5. Fuel a Warm Community
5. Fuel a Warm Community
Warm Is the New Cool
I love my church. I think it is amazing. Everybody knows each other and we all care about each other. It’s not, like, compartmentalized between generations or between different types of people. It is just like a big family. —Katie, age 20
Laurence became disillusioned with church somewhere in the middle of his sophomore year of college. Despite squeezing in church (most) every week while at a Christian university, something wasn’t clicking. So Sunday by Sunday, he began drifting away.
Until he just quit.
The attraction that had once kept Laurence orbiting around both faith and the faith community dissolved, leaving him floating free.
For the next couple of years, Laurence would occasionally drop in on a worship service, usually sitting in the back, highly critical of every act of worship offered and word spoken. Until his fiancée moved to town, and together they decided it was time to pick up the search again. Since faith had been important in their relationship in the past, they sensed that finding a church community could reignite something they had lost.
A few months later, someone told them about a congregation that almost sounded like a secret. With little online presence or physical allure, this small community seemed to be found by word of mouth. Laurence and his fiancée gathered their courage and stepped cautiously into worship one Sunday, first walking in the wrong door of the ancient pink church building before winding through the halls and stairwell down to the right gathering in the basement. They were readily welcomed, took their seats in two rickety folding chairs, and experienced what Laurence would later describe as being caught up in a gravitational orbit. They felt drawn into this growing young faith community not only that morning but also for weeks and months to come.
It wasn’t the preaching or teaching.
It certainly wasn’t the building or the worship style.
It was the life shared among the congregation that drew them in.
It was the moment at the end of the service when the smiling older lady in the wheelchair mentioned the giving box. It was how a particular redheaded child grabbed an oversized portion of communion bread each week and dunked it to the bottom of the cup. It was the way honest petitions were shared during prayer by tearful twenty-somethings and eager seven-year-olds. It was the steady stream of invitations to meals in homes of caring adults who fed them as poor newlyweds-to-be.
For Laurence and his fiancée, every doxology the church sang, every long decision-making process, and even (or perhaps especially) every little imperfection in the worship service drew them ever closer to what they had been looking for all along: a home.
A place to belong.
CORE COMMITMENT: FUEL A WARM COMMUNITY
Laurence experienced a core commitment of churches growing young that our research clearly and emphatically identified as warmth. It’s what you want your home to radiate to your family and friends. It’s like sipping hot tea fireside with your spouse or close friend on a brisk winter evening.
We had a hunch at the start of our research that authentic community would be important to young people in your church and neighborhood. But we were surprised by how much of growing young is influenced by whether or not congregations are warm and accepting.
Research Findings
Why Structure Alone Isn’t Enough to Grow Young
If you’re like us, you have served in ministry settings in which you’ve wanted to boost relationships. So you created a small group program. You invited people to sign up for these communities, then clustered them together and set them free with a small group starter guide.
And it worked. For a few months.
But for the majority of people, those small groups felt forced and awkward. Either they never gained momentum or they started with a burst of energy that then dissolved. In both cases, the groups ended up dissolving too.
Why did this happen? After all, you offered a solid structure to create close, authentic community.
Structures are important.
They simply are not enough.
Our research indicates that leaders need to stop assuming that programs alone are going to foster close relationships.
In our analyses of the terms young people and adults use to describe their own churches or parishes, we noticed repeated words such as welcoming, accepting, belonging, authentic, hospitable, and caring. We began to call this the warmth cluster. Across the board in statistical analyses, the warmth cluster emerged as a stronger variable than any one program. And while 6 out of 10 interviewees mentioned group practices like small groups, youth group, and retreats when they talked about why their church is thriving, what seems important about those practices is that they create space for people to be together and nurture relationships.
So should your congregation develop a small group structure that works? Absolutely. Just be careful not to depend on small groups themselves to remedy the social isolation often felt by teenagers and emerging adults. Nor can you rely on whole-church events. Or put all your eggs in the basket of age- and stage-based programming. Warmth often lives much deeper than your programs and structures—it’s the lifeblood coursing through the veins of your church body.
