Wednesday, October 5, 2005
Pastor Judah Smith's hip morality tales play to young crowd
By CLAUDIA ROWE
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
By the time a person turns 20, the likelihood of abstaining from pre-marital sex and otherwise living "a right life," at least as evangelicals count it, is almost zero. If a kid hasn't drawn the line by college graduation, they say, he probably won't.
This notion translates into one overriding edict for 26-year-old Judah Smith: Get them young.
Mike Urban / P-I
Generation Church Pastor Judah Smith.
The leader of Generation Church, a rapidly growing youth ministry with an increasing presence on the University of Washington campus, Smith believes young people between 12 and 19 are the last bulwark against an America steeped in immorality beyond rescue, and he is out to reach as many as possible before time runs out.
"Look at what's mainstream now -- the average age a person is exposed to hard-core pornography on the Internet is 11," he said in an interview after one of his Wednesday night sermons at the university's cavernous Kane Hall. "The way I see it, we have this small window -- seven years before today's sixth-graders will turn 19 -- to reach this generation and change things."
He spoke from his office at The City Church in Kirkland, sitting before a computer on which the words "Follow Me" bounced across the screen. If Smith were waging his campaign for chastity and sobriety in front of several dozen -- or even several hundred -- young adherents, he might be shrugged off as a determined reformer crying in the dark. But here, in one of the most unchurched regions of the country, Smith's impact continues to grow. Between his weekly university sermons, Sunday talks at The City Church (which is run by his parents) and a travel schedule that puts him in front of throngs around the world, the hip young pastor with spiky blond hair and geeky-cool glasses reaches 4,000 to 20,000 young people a month.
"The era in which we live is one of the most critical turning points in American history," Smith told an audience of college students last month. President Bush's Supreme Court nominations, he said, would be essential to determining "whether or not we will continue to murder innocent lives in the womb of our women."
"Wow," breathed a girl in the audience.
"This is really the most critical time of your life," he said, striding across the stage, which was strewn with electric guitars, and wearing a T-shirt printed with the word "Obey" in gothic script. "You are making decisions that will forge the rest of your future."
His audience was college students mostly -- the boys muscled and moussed, wearing flip flops and jeans, the girls with streaky hair and skin-baring camisoles, scrolling through menus on their cell phones as they listened to Smith's morality tales delivered with surfer-dude cool.
"It's a Friday night -- you think she's cute, she thinks you're cute -- and you're sitting on the couch together," he said. "You know, a couch could quickly turn into a bed." This would be a defining moment, he pointed out to the crowd, which was rapt.
"People have kind of been fascinated by him," said Mike Servello, associate pastor at Mt. Zion Ministries in Utica, N.Y., who invited Smith to speak at a youth conference there in November. "He has both the charisma and the message and that is a powerful thing."
Certainly it was for Alicia McCown, 21, who, dressed in a miniskirt and cowboy boots, was so moved by Smith that she poured out the vodka bottle lying in her car after hearing him preach just once.
"He speaks the truth and what he says is really relevant to our lives," she said. "I was very critical coming in, but I just called my boyfriend about it and was really pumped. I was planning to drink later but I decided to dump the bottle instead."
Millennials rising
Like many of the young people at the university gathering, McCown was there because a friend brought her. Neither is a university student. They heard about Smith through word of mouth, which is much of the reason that his late-night meetings have exploded in the last year, from a tight group of 50 to crowds of 500. Sociologists and historians are not surprised.
Mike Urban / P-I
Congregants raise their hands in praise as Generation Church's Pastor Judah Smith preaches at the University of Washington's Kane Hall.
Raised in an era when their peers made headlines for random school shootings and their president's sexual exploits became a national joke, Smith's target audience, the so-called Millennial Generation, have grown up to embrace a new traditionalism. Some observers say they are the most rule-friendly, group-oriented generation in recent history.
"They are joiners," said William Strauss, co-author of the book "Millennials Rising."
"They are prepared to listen to leaders -- whether from the pulpit or the White House -- in ways that their parents, the boomers, did not, and that is a very new phenomenon. They believe in security rather than radicalism, political order rather than social emancipation, collective responsibility rather than personal expression."
They are also flocking to religion in numbers not seen since the 1960s. The National Network of Youth Ministries, based in San Diego, reports an all-time high of 13,000 member groups around the country, and with nearly 80 million Millennials making up about a third of the U.S. population, their influence, politically as well as socially, could be considerable.
