Don’t Quiet Quit the Church
We should continue to let ourselves be amazed by God’s good work whenever and wherever we find it.
This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
The concept of “quiet quitting”—refusing to do anything but the minimal effort—is all over media these days. Commentators are debating whether or not today’s workers, most notably Gen Z employees, are quiet quitting their jobs.
Count me among the skeptical. Some of the quiet-quitting talk is just another generational caricature (one I’ve not seen any evidence for). And it may well be that workers are getting just as much or more done but are putting healthy boundaries between themselves and their jobs.
Perhaps quiet quitting is happening in some workplaces, although I suspect it’s no more than always. Yet even if mythical, the idea points to something real in many people’s lives: a sense that what they do will make no difference, that things will never change.
I’ve found this mentality to be a genuine temptation in the context of the church.
Those of us who see what’s happening in church life might easily come to the same conclusion that nothing will change, no matter what we do. We might keep attending, keep praying, keep teaching, keep serving—but never really anticipate anything different than the same crises.
I noticed this tendency in myself within the past week.
Recently, I was preaching in a city far from home, and an impressive Baptist Christian in his early 20s picked me up from the airport. As we talked about ministry and what he was doing in the church, he reflected on something I had written here—about how so many leaders I know are demoralized by the craziness of the present moment, both inside and outside the church.
Since he came of age over ...