Transcendence: The Key To Reaching Millennials

I am a big believer that millennials are seeking transcendence – something beyond the laws of the universe and beyond all of their everyday comprehension, within the ordinary, that reveals the supernatural. Millennials want to explore supernatural expressions that are independent of the broken world they’ve come to know so well in order to find peace and hope.

This, to me, is the biggest reason we have come to a common place of millennials who are spiritual and not religious.  IMO, for many millennials, it boils down to the issue of transcendence.  Unfortunately, what millennials know as modern religion (that is us, church) has lost its competence to speak about and live into the transcendent nature of God.  Modern religion has made religion so anthropocentric (human centered) we’ve taken away the beauty and mystery and replaced it with the rote and mundane.  For this reason, millennials have opted for a different route toward supernatural expressions of gods, self, others and the world.

So, then, how can millennials experience transcendence in a practical, everyday kind of way?  I believe one of the ways that the church can help millennials experience the transcendent is through our own lives.  When we live for the glory of God we point to what makes God transcendent. Glory is reflection.  When we glorify God we reflect God in our actions, words, etc.  Transcendence can be found when we live incarnational lives that reflect the nature of God – lives that are full of grace and truth.