20-Somethings - Part 1

This blog post is about the current situation of 20-somethings leaving the church in America. It is not meant to criticize the church, nor to target anyone. It is based on our experience in churches before we were in full-time ministry and on the experiences of other Christian individuals we’ve talked to that are our age. Many posts have been written on reasons for individuals our age leaving the church, most of them focus on hypocrisy and are clearly written out of bitterness. That is not the intention of this post. (For more on hypocrisy see below.**)

We have talked with many leaders of churches who strongly desire to have younger members active in their church, but don’t know where to start. Our hope is to share our personal experience in order to share some patterns we’ve seen in American churches. What we’ve found as the largest struggles, as have many others we know, is finding a church that is both spiritually mature (e.i. preaches the Word, and lives it out), and is focused on building relationships. In the churches we visited, there were no major problems regarding spiritual maturity that jumped out to us, but consistently we found a lack of effort for people of the church to reach out relationally. This seems to be a common theme in many churches we’ve visited.

While in college, Dan and I were both involved with a soup kitchen ministry in the local town in which four different churches served a free breakfast on a rotating basis for those in need. Throughout our involvement in that breakfast program, we observed that only one of the four churches focused on building relationships with the people who attended their soup kitchens. Also, that was the only church of the four in which we saw growth. When the people who attended the soup kitchen saw that the individuals of the church were willing to invest in their lives, they became willing to trust them and their hearts were softened to the Word of God.

I remember talking with the pastor of one of the other three churches who wanted to have more young adults in his church. He talked about needing a band, and switching to modern worship choruses, and kept asking what activities would make people want to come. What he didn’t seem to understand was that just like the people who came for the soup kitchen, young adults would want to come if they saw that the church was willing to invest in their lives. When it came time for Dan and I to seek a church of our own, we found this problem repeated in many other churches as well.

Shortly after graduating college, Dan and I began seeking a church. We attended many wonderful churches with great preaching and many ministries, but week after week while we attended those churches, we had no one from the congregation seek any relationship with us. We would arrive early to visit welcome booths, and introduce ourselves to those sitting around us during the service informing them that we were new; but week after week we were never remembered upon returning to the same church. And after the service ended, those we’d approach to engage in conversation would avoid eye contact and walk away. It became very difficult for us to want to get up to attend church on a Sunday, because while we knew that it was Biblically important, it felt to us like it was no different than just watching a sermon on the internet. We’d walk in and walk out, and no one would even notice we’d been there. We are thankful that eventually we did decide on a church to attend weekly, and honestly our biggest reason for choosing that church was based on the fact that when we’d show up people would actually talk with us.

So how do we, as the body of Christ, begin to address the problem of 20-somethings leaving the church?  One place to start is by building relationships with the ones that show up, and giving them a reason to return the next Sunday. Most friends our age aren’t overly concerned about whether there’s traditional vs contemporary worship, but all of them are craving of solid Godly relationships.  We challenge you to think about how you can use your gifts to build friendships with 20-somethings, including when that means building cross-generational relationships.

**While yes, hypocrisy is a problem, it is not only a “church problem” - it’s a human problem. It is most certainly a sin, but when individuals blame their rejection of the church on the church’s hypocrisy, most often it’s just a cop-out. Jesus calls us to forgive as we have been forgiven, it’s not conditional on whether or not other humans have treated us as we feel we deserve. If we have been wronged by a church, we are called to forgive the church – not to use it as an excuse to stop going.