“Warmth resonates, especially doing ministry in an urban context. For kids growing up without biological fathers or being raised by an aunt or in foster care, the church has to stand in the gap and be family. That means much more than a programmatic approach. Young people have to experience, ‘This is where I belong, where I’m affirmed, where I’m pushed and held accountable.’ This is a hopeful finding for a small church in the inner city or a rural area. You too can make a significant difference with young people. You can get in the game.” —Efrem Smith, World Impact
Ironically, it is possible that your church actually might be working against warmth by offering a myriad of programs. In churches growing young, many young people shared that their church culture is moving away from unnecessary busyness. A deprogramming strategy sometimes helps to elevate relationships by opening up time and space where they can flourish. Young people can then do life together through shared meals, shared transportation, shared service in the community, or shared childcare. In churches growing young, warmth trumps programs.
When asked which age group their church is most effective in reaching, respondents in our study named college-age students less often than teenagers or adults from ages 24 to 29. Yet when those ages 19 to 23 who are connected to a church were asked why they stay involved, 45 percent pointed to personal relationships (nearly doubling the response rate of adults over age 30), not programs.
Warm Is the New Cool: Authenticity Trumps Worship Style
When someone says the name of your church, what image comes to your mind?
A building?
A worship service?
If you were a teenager or emerging adult in one of the churches in our study, your answer might be different. For young people today, church means much more than a worship service or a place to gather. Despite how much energy, money, and other resources we pour into making Sunday spectacular, the worship service may be less important to young people than we think.
When we asked young people how they would describe their church to a friend, only 12 percent talked about worship, and only 9 percent mentioned worship style.
Similarly, when we asked, “What makes your church effective with young people?” only a quarter mentioned worship at all, and only 12 percent mentioned anything about music (that figure dropped to only 3 percent when we isolated the top third of churches most effective with young people).
So what do they talk about when they describe their church? Overwhelmingly, nearly 1 in 3 share about its warmth. Also telling, in evaluating church effectiveness with young people, twice as many pastors as young people name worship music as a vital factor. This reflects a gap between what pastors think young people care about and what they actually care about. One pastor who understands this gap confessed, “We can hire and buy cool, but we can’t hire—or fake—warmth.” Cultivation of warmth requires much more than staffing or planning in order to attract young people to your services.
In site visits, we couldn’t help but notice that some churches are moving away from the models of attractional worship and highly polished, timed-to-the-minute experiences. More than one research team noted that what a particular church lacks in physical resources or flashiness, it makes up in warmth, authenticity, and hospitality. As it turns out, warm is indeed the new cool.
However, these statistics don’t mean that worship planning no longer matters. It may be that for young people, worship is a potential turnoff but not necessarily a turn-on. In other words, our worship style or elements of our service may have potential to repel young people or prevent youth engagement, but simply making our music better does not seem to ensure their involvement.
Or as one young person at The District Church in Washington, DC, shared, it’s one thing to watch a worship performance—you can just do that online. In contrast, “The internet can’t help you move to your new apartment. Only a close community will do that.” Well said.
Warmth Is in the DNA of the Church Family
By suggesting that churches need to grow warmer, we don’t mean adults should be nice to young people. Nice does not cut it. It isn’t how Jesus responded to people, and it falls short of the depth we saw in congregations.
Warmth is more than superficial community. It’s like family. In fact, the phrase “like family” surfaced as the most common term young people used to describe their church in our interviews and field visits. One youth ministry volunteer explained, “This is life. It’s not just church life, it’s life life. It’s hard, it’s busy, but we’re in it together. We’re like a family.” A high school senior shared, “This is family here. It’s natural, I guess.”
This metaphor of family is rich with images of hospitality, welcome, and unconditional acceptance, all of which emerged in church descriptions. This shouldn’t really surprise us, given the developmental need of young people to discover where and with whom they belong (see chapter 3). It turns out that they are looking for warmth not as an add-on but in their church’s very DNA.
The warmth young people seek isn’t usually clean and tidy. That’s just fine, because family isn’t neat. It’s messy. And messy is a good word to describe what young people want from a congregation. They desire not only to share their own messiness but also to walk alongside the authentic messiness of others.
