The Center

I’m a Millennial. 

I don’t know if anything I’ve written thus far has given that away, but now you know for certain. Everyone who isn’t a Millennial loves to blame us for all the problems in the world. I secretly think it’s because everyone else wishes they were us. What’s not to love?! The generation that brought you glitter eyeshadow and stick straight hair every morning before 7th grade? Skinny Jeans? High waisted pants?! The return of vinyl? Who wouldn’t want to be one of us? 

While I love my generation and love watching us grow up into who we were made to be, I also see some of our faults. When we were younger, especially in the circles that I ran in, we were easily swayed by the opinions of popular people in our schools, communities, and in the culture at large. I wonder if we weren’t the first generation to really have a celebrity culture. There were whole magazines dedicated to celebrities and their newest diet or marriage or blue jean outfit (I’ll always love you Britney) or whatever (Gen Z: Magazines are made of paper and you used to read them to figure out when you were going to get married and also how to style your butterfly clips or organize your Beanie Baby collection). I remember when TMZ first came on the air and it started to become kind of normal to be obsessed with the personal lives of people you didn’t know. It was kind of weird.

Millennials, we loved our celebrities and we stood by them. Even in 2007 when Britney, of aforementioned blue jean outfit fame, shaved her head and went a little bonkers. Turns out, Britney’s not crazy, her family is, and you would have gone bonkers too. But now, when celebrities lose their minds or say something we don’t like or do something that’s not “woke”, we just cancel them. People can have done something thirty plus years ago and we’ll cancel them for it. This whole celebrity culture thing has gotten way out of hand. We put people on impossible pedestals and then scream at them for falling off. Did we ever stop to ask them if they wanted to be on that pedestal in the first place? Did we ever stop to consider if they were made to bear that kind of responsibility? Could we, honestly, have done any better?

The unsettling thing about celebrity culture, for me at least, is that it has seeped into faith communities all across the western world. I work with young people and they are always asking me what I think of this person or that person or did I read what so-and-so said. While I’m grateful for the access that we have to solid Bible teachers and good resources, I think there’s a downside here. We make these often well-meaning people into celebrities against their will and something weird happens to them, and to us.

I’ve seen it so many times now, I’ve lost count. Whether on the national stage or in your local faith community, a pastor or leader gets elevated to celebrity status and, after the initial shock, they start to change. It could be unintentional. It could be a result of a latent desire for greatness coming to life. Whatever the reason, where a regular person once stood, a celebrity is installed. And the thing about people, whether they are celebrities or Christ followers or parents or grocery store clerks, is that people are flawed. Deeply. And complex. When we really look at our own lives and at the lives of those we admire, there’s not a clear distinction we can draw between good and evil. All people have the capacity for both.

I hope that you’re noticing the problem that arises when we make a person into more than a person- a celebrity. Because we are all capable of both good and evil, celebrities, whatever the variety, are going to make mistakes. And when we build our life around a person, when that person crumbles, so does our life.

My purpose here isn’t to really talk about Christian celebrity culture, although I could RANT. My purpose is to uncover and explore what happens to us when we build our life around a person and that person turns out to be human after all.

As a Millennial, I’ve also experienced the unfortunate tendency of many people my age to deconstruct their faith. Before you close your browser window and write me off, I’m also NOT here to rail against deconstruction. Many of the beliefs that we were taught as young people or as young followers of Christ are worth examination. They need to be held up to scrutiny to see if they are beliefs worth holding onto. I actually think deconstruction can be really helpful and necessary in building our lives on the right things! If you remember last week, I wrote about spiders’ webs and the importance of identifying and testing the thing at the center. Deconstruction helps us do this. In fact, if we can deconstruct our faith successfully, we’ll rebuild the spider web of our life with the right thing at the center. 

What I don’t think is helpful, though, is realizing that one part of what you were taught or used to believe doesn’t make any sense and so you throw the whole thing out. You can do this with ideas or people. Say the person who taught you about Jesus turns out to be a complete fraud and so you, understandably, decide that everything they taught you is trash. It seems like a logical jump if you have characterized people and ideologies as either all good or all bad. But this doesn’t make sense when held up to the light of reality because, even if you discover that most of the ideologies that you once ascribed to turn out to not make sense of your life, world, or experience, that doesn’t mean that it’s all trash. Ideologies, just like people, are complex. It’s unfair to try to characterize the whole thing as good or bad just as it’s unfair to do that to people. And so, my point about celebrities comes into play.

Many of my friends and acquaintances who don’t follow Jesus anymore made the unfortunate mistake of building their faith on a person or sub-culture, rather than Jesus Christ. They put a pastor, teacher, denomination, doctrine, or subculture at the center of their life or, at least, their faith and that thing turned out to be, like all things, flawed. The center didn’t hold and, so, their lives fell apart and they made the fatal, but understandable, mistake of throwing the whole thing out to build the web of their life again. The worst part about all of this, for me, is knowing that the new person or thing or ideology at the new center of their new life won’t hold either. Because, the only person who is worth building your life around is Jesus Christ. He’s the only person that’s all good and no bad. He’s the only person who will never lead us astray. He always does the right thing and he has both the power and authority to hold at the center of your life.

What’s at the center of your life? If that question is too deep (and it might be, for some of you), then ask yourself what your faith or spirituality is built upon. Is it based on Jesus or on someone or something else? This is the critical question: when the crap in your life hits the fan, can whatever you’ve centered your life (or spirituality) on hold? When your worst-case scenario comes to fruition, will you crumble or stand firm?

Now, that I’ve laid it all out on the table, you might not believe me. You might think that whatever is at the center of your life will always hold and never change. You’re free to make the choices that you want to make. I’m here to ask you questions, warn you, and, hopefully, save you some pain along the way. But, because I’ve been around awhile and because I’m pretty observant, if the center of your life isn’t Jesus Christ, it won’t hold. And when it falls apart, please don’t try to put something else there. Just give me a call and come over to my place. I’ll feed you and we’ll start over.

After you’ve asked yourself these questions and made any necessary changes (or learned by experience that I am right and then come to eat food at my house and reconstruct your life), will you do me, you, and everyone else a favor? Don’t make people into celebrities. It’s a sick, twisted, and fruitless way to live. Give them the same grace, mercy, and compassion that I hope you’ve received. Be different. Don’t build your life around someone else. And watch the whole world come alive with the freedom of Christ at the center.