The Challenges We Face–intro

I receive many inquiries on how to retain young adults, since our church plant has been successful in returning and retaining them. The median age in our church is around 28, as compared with over 50 in many churches.  A significant portion of our membership were either already out (that is, emotionally detached from and not attending regularly), or headed there rapidly (attending only on social pressure from parents, spouses, etc.).

Recently, I received an inquiry concerning “how” we do this. What follows is a redacted version of that personal reply.

Ordinarily, in our denomination, when it comes to ‘how,’ we come out with a new program, a new publication (like the college quarterly), or a new ministry. Our institutions and ministries have become the frame of reference for how we approach a new situation, people group, whatever. So “Amazing Facts” develops a new set of evangelistic sermons; the GC sets up a study center (in this case centre for secular postmodern studies). Meanwhile, nothing happens.

The Militant-Evangelism complex baptizes several hundred people (all over North America), and declares that evangelism (by which they mean techniques originated in 1831) still work as well as ever. Which may, sadly, be true. Meanwhile, we continue to bleed young adults. At a recent church summit concerning this topic, the estimate is that we’re losing somewhere close to 70% of young adults.

The changes–the ‘how’– generally proposed so far cannot succeed, because they are of the nature mentioned above. A new program, series of topics, even changing the music–though it might help–will not be sufficient. Changes need to be much more comprehensive.

Let me give you an analogy. Suppose you have an aquarium. It’s full of guppies, mollies, swordtails, etc. Then you decide you want to include some clown fish. So you enlarge the aquarium, add nooks and crannies for the clown fish to hide in, buy the proper food, etc. But no matter how you go about it, the clown fish simply don’t survive for more than a few minutes or hours.

The reason is simple. Guppies, mollies, etc., are freshwater fish, the clown fish lives in salt water. Obviously, no analogy is perfect. Young adults don’t literally die in our present churches. They flee instead. And those in the current congregations would not die if we changed the ‘water.’ The question and choice facing the church is this: are the currently contented members willing to change (to adapt to salt water), in order to keep the young adults? Or are we going to insist that the young adults, and the affluent secular world in general, adapt to our ‘freshwater’ environment, and say goodbye to those who won’t?