In 1935, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was invited to lead an underground seminary along the banks of the East Oder River to train Christian leaders to remain faithful to Christ during the rise of Nazism. With dozens of current and future pastors in the cohort, it was the living out of his book Life Together and the birthplace of his book The Cost of Discipleship. 

While at the seminary, a friend came to Bonhoeffer concerned about this new effort, worried it would get him into trouble. So Bonhoeffer and his friend took a short trip up the river and hiked to the top of a hill from which they could see two landmarks: the seminary and an airfield, the latter of which was occupied by Hitler’s troops training and testing planes. As the two friends discussed the theological compromises inside the German church, Bonhoeffer pointed out the two places of training below them—one forming men for a ministry of grace, the other forming men for a regime of horrific cruelty. “This,” Bonhoeffer said while pointing back down the hill at the seminary, “must be stronger than that,” he continued, turning and pointing to the Nazi troops. 

In the face of the frightening formative power of the culture around him, Bonhoeffer felt compelled to create a community of counter-formation, a place to cultivate robust and faithful spiritual resilience in Christ’s people. 

At the risk of sounding alarmist, the church in the West is facing a similar challenge. Research in the recent book The Great Dechurching reports that more people have left the church in the United States in the last 25 years than were brought into it during the First Great Awakening, Second Great Awakening, and the Billy Graham crusades combined. In Dechurching, authors Jim Davis and Michael Graham carefully note that the reasons for this phenomenon are complex. Still, people who have left the church generally fall into two categories: the “casually dechurched” and the “dechurched casualties.” 

As you might imagine, those who have dechurched casually have been pulled out of the church slowly over time by the undertow of whatever life has presented as more appealing or convenient than persevering in the faith. Those who are dechurched casualties have traveled a rougher road, often pushed out of the church by the abuses and hypocrisies they’ve seen or experienced firsthand. Whether pulled out or pushed out (or both), the result is the same: separation from a vital connection with Jesus through his church.

So, how can the church form faithful and resilient followers of Jesus in our cultural moment? In my context (urban, northeastern, Gen Z, highly secularized, politically and ethically progressive), the most fruitful ministries have found ways to embody a life together that is smaller, slower, deeper, tighter, and richer.

Smaller

It is no secret that we are living through a moment of deep loneliness and isolation. In this culture of isolation, people need places to be known and cared for. While larger groups and gatherings are still important, they can’t be the only level at which the church engages one another. My experience ministering to Gen Z in NYC has revealed that they are far more likely to invite their friends (believing or not) to a small group. The “front door” of our ministry is our small groups. Larger gatherings like Sunday worship are still critically important, but in a fragmented moment full of relationally adrift people, the degree to which we “on-ramp” people into smaller groups will be the measure of our ability to retain and form them. 

Slower

“Speed kills.” This is a common motto in American football, meant to communicate how quickly a fast-running player can take over a game and break the heart of their opponent. But it’s also true in our spiritual lives. A hurried spiritual life is a struggling spiritual life. When Jesus calls us to abide with him because he is the vine and we are the branches, it is (in part) a call to go slow with him. Branches are not in a hurry to draw life from their vine. In a constantly hurried culture, ministries that are not in a rush but are willing to wade through the slow journey of discipleship tend to be more fruitful. Discipleship must be slower when our starting place is further back and cultural resistance is higher.

Deeper

In a culture that prizes the shallow engagement of clicks and views, ministries willing to go theologically deep with people are essential. Whether they can name this or not, our congregants and neighbors are wrestling with deep, existential questions about meaning, identity, purpose, justice, and belonging. With a limitless trove of answers—from decent to dangerous—always available to each of us on our devices, the church needs to be a place where deep wrestling is encouraged and the Scriptures are mined for deep and durable answers.

Tighter

For most of my students here in NYC, even modest openness about their Christian belief risks immediate isolation from almost everyone they interact with daily. When your relational world sees your faith in Christ as a liability, resisting the temptation to cower or compromise requires at least a few deep friendships with other believers with whom we have daily, meaningful interaction. If all the “one another-ing” that the New Testament envisions is happening superficially or only happening on Sundays, perseverance in Christ will be very difficult. To endure, we need a tight community within which we can learn to bear with, forgive, comfort, encourage, confess to, and love one another.

Richer

One of my favorite things to do is coach my son’s Little League baseball team. I love watching the team grow together as a unit and each player grow their skills. But this takes work. Baseball doesn’t have a clock, but those players need “minutes” to get better. They’ve got to be on the field, stretching their skills beyond their limits, making mistakes, learning from both failure and success. In the same way, theologian Mark Sayers says Christians need “discipleship minutes” in order to grow into maturity. Christians who just show up casually will, almost certainly, be pulled away from Jesus by the world’s undertow or pushed away by the inevitable challenges of life in the church. When Paul exhorts us to “work out our salvation with fear and trembling” in Philippians 2, I think he’s talking about this idea. The path to maturity in Christ is not solitary or passive but one in which we participate richly in the good news we proclaim. Every believer needs to be embedded in a community that puts them in the game, inviting them into a richer working out of the day-to-day implications of Christ’s saving work in their piety, home, church, neighborhood, job, community, and beyond.

Years ago, a student leader in our RUF ministry here in New York came to me in the grip of a harrowing spiritual season marked by guilt, shame, apathy and doubt. She needed to be pastored through each of these things from the Scriptures with curiosity, grace, and hope. But what poured gasoline on the bonfire of her wrestlings was that she would go days, sometimes weeks, without meaningful conversation with another Christian. What’s more, almost all of her daily interactions were with people who saw her vices as virtues (and vice versa). She needed the ordinary, means-of-grace ministry of the local church. But she also needed those same means of grace embodied daily in a community where she was known, cared for, challenged, and called into a more active living out of her hope in Christ. 

In a world where she was constantly and subtly being formed to believe that the Truth was a lie and the lies around her were true, she needed daily, meaningful contact with a community that could carry her along in the spirit of Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 3, that she may have the strength to comprehend with all the saints the incomprehensible love of Christ.

She needed fellow Christians to come alongside her to embody a life together that was smaller, slower, deeper, tighter and richer.

Matt is a pastor in New York City where he has served as the campus minister with RUF City Campus since 2016. He lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with his wife, Megan, and their three kids who are rapidly approaching their teen years. When he’s not hanging with his family at a local park or coaching little league baseball, you might find him on the hunt for NYC’s best slice of pizza.