Everything is not O.K.

Everything is not ok in my country.

The latest mental health statistics indicate that 32.4% of Males aged between 16 and 24 have had symptoms of a mental health disorder in the last 12 months (2023). For young women, that number is 45.5%^[1].

Before the COVID pandemic, loneliness was described “both as an ‘epidemic’ and one of the most pressing public health concerns in Australia.”

^[2]In 2021, more than 1 in 4 women aged 18–24 agreed with the statement ‘I often feel very lonely’ in 2021, an increase from less than 1 in 5 in 2015.^[3]

It’s not only my country.

America is setting new records every year for teenage depression, and young Americans have never ”been more anxious about their own lives or more depressed about the future of the country.^[4]”

Derek Thompson reports in the Atlantic that:

From 2003 to 2022, American men reduced their average hours of face-to-face socializing by about 30 percent. For unmarried Americans, the decline was even bigger—more than 35 percent. For teenagers, it was more than 45 percent. Boys and girls ages 15 to 19 reduced their weekly social hangouts by more than three hours a week. In short, there is no statistical record of any other period in U.S. history when people have spent more time on their own.

In Thompson’s article exploring the phenomenon, he pointed to evidence that there are three primary reasons for the increase in social isolation and decrease in mental health:

1. There is a direct correlation between the amount of time people spend on screens (televisions and phones) and the decrease in time people spend in face-to-face relationships.
2. People are busier than ever before, with people aged 30-40 having measurably less leisure time than they did two decades ago.
3. There has been an erosion in America’s (and Australia’s) social infrastructure, with sports teams, service clubs, voluntary associations and churches all experiencing significant declines in membership.

These three factors are not new. We all experience them daily. What is new is that they have been at play and increasing in severity for a long enough time now that we are moving towards a social tipping point.

In May 2023, the US Surgeon General released a general advisory document with the headline “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation” in which he declared:

Loneliness is far more than just a bad feeling—it harms both individual and societal health. It is associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death. The mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and even greater than that associated with obesity and physical inactivity. And the harmful consequences of a society that lacks social connection can be felt in our schools, workplaces, and civic organizations, where performance, productivity, and engagement are diminished.^[5]

The advisory report contained data from a broad range of sources, all of which pointed to the fact that there is a direct correlation not just between social isolation and mental health but also a strong correlation between social isolation and health in general. Social isolation was significantly worse for you than smoking 15 cigarettes a day, drinking six alcoholic drinks a day, avoiding exercise, obesity or air pollution.

Everything is not ok.

The Surgeon General proposed a 6 point plan, which culminated with the sixth point: Cultivate a Culture of Connection, in which he suggested that the nation needed to:

• Cultivate values of kindness, respect, service and commitment to one another
• Model connection values in positions of leadership and influence
• Expand conversations on social connection in schools, workplaces and community^[6]

The Surgeon General has a problem. A government cannot cultivate values of kindness, respect, service and commitment to one another. Our national leaders are as shaped by our eroding cultural foundations as anyone else, and often, in pursuit of political office, they themselves become forces of disintegration.

Our society is fragmenting because we don’t have the unifying, transcendent story that provides us with our unifying values. Ronald Ingleheart states, “Democracy is not attained simply by making institutional changes through elite-level maneuvering. Its survival depends also on the values and beliefs of ordinary citizens.“^[7]

Someone who knew firsthand what it means to shape national values, Martin Luther King Jr., quoting Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick, made a clear distinction between enforceable and unenforceable obligations. He writes:

Unenforceable obligations are beyond the reach of the laws of society. They concern inner attitudes, expressions of compassion which lawbooks cannot regulate and jails cannot rectify. Such obligations are met by one’s commitment to an inner law, a law written on the heart. Man-made laws assure justice, but a higher law produces love. No code of conduct ever compelled a father to love his children or a husband to show affection to his wife. The law court may force him to provide bread for the family, but it cannot make him provide the bread of love. A good father is obedient to the unenforceable.^[8]