Warmth Helps Young People Find—and Stick with—a Church
As young people are choosing a church, warm community is often a stronger draw than belief. When we asked what keeps people involved in their church, the highest response was personal relationships (named by 1 out of 3), and warmth was almost equally mentioned. In fact, beliefs comprised only 6 percent of responses—and more telling, 12 percent of leaders but only 3 percent of young people mentioned beliefs.
This experience of being enfolded into a family echoes the ancient Christian practice of hospitality. Much more than our thin image of welcoming people who may share our life stage or interests into our homes and communities, hospitality in Scripture and the Christian tradition always includes welcoming the stranger.1 When we consider the young people within and beyond our congregations who may feel like strangers in our gatherings, these words of theologian Christine Pohl ring especially fresh:
In other words, you may think young people are staying because of beliefs, but it’s more often about finding an experience that feels like family. For teenagers and emerging adults, depth of relationship opens the door to deeper exploration of belief. First relationship, then formation. First belonging, then belief. And eventually these blend into one fluid movement.3
The first time Grant showed up at Thursday night youth group, his demeanor sent one message: he wasn’t happy to be there. His sister had encouraged him to attend her new church to try to make friends, but he didn’t appear interested. At one point, he declared to his small discussion group that he was an atheist.
Committed to warmly welcoming all young people—even those like Grant who aren’t eager to connect—the volunteers at this West Coast church reached out and attempted to get to know him. He mostly shrugged off their advances, keeping to himself and quickly disappearing at the end of the evening. The youth ministry team never expected to see Grant again.
So the youth pastor was surprised later that week when he received a message from Grant’s sister. She shared that lately Grant had been hostile to everyone around him, and understandably so. Their dad had passed away a few years back, their mom was now in a toxic relationship, and Grant had moved in with his sister to escape. But when he visited the church group that night, he came home and told his sister, “That was awesome. There was love there.” He felt like some hard part of him had begun to crack open. This response came as a total shock to the youth pastor, who had assumed Grant found little of interest in their gathering.
What’s more, Grant came back week after week. He still wasn’t sure about God, but he felt drawn by the community. He often pushed boundaries as if to test whether this church was really willing to accept him. One night after the youth ministry had become an especially safe place for Grant, he shared with a volunteer leader, “Maybe there’s more to this God stuff.”
Grant’s journey is nowhere near neat and tidy. He has been in and out of church over the months since his first visit. But the youth ministry team insists that the church’s emphasis on acceptance and welcome leads to stories like Grant’s. They affirmed, “The first message students hear and experience is, ‘You belong here.’”
Honest Relationships Build Belonging
“I can just be myself.”
We repeatedly heard this phrase (or a close counterpart) from teenagers and emerging adults in warm churches. As one young person described, “It feels so safe to be part of a community that isn’t afraid of or offended by the ugly parts of my life.” When the research team listened to the way young people talk about their churches, we were surprised by how much it matters to them to have a church family where they can be authentic.
The youth leaders at one congregation of under 200 want honesty and authenticity to be hallmarks of their ministry. These adult volunteers made a pact with one another that they would simply be there for teenagers and emerging adults no matter what, without judging or criticizing them. They didn’t tell the young people about this; they just tried to live it out. Through our interviews and focus groups on site, it became obvious that the young people feel like they can trust these adults enough to be honest about their struggles. One young woman affirmed, “The adults here actually listen to us.”
“When I lost my grandfather to cancer, I was able to talk about that in front of other high schoolers and . . . [gets choked up] . . . that really helped me to get through that time, to have the support of my church and to be able to share and work through that and to grow in my faith. I think that is the feeling a lot of people get from the youth group, that they can talk about things that you don’t normally talk about in the school cafeteria.” —Ginger, age 18
“Some of our older couples are, like, in their seventies, and the first time or two that someone new comes to worship, these older couples will invite them over to their house for Sunday dinner. It’s a homemade dinner, and so the young people will go and tell their friends, ‘Hey, come to this church. You know what? There are people who will invite you over for dinner!’” —Titus, age 19
In other words, the pact worked!
Young people also expect others—including their leaders—to be real about struggles. As discussed in chapter 2, keychain leaders share openly about their shortcomings as opposed to pretending they are immune to failure. This reciprocal authenticity warms up the whole church.
