I helped lead a student leadership retreat over the weekend. It was a small, pretty quiet group. It was a good experience in some ways, and a bit concerning in others. I've been assuming for a while that the mainstream evangelical church of North America would soon experience a kind of death, and become an insignificant part of culture. This is neither all bad or all good. Now I'm thinking I'm all wrong. There are still a lot of young people who are still very much tracking with the mainstream evangelical church, and the ones who are either self-identifying, or being identified by others as future leaders have some pretty conservative, very conventional ways of thinking.

For example, I sat and watched these 19-25 year olds have a conversation about which Bible translations were the best/their favorites (for the sake of clarity, this was not a dogmatic, fist-pounding debate for KJV only, or anything close to it). And while it's fine by me for people to have their preferences for different translations, I was a little unnerved about the strength of opinion I heard being offered - as though this was an issue of critical importance to them. Later, as I was engaging them with questions about culture and Kingdom, and a few times I got the sense that they wanted to ask me, "Soooo, what's the point?"

Interestingly, one of the biblical passages I talked about has Jesus sending his disciples out and telling them to "go to the lost sheep of Israel" first when they do their Kingdom thing (Matthew 10). I was trying to ask them who they thought the equivalent of "the lost sheep of Israel" would be in our culture. Now that I'm reflecting on it, I'm wondering if I wasn't talking to the lost sheep right then and there.