When I arrived in Tasmania after spending five years in Canada, I was fascinated to be one of three church leaders invited to the official opening of the new parliament following a state election. While Australia has the separation of church and state built into its national constitution, there has always been a tacit understanding that there is a function of societal value shaping that was the domain of Christian churches in the Western world. Church leaders are invited to symbolic moments in a secular democracy because, as agnostic President of the Czech Republic Vaclav Havel pointed out in a 1994 Stanford University speech, democracy needs a reality beyond itself to guarantee dignity, freedom and responsibility:

The separation of executive, legislative, and judicial powers, the universal right to vote, the rule of law, freedom of expression, the inviolability of private ownership, and all the other aspects of democracy as a system that ought to be the least unjust and the least capable of violence – these are merely technical instruments that enable man to live in dignity, freedom, and responsibility. But in and of themselves, they cannot guarantee his dignity, freedom, and responsibility. The source of this basic human potential lies elsewhere: in man’s relationship to that which transcends him. 

I think the fathers of American democracy knew this very well. Were I to compare democracy to the sun’s life-giving radiation, I would say that, though from the political point of view, it is the only hope for humanity, it can have a beneficial impact on us if it resonates with our deepest inner nature. And if part of that nature is the experience of transcendence in the broadest sense of the word – that is, man’s respect for that which transcends him, without which he would not exist, and of which he is an integral part – then democracy must be imbued with the spirit of that respect if it is to succeed.^[9]

Our society is fragmenting because its fundamental values are being eroded. It’s like we want the radiation from the Sun to keep us alive, but we don’t like to acknowledge the presence and importance of the source of that radiation, the Sun itself.

We are now being shaped by values that result in being constantly distracted by our screens, giving up our leisure time (and therefore our space for relationships) and losing our commitment to the voluntary associations Alexis de Tocqueville identified as the fabric that enabled the functioning of democracy.^[10] 

The values that the Surgeon General has declared we need to rediscover are values that come from the Judeo-Christian tradition, as German Philosopher Jürgen Habermas has articulated:

Christianity has functioned for the normative self-understanding of modernity as more than a mere precursor or a catalyst. Egalitarian universalism, from which sprang the ideas of freedom and social solidarity, of an autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, of the individual morality of conscience, human rights, and democracy, is the direct heir to the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day, there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a post-national constellation, we continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk.

^[11]If it is true that our society is fragmenting and we are losing the Judeo-Christian values that enable social cohesion, connection and health. In that case, it is also true, as Dr. King declared, “The church must take the lead in social reform. It must move out into the arena of life and do battle for the sanctity of religious commitments..”^[12]

Therein lies the problem.

The church’s place in the community isn’t what it used to be.

This graph shows the seismic change over the last 30 years in my state, Tasmania.

The line heading downward reflects the number of people who consider themselves Christian, while the line leading upward demonstrates the number of people who say they have no religion.

If the number of people identifying with Christianity had sharply declined in this way, and the result was that people were happier, healthier and more socially connected, we would have to conclude that the new paradigm that people were now living from better equipped them for the complexity of real life, and was therefore superior to the Christian worldview.

That is not the case.

The rapid increase of people who identify with no religion is at least correlated to the rapid rise in people who are experiencing social isolation and its resultant serious mental health and general health consequences.

So, how should the church respond?

I am convinced that when the paramount need in our society is for social connection and unity amid diversity, the time has come to engage seriously with Jesus’ vision for the church, encapsulated in his John 17 prayer. 

The kind of Christianity Australians distance themselves from does not reflect the ideal contained in that prayer. As G.K. Chesterton wrote, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.”^[13]

I am very aware that it’s effortless to make a sweeping statement and that it’s another thing to come to terms with what can be done differently in the real world.

I am writing this book as a Pastor of a Baptist church in Australia’s most secular state and as one of the leaders charged with charting the path for the Baptist Union in Tasmania. 

I know firsthand that we need more than biblical exegesis, so I am writing this book as a five-cornered dialogue rather than a simple bible study.

