Everything Good About Gen Z: Union University’s “Scriptorium” Warms a Cold, Desolate January
by Ted Kluck
My most recent for WORLD…
Generation Z is often maligned for being shiftless, dead-eyed, screen-addicted, concave-chested, and too ironic by half. I guess you could make the argument that this is true, although it’s probably more a product of how my generation has messed up parenting them, than their generation itself. Our generation often likes to say things to them like, “Touch grass,” or “stop playing video games,” or in some cases, “please move out of my house, already.”
That said, I had an experience with Gen Z recently that warmed the proverbial cockles of my own cynical heart. Let me explain.
For the past week-and-a-half we’ve (in the mid-South) been living basically encased in snow and ice. For three days I didn’t have running water in my neighborhood, which meant that I was filling pots with snow and melting them on a stove, like Pa Ingalls, just to be able to flush our toilets. Part of the collateral damage of this snow/ice storm situation is that for the last two Sundays, church has been cancelled, which has crushed my spirit each time, as gathering with the saints on Sunday is the highlight of my week.
I happened to be meeting with some students in our campus coffee shop when I got news of the latest church cancellation. Bear in mind these students keep tabs on my glumness and got concerned when I started my last email with, “Greetings, from the Winter of My Discontent.” Anyway, I was inconsolable when I got the church closure notification, to which one of my students responded, “Why don’t you and KK [my wife] come in and join us for Scriptorium!”
Scriptorium was the brainchild of one of these kids, from my university, a couple of years ago, and has grown into a twice-weekly meeting where college students gather to help each other memorize scripture. And then they’ll occasionally have recitations, where they gather to say aloud the scripture they’ve memorized. If this sounds like possibly the most wholesome, and hopeful, thing you’ve heard in a long time, that’s because it is.
It requires no budget, concerns the most important thing we have and will ever have (the Word of God), and happened completely on the initiative of a few students. It is perhaps the most “Christian college” thing a Christian college can do, except that we didn’t think of it and put it in a brochure and sell it. They just started doing it.
“I’ll be there!” I replied, happy that I’d have some saints to gather with on Sunday morning. So my wife and I hopped in the car, slid over the ice rink that used to be our campus, and joined these students in the school’s theatre, the door of which I last darkened to watch a student rendition of Sherlock Holmes. We sang “Christ the Sure and Steady Anchor,” “It is Well with My Soul,” and “Christ is Mine Forevermore,” accompanied only by a guitar and piano. One of my journalism majors led the singing, which was lovely. We were all dressed in attire that said, “I just scuttled in through the snow.” Also, lovely.
And then my pastor preached a sermon from the back half of Romans 8 about hope in the face of suffering, after which we all stood around and visited for about 45 minutes, absolutely thrilled to be together on a cold Sunday morning.
I share this anecdote because it brought me hope, and hope is important. I share it because it won’t make the mainstream news, it isn’t the kind of Big Revival that momentarily draws attention to a college campus, but it is no less awesome. I share it because sometimes “thinking about young people” and their crazy podcasts (Nick Fuentes, et. al.), their meme-culture-as-a-means-of-coping, and their binge-watching-The-Office-for-the sixth-time-to-cope can be a little despair-inducing.
Scriptorium was the opposite of despair-inducing, in that it was hope-inducing. I hope these students are nourished by the Word. I hope they hide it in their hearts. I hope it helps their future marriages, and they use it to serve their future churches. And I hope to join them a little more often, and memorize some scripture myself.
It occurred to me that while some are called to Think Piecing, and some to provocative Tweeting (is anyone actually called to this?), perhaps the culture war would be better waged by just memorizing the book of Ephesians and seeing what the Lord does with it?