Claim. Hendricks (extending Donald Miller) argues that the only viable mechanism for merging worship across religions is to turn ownership of worship over to youth in flattened, locally-empowered communities — because youth alone have “affection and trust for each other surpassing their commitment to the traditional forms of their own religions.”
Elaboration. Per intro: Miller’s research concludes that “the services need to be led by young men and women whose lives have been transformed by their experience of the sacred”; the youth “may organize their churches in radically different ways from those of their parents and grandparents.” Hendricks generalizes Miller’s intra-Christian framing to interfaith: “why not let the Buddhist, Christian, Unificationist, Muslim, Jewish etc. youth work out shared worship, a ‘radical restructuring of liturgy’?”
The mechanism requires a flat organizational structure (no parish-line gatekeeping by clergy invested in tradition), which is why this proposal only operates inside the populist-church form. The principle is structurally identical to the “for us, by us” principle from ch 7 — peer-led ministry without senior-pastor mediation — extended across religious boundaries.
See also. meltdown-worship, populist-church, hub-la-2008-young-adult-pilot-and-trust-creative-space