Smith, an admitted ham who always relished the spotlight, insists that he has no aspirations for public office. But that is not to say he is uninterested in changing minds or affecting policy. Married to the only girl he says he ever held hands with, Smith is blunt about his beliefs -- for example, that homosexuality is a sin, the same as murder, rape or living with your girlfriend -- and he has been working since childhood to convince others. His sermons are televised and podcasted. A decade from now, he says, "tens of thousands more young people will be affected."
'Crying in the audience'
His crusade began in earnest the day Smith, age 16, abruptly left Bellevue Christian School mid-sophomore year to enroll, against his parents' wishes, at Issaquah High. Gini and Wendell Smith, both pastors, had favored Bellevue's religiously based instruction, but their son wanted to throw himself into a comparative pit of sin, a place where he would be forced to steel his faith against those who did not necessarily share it.
"I was living in a gray world," he said of Bellevue, where belief in God was tacitly assumed, never shouted out loud. "I wanted to be in a black and white environment."
Immediately he got to work, convening a small Bible study group during lunch periods and inviting the hard-partying jocks to attend. He had already announced that he would not date, assiduously avoided any event where there might be drugs or alcohol and listened to the Gospel Gangsters instead of Tupac Shakur.
There were kids who avoided sitting near him and others who rolled their eyes, but by the end of his senior year Smith had persuaded the administration to let him hold a nighttime rally in the football stadium, where he broadcast his message about the reality of miracles over the PA system and urged his classmates, hundreds of whom showed up, to re-examine their lives. Right then and there, several dozen -- including a star of the football team -- gave themselves to Christ.
"It was fairly moving," recalled Ryan Ficker, a financial analyst who graduated with Smith. "People were crying in the audience."
Many of them have grown up to become members of The City Church, an evangelical-charismatic ministry run by Smith's mother and father on a large campus in Kirkland. The Smiths preach about the reality of miracles. They speak in tongues. They believe the Bible is fact, not allegory, and that living radically as a Christian does not necessarily mean taking a vow of poverty -- "We've got multimillionaires in this church. I've got no problem with prosperity," said Smith, who bought a $410,000 home on the Eastside with his wife in 2002. What his church emphasizes is gathering as many as possible into the fold.
Cool vs. Christian
Smith's magnetism for young people may be partly genetic. He and his sister, Wendy, who is married to the well-known charismatic Benny Perez and preaches in Las Vegas, are the seventh generation of pastors in their family. By the time Smith was 9, he was traveling the world with his father, watching as the older man spoke before thousands. At the end of each rally, Wendell Smith would bring his boy on stage to ask what he wanted to be when he grew up.
"I want to preach," the child always said. "I want to preach better than you."
At 13, while other kids were sneaking sips of booze and peeking at dirty magazines, he gave his first sermon. It was on peer pressure.
This is a subject Smith still ponders a lot.
"Could it be that Christianity could cost us coolness?" he asked in a recent sermon, exhorting his young audience to "launch" themselves into dorm life and proselytize, despite the likely injury to their social standing.
A few weeks earlier he had urged them to attend his three-day Bible camp, even if they didn't have the necessary $200, even it meant quitting jobs they'd worked all four years of college to attain. Rise from your seats, he urged the young people, and walk down to the stage to say you will go to camp.
"If you go to camp and your life is not changed I will pay, personally, your way," he said, staring up at the diminishing crowd, more and more of whom were now standing with him and looking back at their friends.
"Camp totally changed my life," said Imani Lawson, 20. "Before it, I was like, 'Why am I going to camp? I'm a pre-med and Spanish major and my grades suck.' But I asked God about it and God totally spoke to me about my grades. He said, 'Just keep going to church, I'll take care of that.' " And he has, Lawson said. "School became so easy, I'm like, 'Wow, God.' "
Lawson's parents have expressed concern about the intensity of her involvement with Smith's ministry, she said, but this has not dampened her enthusiasm. Nor has it worried Smith, who urges his followers to go home to families and roommates and spread the word.
"Go for it," he said, "and may the mojo be with you."
Wednesday, October 5, 2005
Pastor Judah Smith's hip morality tales play to young crowd
By CLAUDIA ROWE
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
By the time a person turns 20, the likelihood of abstaining from pre-marital sex and otherwise living "a right life," at least as evangelicals count it, is almost zero. If a kid hasn't drawn the line by college graduation, they say, he probably won't.
