Three Ways Church of the Apostles Benefitted from an Online Summer Book Club
by Ryan Bettwy
This summer, Church of the Apostles youth group leaders initiated their first Summer Book Club, which met on Zoom for four weeks while reading C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity. Here are three ways all our participants benefitted from the experience!
1.) Lewis's purpose in writing the book was the same as our purpose for the Book Club: to comfort people suffering communally to one another and to Jesus.
As our leaders prayed how we were going to pursue ministry throughout the last six months, we realized the plans we had to open our summer Book Club with Mere Christianity were perfect! In addition to being one of the 20th century's most influential Christian publications, it also began as a series of 25 radio messages Lewis reared for BBC Radio between 1941 and 1944. Lewis had earned a hearing for the Gospel in the 20th Century through his own personal suffering, winsome defense of the faith, and unyielding intellectual honesty, a standard he held for himself but also held for those who criticized the faith he pursued while remaining an influential academic. We quickly learned our teenagers understood this implicitly! One recent high school graduate, whose standards for good literature and great answers to human suffering are sky high, responded during our first discussion together, "I mean, I loved how relevant it was to today!" The book itself appealed to them, as it was born out of an attempt to make the Christian faith understandable during a time of collective and personal suffering. So, Lewis's answers to pain and suffering in the world in the text, which are different than answers our students find inside or outside the church, served as reprieve to the heavy social, intellectual, and spiritual burdens they have carried in this season.
2.) The Book Club gave us quality answers to the hardest-hitting questions closest to students' concerns.
We know if we do not show up to hard conversations with young people, making ourselves available to young people in this season, they would take their questions somewhere else, and perhaps not trust the church as a place for their concerns to be handled or heard! Apostles youth group initiated the Book Club because our youth group is pretty "heady" and passionate about their community. Shallow or stale answers to new manifestations of old concerns never work. But what a rough summer to come up with lots of news answers to tough questions! We went three months without seeing each other, and students were suffering cabin fever of epic proportions. Leaders were scrambling just to figure out their own life's circumstances and could have by all rights rested on their laurels, but we wanted to keep answering some of the questions about life closest to the hearts of our teenagers and young adults. How does God account for intense human suffering such as war, social oppression, and global pandemic? What ways does Christ's Gospel minister to us in a time of ideological confusion, political and national disunity, and personal isolation and devastation? How we can trust the Bible's answers on these matters when they seem so vastly foreign to our own? The Book Club gave our group an easy bridge to serve students and leaders in personal and theological confusion as we pursued Christ amidst these otherwise immense obstacles in our lives.
3.) It gave our group a place to find comfort and unity in Christ in a season filled with despair.
A global pandemic, economic crisis, and unprecedented hiatus from church worship has made leading others that much harder for our youth workers. Our volunteers have had to manage serving young people and their families while navigating their own challenges from job loses, loneliness and anxiety, personal tragedy, and other unique complications stemming from this season. Having Lewis's pastoral voice and disarming wit to insulate us from the need to constantly have every answer perfectly polished and ready, our group was able to minister to one another in the communal healing we found as we prayed for one another and looked ultimately to Jesus as our only Truth and comfort in times of profound confusion and grief!
Our Book Club also helped us connect consistently during a summer when our families and church choose wisely to refrain from pushing the envelope on opening; our Book Club was a much easier, relational, and lighter conversation than we had held throughout the spring. Even as our teenagers came to the Book Club with their disappointments, we all learned together to appreciate Lewis's vision of pressing into our doubts, fears, and concerns about human life by looking to Jesus's own suffering rather than trying to pretend like hurting didn't matter. One of the best ways the text served our leaders during this discussion was Lewis's ability to put words to pastoral concerns, responding with truth and mercy to our pain. During a discussion of the collective trauma of isolation stemming from this "quarantined" season of life, we leaned heavily on Lewis's own testimony that "in religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the only thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort and truth in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth -- only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair." We loved the opportunity we had to join to this pursuit of "the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our afflictions, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God." (2 Corinthians 1:3-4)
The Rev. Ryan Bettwy is the Associate Priest and Youth Pastor at Church of the Apostles in Fairfax, VA.