A colleague recently shared that some of the young people in his ministry have become uninterested in talking about joy and hope. They tell him there is too much despair and brokenness; it is just too hard to try to hope. For some, hope in the face of oppression and evil seems like foolhardy denial that is profoundly useless.
This rattled me.
I do my best to tell young people in every way I know how that they are not the future; Jesus Christ is. Yet I also realize that at some point in my ministry I formed an assumption that young people are constitutionally disposed toward hope. I assumed that youthful hopefulness was enough to drive out cynicism and despair. In fact, I was counting on it.
The problem with this assumption is that it misses the source -- and the hard work -- of hope. Hope that relies on the vitality of youth risks becoming baseless optimism. And this kind of optimism demands that the young offer me and others something they are not prepared to offer.
Hope is not a can-do attitude. Nor is it something with which God infuses us. Rather, it is a sense of possibility that can be fostered through practices of attentiveness.
We resist change less when we associate it with mission and fortify it with hope. So argues longtime congregational consultant Peter Steinke in his fourth book, A Door Set Open, as he explores the relationship between the challenges of change and our own responses to new ideas and experiences. Steinke builds on a seldom-explored principle posited by the late Rabbi Edwin Friedman: the 'hostility of the environment' is proportionate to the 'response of the organism.' The key, Steinke says, is not the number or strength of the stressors in the system--anxiety, poor conditions, deteriorating values--but the response of the individual or organization to 'what is there.' Drawing on Bowen system theory and a theology of hope, as well as his experience working with more than two hundred congregations, Steinke makes the case that the church has entered an era of great opportunity. Theologian and sociologist Ernst Troeltsch said the church had closed down the office of eschatology. Steinke reopens it and draws our attention to God's future, to a vision of hope for the people of God. The door is set open for exploration and new creation.
