To Save Faith
How churches can bring in the millennials
‘CHRISTIANITY is on the decline,” warns Tom Wildmon of the American Family Association. And it’s pretty obvious that, to turn things around, the church needs to convince millennials they need God.
He asserts this even though “in America we have more Christian churches, movies, and attractions than any other time in our history,” as he noted in his warning. He specifically pointed to “the largest generation of our time” — millennials.
According to a 2015 Pew Research Center poll, more than one-third of millennials now claim no religious affiliation at all, up nine percentage points from millennials in 2007. Notably, the exodus is from Catholicism and mainline Protestantism.
For more than 10 years, I was one of those statistics.
See, the church I grew up in was an extremely rigid fundamentalist Baptist one. It was so hell-bent on convincing congregants that it was reading the only correct interpretation of the Bible, that if you didn’t fall in line your faith was suspect (and so were you).
Obsessed with the letter of the law, my church failed miserably at demonstrating the spirit of the law. The life-sustaining, whole bloody beauty of the Christian story in the first place.
And it was tailor-made to repel young worshipers.
In my experience, people left for a bevy of reasons, but right at the top was shame. But not for the honest-to-God reasons one might ordinarily feel ashamed.
Instead, it was being shamed for wearing pants (“no skirt, no sleeves, no service”); for listening to music with a beat, because it inspires your body to move, thereby enticing the opposite sex; for going to movie theaters, lest someone think you’re seeing an R-rated film; for doubt in general. I left. I was angry. But my umbrage wasn’t that they were preaching the gospel, it was in what I per- ceived was their distortion of it. You know, because at 15 I’d already become an expert.
I remember thinking: Of all of the Bible’s lessons, we’re getting a talking-to about not listening to Britney Spears.
It’s hard to put into words, but what they were doing was equating godlessness to worldliness — and if you listened to Britney, you were definitely closer to the sinful, worldliness part of the scale, which was grounds for being ostracized.
So after I peeled out of that church parking lot fueled by righteous indignation, that’s where I stayed for years — gone. Stewing in bitterness, with a chip on my shoulder so heavy it could’ve been the foundation stone of a new church.
But the thing is that millennials really do want a good swath of what the church ideally has to offer: community, acceptance, imbuing life with meaning. That’s why we’re signing up for transcendental yoga. That’s why we’re volunteering for charities and donating to GoFundMe’s.
We want, and do believe in, more than we are. We’re trying to find it.
I’m no exception. So little by little I tried to find God again. In books. In podcasts. In music. In conversation.
It was a long slog to finding my faith, let alone finding myself happily sitting in a pew. I did it, though, 14 years after I left. I found a church that marries the boundless love of Jesus with sound theology.
Crucially, it’s also one that doesn’t pretend we don’t live in this world, and so it uses examples from the world — music, movies, heck, even The New York Times — to point evermore toward the Author of All Things.
Wildmon writes that millennials are the “future leaders” and the church simply can’t afford to write them off. The simple strategy to bring them in is to start with love. Meet brokenness in love. Meet skepticism in love. Meet pantswearing in love. Meet this weird cultural millennialism in love.
And if not love, then at least openmindedness.
If anything can be said about millennials, it’s that we believe hard and with a fiery passion. It sometimes comes out in activism, in social-justice warriorism and political correctness (hey, I didn’t say it was all well-placed) — and also in loving others.
But most churches’ response to that is to give us either hippydippy bullhonkey, because they think that’s what we want, or hardcore dogmatism, which no one ever really wants. And both are lacking in the very thing we millennials (and everyone, really) are begging for — authenticity.
The church, yes, is in danger — but so, and perhaps more important, are the hearts of the young people they’re trying to convince. Meet them where they are at, and God will do (and always does) the rest.