Warm Intergenerational Relationships Grow Everyone Young
Much of American youth and young adult ministry tends to be devoted to building relationships with age-group peers. While peer friendships are crucial, a variety of analyses suggest that intergenerational relationships are also incredibly important. Specifically, churches with close intergenerational relationships show higher faith maturity and vibrancy, as well as more examples of the six core commitments in action.
Strategic one-on-one ministry is parallel to what youth ministry has historically called “relational ministry” or “contact work,” meaning leaders go to the places students spend time each day—schools, ball fields, and local hangouts.4 This approach is still alive and well in churches growing young; in many cases, ministries are shifting the responsibility for contact work from one paid leader to a diverse team of volunteers, mentors, and the church community. Some churches that emphasize contact work reduce ministry programming in order to focus on meeting students around town. In this way, they’re able to engage even more young people in relationship.
One parent misses structured church events even while sharing her appreciation for this kind of outreach: “The leaders probably do not do as many programs as I would like, but they are high on relationships. They will put together a school calendar of events that students are part of, and they attend many of them. So when my daughter is in a play, they come watch. Another girl plays volleyball, and they come watch. But they don’t come alone. When they show up, they bring three or four or ten other teenagers with them.”
While intergenerational relationships can develop naturally, two primary avenues through which churches strategically integrate generations are mentoring and worship. Mentoring often develops through one-on-one discipleship, vocational guidance, or shared ministry work. A common example of shared work is adults and teenagers serving together in some skill-specific task in the church, such as kids’ ministry, technology, or music. Some mentoring structures are more formal than others, but most include a level of intentionality in matching young people with adults who share interests and talents.5
“Intergenerational worship” has become a catchphrase of the Sticky Faith movement over the past handful of years. We discovered in our previous research that involvement in all-church worship during high school is more consistently linked with mature faith in both high school and college than any other form of church participation.6 As we studied churches growing young, we found a variety of valued and effective intergenerational worship practices. At St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church in Indianapolis, the masses are fully intergenerational. All ages attend, and young people are involved in various roles. One mom of young twins shared, “My kids are soaking in Jesus. They know the Lord’s Prayer and so much of what we say in mass together.”
Just because intergenerational relationships are important doesn’t make them common. One participant shared that he “loathes” the peer-based small group model in which he has always been forced to participate. He lamented, “As a 29-year-old I want a small group led by a 45-year-old with 60-year-olds and 15-year-olds and both genders. I want to learn from a high school freshman and an 80-year-old grandmother and everyone in between. We do not have any avenues for that.”
Many churches that are growing young still struggle with intergenerational relationships.7 After participants in our study had rated their church on several characteristics, we asked them to give a story or example of one of the characteristics at which they thought their church was weakest. The highest response (by far) was “Helps people from different age groups get to know each other,” mentioned by a quarter of interviewees.
Perhaps the best response to the systemic abandonment described in chapter 3 is systemic support, where a warm, family-like community embraces young people as fully participating and fully needed members of the body. The good news is that when we bridge generation gaps, everyone grows young. Cross-generational discipleship is beneficial not only for young people but also for older generations who need the vitality of the young to inspire their faith just as much as the young need wise elders to ground theirs. Faith, after all, is not just passed down. It’s passed around.
Fostering Peer Friendships Fosters Spiritual Formation
We wanted to get your attention about the importance of intergenerational relationships, but guess what? Peer friendships at church also strengthen faith. You may have guessed that, but now we have research to support it.
Specifically, when we asked young people about church friendships, those who report more close friends at church also show higher faith maturity. As the number of close friends gets closer to five, so does the likelihood that a young person attends church and regularly participates in worship with others, takes time to read and study the Bible, talks openly with other Christians about their faith questions or struggles, serves others in need locally and/or globally, and sees their faith as an influence in their friendships.
This benchmark of five close friends isn’t magic, but it sure seems to help.
Becoming a Body Drives Warmth
At the end of the day, increasing warmth in your church is not only about growing young. It’s also about good theology.
