So I’m in a class at Lancaster Bible College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on Christianity and Culture (sound like I’m in my element?) by a professor whose recent book is Getting the Blues: What Blues Music Teaches Us About Suffering and Salvation (sound like I might like this guy?), and though this is midway through the second hour and a half class and my voice is tired, my spirit is not. Since my chapel talk in the morning, I’ve been deconstructing the Christian subculture and finding that these kids are for the most part ready to have it deconstructed. Hardly anyone is fighting me like they often do. This is what I hear them saying so far, “Finally, someone is saying it. Thank you!”

I’m pumped. These kids want to follow Jesus, not conform to a Christian culture. And they’re not just filling up their blank notebooks with all the right things to think; they are thinking some of their own thoughts and rethinking what they’ve been taught. There is hope for the church, my friends, and this is a Bible College, mind you. I would normally expect to find the thinkers/questioners at a more liberal arts college. The Bible College is where you go to learn the Bible. But these kids are doing more than that. They want to learn the Bible, or they wouldn’t be here, but they also want know how the Bible fits into the real world.

Getting it right is one thing; getting it real is another. You can get it right, but if it doesn’t touch your real life – if you didn’t grapple with anything to get it, you didn’t struggle for it, or wonder about it, or question it in any way, then it will mean little to you, and you will lose it as fast as you can say the word “Graduate.”

But back to midway through my second class on Christianity and Culture, that’s when I got this little treat. A student in the back row raised his hand and said he just texted his mom that I was at that moment leading a discussion in his class and his mom wrote right back, “NO WAY!!!!!! I became a Christian at a John Fischer concert in 1979.” And then this young man proceeded to say, “That means I probably wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you!”

God is doing a most wonderful thing through all of us in this world. It’s a tapestry woven through time and space. You are in it, and I am too, and we know very little about how it is all connected, but some day we will, and it will all be part of the amazing glory of God.