This is a presentation I gave for the annual meeting of the Water of Life Conference of the Northeast Iowa Synod of the ELCA on Sunday, February 15, 2015.
Who Needs You?
Millennials and the Identity of the Church
The initial impetus for this topic was an article I read in Christianity Today about Bonhoeffer and youth ministry. The title was Good News, Millennials, You Don’t Need to Save the Church. If you have church friends of the right sort on social media, you’ve likely seen articles like Why Millennials are Leaving the Church by Rachel Held Evans, or 10 Reasons Churches are not Reaching Millennials.
I’ve seen all sorts of reasons, ranging from churches being hostile and judgmental to GLBT people, to churches being too willing to compromise and becoming indistinguishable from a community center, to traditional worship styles and liturgy being seen as outdated and unwelcoming, to more contemporary worship styles being seen as shallow and equally outdated. And all of those criticisms are true at some level for some churches.
But I think what concerns me is millennials who just don’t see why they would want to be part of a church. One of my classmates last year who had just gotten back from internship told a story about a young man he was talking to who described himself not as an atheist or an agnostic, but as an “apathy-ist.” He said he though maybe God existed, and maybe the church did some good things, but he just didn’t care.
In the famous rise of the nones survey that I suspect all of you are familiar with, Pew Research found in 2012 that 32% of Americans age 18-29 are unaffiliated with any religion, by far the most of any age group. For people age 65 and over, only 9% describe themselves as unaffiliated. And this trend appears to be increasing over time. The fear about millennials is understandable.
That article about millennials not needing to save the church started with the premise that many churches are desperately trying to figure out how to reach millennials and bring them into church. What do we need to do to bring them in? But this article is concerned with why churches are trying to bring in the youth. Is it so the church doesn’t die? So the church has a consistent supply of new energy (and money?) I’ve heard hints of that here in budget discussions, and I’m sure we’re not the only ones…how it can take 7 millennials to replace the giving of one baby boomer who dies. That might sound more cynical than I really mean it to, but it is a practical concern.
But as the church, we do ministry for the benefit of the other. We can’t just be concerned about millennials for our sake, but rather, for their sake. Let me read you the conclusion of that article:
But our ministry with youth cannot be about getting millennials to come and stay so that they might do good things or revitalize the church or even evangelize the world. If these things happen, we rejoice. But as Bonhoeffer articulates in this first thesis, the church’s ministry to the young is primarily about encountering the living Word of God in the context of the whole church. If acts of justice, church revival, and evangelism are to happen, they will not run on the gas of youthfulness. If they happen, it will be the act of God through the Holy Spirit, as the Spirit calls young people to love the world as they are loved by Jesus Christ in the context of the whole church.
Anxiety always obscures and corrupts our ability to share in each other’s lives. Thus, the best way to help the church engage millennials is to stop wringing our hands over the millennial problem. Instead, we might seek the Holy Spirit together with all generations, looking for concrete experiences of the presence and absence of God in the lives of the young, confessing our confusion and telling our own stories of God’s work in our lives. That’s when the Holy Spirit binds and unites us, calling us beyond our generational divides. For in Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, millennial nor boomer.
Reaching out to millennials isn’t different than reaching out to anyone else. I think it’s way too easy to conflate millennials into one group in ways that we risk losing sight of each person’s uniqueness. Millennials do have some general characteristics as a generation. We’re much more likely to be digital natives, we expect to have ubiquitous internet access, we like to travel, we’re likely to have student loan debt, etc.
All that said, millennials are not the same. Just like any other generation, age isn’t the sole, or even necessarily the most important factor in describing people. What a single, recent college grad looks for from church can be completely different than a married, dual-income, employed couple with young children look for. You all know this, but I think we need constant reminders. We need to think about individuals, rather than worrying about abstract, faceless groups.
So, with that background of both anxiety over millennials, youth, and children, as well as the reminder from Bonhoeffer that the energy of the church depends on Christ, not on any particular generation, in the background, I want us to think about what our churches have to offer. Who needs us? And just as importantly, how do we let them know we’re here for them? And before we do that, how do we listen to the needs?
The cover article of The Lutheran this month asks, “What draws people to the ELCA?” That’s an important question, but I think many people when they look for a church aren’t looking primarily at the denominational name. Although Dubuque is pretty Roman Catholic, I think we probably have fairly high name recognition of the label Lutheran. Still, I’d be interested in knowing how many people in the mall have any idea what makes Lutherans distinct, much less ELCA versus LCMS or WELS.
I’m more interested in what draws people to individual churches. I talked to someone this week who said she became Lutheran because she and her husband came out of different denominations, and when they visited the Lutheran church, the pastor remembered their names the next week. I’m completely convinced that for most people, their experience when they visit a congregation is far more important than denominational affiliation.
I know here at St. Peter, there is a level of anxiety among some that there are some people who find other churches more attractive. While that’s hard to hear, I really think it’s ok for another church to be a better fit for some people. If an individual congregation tries to be all things to all people, I think we end up being mediocre at everything. (Sometimes I joke that as a liberal arts graduate, that’s really what I am. Mediocre at everything.) But no one other congregation, Lutheran or not, is the right fit for everyone either.
Obviously, there’s always room to improve, and I think there’s a sort of baseline of ministries that every congregation needs that we can’t just ignore. Obviously we all need to have worship services, we all need to have some form of children’s ministry, youth ministry, elderly ministry, fellowship groups, etc. But the reality is that some churches are better at some things than others. And that’s ok!
But for the rest of whatever time we have here, I want you to think about what your congregation is good at. What are your distinctives? What’s your congregation’s elevator pitch? Not a broad mission statement, but specifics. One way I’ve thought about it is if your church had the opportunity to do a Super Bowl ad, what would your ad say?
A few weeks after I started my internship this summer, there was a faith fair at Clarke University, and I went as a representative of St. Peter, and sat at a table to answer questions from college students looking for a church. It wasn’t really fair to have me represent a church I’d just started at, because I realized that I didn’t know how to answer the question of why someone should visit St. Peter. I have some thoughts on it now, and I think there is some great ministry happening here, but there’s still room to consider the question.
If someone in the community asks of your congregation, “Who needs you?” what would you answer?
23% of Americans have watched religious television within the last week. That’s probably not Lutheran tv. I’m not sure there are any Lutheran televangelists. How are we distinctive from that?
And flipping the question around, how do we communicate to people within our congregations that the answer to who needs you is that the rest of us do? How do we tell people that their presence in the life of the congregation, both in worship services and beyond is important?
Talk at your tables about the questions on the handout, and maybe we can have some large group discussion as well. I’d suggest starting by making sure you have someone from a different congregation at your table, and introducing your congregation to people from a different congregation.
Discussion Prompts
1. What attracted you to your congregation? What keeps you coming back?
2. What makes your congregation different from the church down the road?
3. How can you share with people outside what makes your congregation unique? What about with those inside?
4. What Lutheran distinctives are important to you personally? What about to your congregation? How would you describe what’s unique about being Lutheran?
5. What are some of the particular strengths of your congregation? What particular things do you see God doing in your community? How can you share those stories?