I believe Jesus’ John 17 prayer has very tangible implications that can be reality tested, which I propose to do by using Jesus’ words as a dialogue partner with three distinct movements from recent Christian history in Australia as well as the moment we find ourselves in today and how I hope to apply the prayer in the church I lead.

The three Christian movements I will be exploring are the ones with which I have some personal familiarity.

The first is the Jesus People/Radical Discipleship movement of the 1970s, of which my father, Mal, was a leader. To help with this, I will reflect on my Dad’s experience and that of other leaders, such as the founder of the God Squad, John Smith, and other pioneers such as John Hirt, Athol Gill and Kevin Smith.

The second is the Pentecostal surge in the 2000s, where churches such as Hillsong and Phil Pringle’s Christian City Church snowballed and attracted many young people and new Christians. I was involved in a little Brethren church impacted by the Pensacola revival ^[14]and eventually became the Hillsong outpost in Hobart. Later on, my first experience of Pastoral ministry in a Christian and Missionary Alliance Church in Alberta, Canada, exposed me to Donald McGavaran’s church growth model and many of the understandings that undergird the Mega-Church movement.

The third is the Missional church movement, which happened around the same time as the Pentecostal surge, often defining itself against it. Throughout my time in Fusion, I read the books that emerged from people like Michael Frost, Alan Roxburgh, and Alan Hirsch. I enjoyed hearing them speak at different times, including at the Exponential conference in L.A. As I engaged with leadership in the Baptist church, I connected with the Tampa Underground network and participated in some of their training based on many of the insights of people like Frost and Hirsch.

Each movement has had particular strengths and weaknesses, which I believe God has used to prepare his church for the moment we now find ourselves in.

As we begin to unpack Jesus’ prayer, I can point to very tangible examples of how one or more of those Christian movements wrestled with what it meant to live out Jesus’s words and what it could mean for us to do the same in our moment.

I believe we are at a pivotal moment in history and that Jesus is inviting his church forward amid a rapidly fragmenting society. If we can hear his words and face our complex history, we can be agents of his hope for a world that desperately needs it.

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[1] Source: National Study of Mental health and wellbing (https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/health/mental-health/national-study-mental-health-and-wellbeing/2020-2022#data-downloads)

[2] https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/australias-welfare/social-isolation-and-loneliness

[3] ibid

[4] Derek Thompson Why Americans Suddenly stopped hanging out The Atlantic, Feb 14 2024

[5] Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/surgeon-general-social-connection-advisory.pdf Accessed 20 Feb 2024

[6] Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community (2023) Page 53

[7] Ronald Inglehart R (2000) Culture and democracy. In: Harrison LE and Huntington S (eds) Culture Matters: How

Values Shape Human Progress. New York: Basic Books. page 96

[8] Martin Luther King Jr. Where do we go from Here: Chaos or Community? Beacon Press (2010 edition),page 105

[9] Václav Havel, The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice: Speeches and Writings, 1990–1996, trans. Paul Wilson and others (New York: Knopf, 1997), 180

[10] Democracy in America: Historical-Critical Edition of De la démocratie en Amérique, ed. Eduardo Nolla, translated from the French by James T. Schleifer. A Bilingual French-English editions, (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010). Vol. 3.

[11] Jürgen Habermas, Time of Transitions, trans. Ciaran Cronin and Max Pensky (Cambridge, UK:

Polity, 2006), 150-51.

[12] Martin Luther King Jr. Where do we go from Here: Chaos or Community? Beacon Press (2010 edition),page 105

[13] G.K. Chesterton What’s wrong with the World Kindle edition (1999) Loc 475

[14] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1997/04/27/what-in-gods-name-june-1995-pensacola-florida-a-one-day-church-service-turns-into-the-longest-loudest-religious-revival-in-nearly-a-century-its-still-going-strong-theres-weeping-and-wailing-and-bodies-are-thudding-to-the-floor-is-this-love-lunacy-or-the-beginning-of-the-end-of-the-world/ecfd0481-fd4e-4d14-b047-01b19b8f8b06/ accessed 20 Feb 2024