This notion translates into one overriding edict for 26-year-old Judah Smith: Get them young.
Mike Urban / P-I
Generation Church Pastor Judah Smith.
The leader of Generation Church, a rapidly growing youth ministry with an increasing presence on the University of Washington campus, Smith believes young people between 12 and 19 are the last bulwark against an America steeped in immorality beyond rescue, and he is out to reach as many as possible before time runs out.
"Look at what's mainstream now -- the average age a person is exposed to hard-core pornography on the Internet is 11," he said in an interview after one of his Wednesday night sermons at the university's cavernous Kane Hall. "The way I see it, we have this small window -- seven years before today's sixth-graders will turn 19 -- to reach this generation and change things."
He spoke from his office at The City Church in Kirkland, sitting before a computer on which the words "Follow Me" bounced across the screen. If Smith were waging his campaign for chastity and sobriety in front of several dozen -- or even several hundred -- young adherents, he might be shrugged off as a determined reformer crying in the dark. But here, in one of the most unchurched regions of the country, Smith's impact continues to grow. Between his weekly university sermons, Sunday talks at The City Church (which is run by his parents) and a travel schedule that puts him in front of throngs around the world, the hip young pastor with spiky blond hair and geeky-cool glasses reaches 4,000 to 20,000 young people a month.
"The era in which we live is one of the most critical turning points in American history," Smith told an audience of college students last month. President Bush's Supreme Court nominations, he said, would be essential to determining "whether or not we will continue to murder innocent lives in the womb of our women."
"Wow," breathed a girl in the audience.
"This is really the most critical time of your life," he said, striding across the stage, which was strewn with electric guitars, and wearing a T-shirt printed with the word "Obey" in gothic script. "You are making decisions that will forge the rest of your future."
His audience was college students mostly -- the boys muscled and moussed, wearing flip flops and jeans, the girls with streaky hair and skin-baring camisoles, scrolling through menus on their cell phones as they listened to Smith's morality tales delivered with surfer-dude cool.
"It's a Friday night -- you think she's cute, she thinks you're cute -- and you're sitting on the couch together," he said. "You know, a couch could quickly turn into a bed." This would be a defining moment, he pointed out to the crowd, which was rapt.
"People have kind of been fascinated by him," said Mike Servello, associate pastor at Mt. Zion Ministries in Utica, N.Y., who invited Smith to speak at a youth conference there in November. "He has both the charisma and the message and that is a powerful thing."
Certainly it was for Alicia McCown, 21, who, dressed in a miniskirt and cowboy boots, was so moved by Smith that she poured out the vodka bottle lying in her car after hearing him preach just once.
"He speaks the truth and what he says is really relevant to our lives," she said. "I was very critical coming in, but I just called my boyfriend about it and was really pumped. I was planning to drink later but I decided to dump the bottle instead."
Millennials rising
Like many of the young people at the university gathering, McCown was there because a friend brought her. Neither is a university student. They heard about Smith through word of mouth, which is much of the reason that his late-night meetings have exploded in the last year, from a tight group of 50 to crowds of 500. Sociologists and historians are not surprised.
Mike Urban / P-I
Congregants raise their hands in praise as Generation Church's Pastor Judah Smith preaches at the University of Washington's Kane Hall.
Raised in an era when their peers made headlines for random school shootings and their president's sexual exploits became a national joke, Smith's target audience, the so-called Millennial Generation, have grown up to embrace a new traditionalism. Some observers say they are the most rule-friendly, group-oriented generation in recent history.
"They are joiners," said William Strauss, co-author of the book "Millennials Rising."
"They are prepared to listen to leaders -- whether from the pulpit or the White House -- in ways that their parents, the boomers, did not, and that is a very new phenomenon. They believe in security rather than radicalism, political order rather than social emancipation, collective responsibility rather than personal expression."
They are also flocking to religion in numbers not seen since the 1960s. The National Network of Youth Ministries, based in San Diego, reports an all-time high of 13,000 member groups around the country, and with nearly 80 million Millennials making up about a third of the U.S. population, their influence, politically as well as socially, could be considerable.
Smith, an admitted ham who always relished the spotlight, insists that he has no aspirations for public office. But that is not to say he is uninterested in changing minds or affecting policy. Married to the only girl he says he ever held hands with, Smith is blunt about his beliefs -- for example, that homosexuality is a sin, the same as murder, rape or living with your girlfriend -- and he has been working since childhood to convince others. His sermons are televised and podcasted. A decade from now, he says, "tens of thousands more young people will be affected."
