NeoZine

History behind the NeoZine

Yes! We’re up and running now, albeit a mite-bit wobbly.

NeoZine was dismantled and resurrected just in time for the academic year to begin, which means we can start working for students. This is an important burden for us at Xenos because our ministry is highly-attuned to students, and historically God keeps pushing us there.

Reaching students for Christ means fomenting Revolution, and always did. (Or reaching student-age, if not students.)

Put another way: Revolution means reaching the non-religious, which means alienating the religious.

Put another way: the difference between non-religious and religious is the difference between a student-age mindset and an old-person-thing. This is an undeniable fact in Christian history, beginning with Jesus Christ and continuing with Paul’s work and every appearance of Christian Revolution since.

But let me first illustrate this point through a slice of Americana very near and dear to us.

The Birth of Body Life

Our roots sprang from the early days of  Campus Crusade for Christ. In 1963 Bill Bright, Crusade’s founder, sat in our living room making plans with my mother and others to launch this campus ministry at Ohio State University, the largest university in the world at the time.  This brought a parade of young Christian radicals like Hal Lindsay (before writing Late Great Planet Earth), Josh McDowell and other leaders from across the nation into our world. Some of them stayed and helped launch Bible studies that became Layman’s Challenge for Today, which launched an underground student paper called The Fish, which launched The Fish House, which became the first of hundreds of ministry houses planted around the OSU campus over time.

Then radical Christianity really exploded nationwide. Ray Stedman published the psychedelic booklet Body Life,  which became a handbook for the Jesus Freak Revolution and home church movements, and radical Christian communes like JPUSA in Chicago and Grace Haven Farm near Columbus. ¹ Stedman was grieved by how few traditional churches welcomed young Jesus Freaks, a condition that still plagues Church Institutions today and raises new generations of disenfranchised youth. Fortunately, Stedman’s ministry in California put that little book into the public domain along with much of his prodigious scholarship to provide others with a biblical framework for building Body Life instead of Church Institutions.

Soon the spontaneous expansion of the church was underway, Jesus-Freak-style.  Student converts from the massive OSU population sustained the movement for decades.  In order to sound more adult-like, we changed the name from The Fish House to Xenos, but the new name was still so Jesus-Freakish.

The Vital Student World

We didn’t always realize Body Life was so bound to the student mindset, however. It was confusing because we carried it into Suburbia as we aged. The transitioning population was so large (more than 3,000 attending adults started having babies),  so radical Christian Body Life always seemed normative to us in Columbus even as we became paunchy, bald-headed radicals.

When we tried planting Xenos fellowships outside Columbus we became aware that it’s quite difficult to launch a Xenos fellowship among middle-aged people. We made that mistake in Cleveland, Cinci and Dayton, and discovered middle-aged America is Revolution-aversive. (Duh!) This is why Xenos grows best among student populations. Our success among the young is striking to traditional churches struggling with that age group.

So why does Xenos thrive in student populations? The answer is simple: our growth comes from conversion growth, so only 20% of our growth comes from Christians transferring from other churches. It’s a sad fact that openness towards God in America rapidly shuts down as people enter careers and start building families. The researchers all agree that 90% of American Christians received Christ before college-age ends (around ages 23-25).

But an interesting phenomena breaks down those age barriers: older adults grow interested in Christ when their kids get interested. Especially when kids are suddenly behaving more sane and thoughtful, secular parents want to know more about Jesus Christ. And these adults raise interest among their peers. At times we’ve seen large numbers of middle-age and career-age people converting to Christianity.

It’s pretty cool, because lots of adults would love to hang with younger people if they were allowed to. In the typical sex-drugs-rock’n-roll world, adults are completely excluded (except drug dealers), but not so with Christian students (although they don’t like getting swamped with old farts, for obvious reasons).

Just Do It!

I just don’t get it: why be so dedicated to man-made traditions? What’s the benefit? If these be such magnificent traditions, as many Christians claim, surely God would have the foresight to institute them in the Bible, right? The conspicuous  absence of traditions and institutional blueprints in the Bible give us tremendous freedom–but it seems nobody wants the freedom He gives.

Here’s where traditions become slavery: dedication to man-made traditions even at the expense of alienating the youth.

What tradition could possible be so valuable? Rather than loosen the grip on traditions, the exact opposite is occuring, especially among those still embracing Calvin’s old “Reformed Theology” (Calvin was a champion of state-owned church institutions):

Here’s what Bono, Oprah, and the guru speakers on PBS won’t tell you: Jesus believed in organized religion and he founded an institution. – Todd Pruit

Their disengagement from “pop religion” is admirable, but unfortunately this embrace of Institutionalized Christianity is really “The Shock of Culture Shock” and merely strengthens the strongholds against a threatening culture. It’s a real losing strategy championed by American Christians for decades now.

Let’s use the NeoZine to set some people free!

Footnotes:

1. Many of these nontraditional Christian groups joined the Vineyard movement in the 1980s. [↩]

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