hunger under the headline
Almost everything handed to a person under thirty-five is new, optimized, and already being replaced. The phone is new. The job description is new. The advice is new, and contradicts last year's advice. When you have spent your whole life standing on a surface that keeps shifting, a prayer that Christians have prayed for seventeen centuries does not feel stuffy. It feels like rock.
God said as much through Jeremiah, to a people who had gotten lost chasing whatever was current:
"This is what the LORD says: Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls." (Jeremiah 6:16)
Notice what the invitation is not. It is not build a new road. It is not stay at the crossroads and admire the view. It is: ask where the good way is, then walk on it. And the promise attached is not excitement. It is rest for your souls. That is exactly what a generation running on fumes is looking for, whether or not it could put the longing into those words.
Roots and wind are not rivals
Here is where I want to be careful, because it would be easy to hear all this as a vote against what we do here. It isn't. The day the Holy Spirit fell in Acts 2, He fell on a room full of people who had been praying the old prayers at the old hours, and the first thing Peter did with that brand-new power was quote the prophet Joel — a text that was already ancient to him. The fire came down on people standing in the ancient path. It did not replace the path; it lit it up.
And honestly, the things we treasure are old too. Praying for the sick with oil and laid-on hands is in James. Prophecy and tongues and words of wisdom are first-century furniture, not a recent invention. A Spirit-filled church is not a church that threw out its inheritance. It is a church that expects the God who did all that then to still be in the room now. Paul put the two together in one breath: "rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness" (Colossians 2:7). Rooted and overflowing. Both.
If you don't feel like you have roots
Some reading this had no faith handed to them at all. No praying grandmother, no family Bible with names in the front, nothing to go back to. I want to say plainly: you are not a second-tier Christian for that. The lineage you are joining is not genetic. "Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God's people and also members of his household" (Ephesians 2:19). You walked in off the street and were handed two thousand years of family. The ancient path is not closed to newcomers. It was built for them.
What is received gets handed on
There is one more turn in this, and it matters. Paul wrote, "For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance" (1 Corinthians 15:3). Received, then passed on. That is the whole motion of the faith — nobody is meant to be the end of the line.
That is really what Mission Sunday on November 1 is about here. Not a guilt trip about the world, but the simple recognition that we are holding something we did not invent and were never meant to keep. Somebody walked the old road ahead of us and left the way marked. Our turn.
So if you are young and find yourself strangely moved by something very old — a creed, a hymn your grandmother knew, bread and a cup — that is not nostalgia. That is the Spirit pointing you toward the One who does not shift: "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever" (Hebrews 13:8). Stand at the crossroads. Ask. Then walk.
Join us this Sunday at 10:30am — Outpouring Worship Center, Ravenna.