'Crying in the audience'
His crusade began in earnest the day Smith, age 16, abruptly left Bellevue Christian School mid-sophomore year to enroll, against his parents' wishes, at Issaquah High. Gini and Wendell Smith, both pastors, had favored Bellevue's religiously based instruction, but their son wanted to throw himself into a comparative pit of sin, a place where he would be forced to steel his faith against those who did not necessarily share it.
"I was living in a gray world," he said of Bellevue, where belief in God was tacitly assumed, never shouted out loud. "I wanted to be in a black and white environment."
Immediately he got to work, convening a small Bible study group during lunch periods and inviting the hard-partying jocks to attend. He had already announced that he would not date, assiduously avoided any event where there might be drugs or alcohol and listened to the Gospel Gangsters instead of Tupac Shakur.
There were kids who avoided sitting near him and others who rolled their eyes, but by the end of his senior year Smith had persuaded the administration to let him hold a nighttime rally in the football stadium, where he broadcast his message about the reality of miracles over the PA system and urged his classmates, hundreds of whom showed up, to re-examine their lives. Right then and there, several dozen -- including a star of the football team -- gave themselves to Christ.
"It was fairly moving," recalled Ryan Ficker, a financial analyst who graduated with Smith. "People were crying in the audience."
Many of them have grown up to become members of The City Church, an evangelical-charismatic ministry run by Smith's mother and father on a large campus in Kirkland. The Smiths preach about the reality of miracles. They speak in tongues. They believe the Bible is fact, not allegory, and that living radically as a Christian does not necessarily mean taking a vow of poverty -- "We've got multimillionaires in this church. I've got no problem with prosperity," said Smith, who bought a $410,000 home on the Eastside with his wife in 2002. What his church emphasizes is gathering as many as possible into the fold.
Cool vs. Christian
Smith's magnetism for young people may be partly genetic. He and his sister, Wendy, who is married to the well-known charismatic Benny Perez and preaches in Las Vegas, are the seventh generation of pastors in their family. By the time Smith was 9, he was traveling the world with his father, watching as the older man spoke before thousands. At the end of each rally, Wendell Smith would bring his boy on stage to ask what he wanted to be when he grew up.
"I want to preach," the child always said. "I want to preach better than you."
At 13, while other kids were sneaking sips of booze and peeking at dirty magazines, he gave his first sermon. It was on peer pressure.
This is a subject Smith still ponders a lot.
"Could it be that Christianity could cost us coolness?" he asked in a recent sermon, exhorting his young audience to "launch" themselves into dorm life and proselytize, despite the likely injury to their social standing.
A few weeks earlier he had urged them to attend his three-day Bible camp, even if they didn't have the necessary $200, even it meant quitting jobs they'd worked all four years of college to attain. Rise from your seats, he urged the young people, and walk down to the stage to say you will go to camp.
"If you go to camp and your life is not changed I will pay, personally, your way," he said, staring up at the diminishing crowd, more and more of whom were now standing with him and looking back at their friends.
"Camp totally changed my life," said Imani Lawson, 20. "Before it, I was like, 'Why am I going to camp? I'm a pre-med and Spanish major and my grades suck.' But I asked God about it and God totally spoke to me about my grades. He said, 'Just keep going to church, I'll take care of that.' " And he has, Lawson said. "School became so easy, I'm like, 'Wow, God.' "
Lawson's parents have expressed concern about the intensity of her involvement with Smith's ministry, she said, but this has not dampened her enthusiasm. Nor has it worried Smith, who urges his followers to go home to families and roommates and spread the word.
"Go for it," he said, "and may the mojo be with you."
4 comments:
I hope you enjoy this really long post. Oh, and look down below at my new, oddly placed post, Generation Conference. Meci beaucoup!
I am speechless...
That is an awesome testamony, one that I wish I could call my own. I am very greatful to God for putting people like Judah Smith on this earth to shine in the dark and help people like me to be more confrontational with sin.
I loved that...right on!
I don't think I have ever heard of anyone not liking Pastor Judah. Or anyone thinking that he isn't cool. I think the passion he has for God and for this Generation makes him totally cool. I am glad you enjoyed it.
*looking confused*
Where is Maria?
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