Theologian Miroslav Volf draws on the warm communion of the Trinity to undergird warmth in the church. He contends that “We are the church” doesn’t mean “We meet occasionally” or “We cooperate in a current project.” Instead, we actually become part of one another.8 This sounds like Paul’s exhortation that “each member belongs to all the others” (Rom. 12:5).
This kind of ecclesiology—our theology of church—pushes against the societal trend of hyperindividualism, in which churches envision themselves as loosely affiliated groups of spiritual persons having simultaneous, individual spiritual experiences.9 In contrast, we are adopted into one body.10 That means smelly teenagers and jaded emerging adults are connected tendon-to-bone with great-grandparents of the faith as they work out community together.
“We do life together. I always feel like I am part of a family, a collective member of it. I just feel like I am a part of something really big, something important, and I do not feel complete unless I go. It’s like a chunk of my week is missing.” —Timothy, age 28
Jesus’ own life illustrates how young people can be welcomed within the faith community. You may remember the scene in Luke 2:41–52 in which Jesus at age 12 (the only time we meet him as an adolescent in Scripture) travels with his parents to Jerusalem. After the Passover celebration, his parents begin to journey back toward Nazareth with extended family and friends who have traveled together. At the end of the first day, his parents realize that they each assumed he was traveling with the other (it was customary for the men and women to travel in separate groups, with the children passing back and forth between them). They race back to Jerusalem and after three days find him sitting among the teachers in the temple, listening and inquiring.
There are a few questions we don’t often hear asked about this story, but they have the potential to be game changers for churches that want to grow young.
Where did Jesus sleep?
Who made sure he was safe?
And maybe most importantly, who fed this boy? Have you ever attempted to keep a 12-year-old boy fed? I (Kara) have, and it’s not a small feat!
We can give a spiritualized answer to these questions, and perhaps God simply watched over and provided for Jesus those three days. But odds are good there is also a communal answer. Our hunch is that the faith community saw this young person, embraced him, and welcomed him to their table. Both two thousand years ago and today, churches that grow young find adolescents and emerging adults who need our welcome and embrace.
One senior pastor of an African American church in our study embodies the type of community Jesus found in Luke 2. He doesn’t wait for young people to show up and ask for connection; he goes to them. Each year this sixty-something leader takes a week to participate in a high school camp. He leads some of the teaching, but he goes beyond that. He plays games, eats meals, and even stays in cabins with students and youth ministry leaders rather than lodging somewhere more peaceful. He has realized that with teenagers, he has to gain enough trust through real relationships before he can speak into their lives. Like his whole church, this leader is growing young.
Ideas for Action
As you review the following ideas, perhaps make notes in the margin. Mark if the idea is a fit for your church, who should implement the idea (you or another leader), and whether it can happen now or later. Please don’t try to do everything—instead, aim for two or three ideas that you can act on now. Then at the end of the chapter, use the strategic questions to guide your church toward a specific plan to fuel a warm community.
Take Your Congregation’s Relational Temperature
Warmth isn’t generated through simply being polite. By our definition (from young people themselves), the qualities of a warm church include authenticity, hospitality, caring, welcoming, accepting, and belonging. Consider asking a handful of young people to gauge the relational temperature of your congregation based on this definition of warmth.
One of the potential pitfalls of closely connected groups is that over time they can become shut off to outsiders. Shared life creates such strong bonds that newcomers can feel alienated and intimidated by a communal narrative that doesn’t seem to include them. This can be especially true in smaller churches in which everyone seems to know each other, or in larger churches with well-established friend clusters or historic small groups that appear impenetrable.
Warm churches keep watch for the unhealthy tendency to grow inward. In some cases, this can manifest as resistance to growth; congregants feel threatened by new people and greater numbers. If that’s happening to your church or parish, consider when particular groups or the whole body needs reminders to reach beyond cloistered in-group dynamics and cultivate fertile soil where new relational seeds can germinate. Small need not be an idol that prevents hospitality.
On a scale of icy, cool, room temperature, or fireside warm, what rating would they give your community? Ask why they think the temperature is what it is and what ideas they have for fostering more warmth.11
Take their insights to your leadership team and wonder together what it might look like to get beyond nice to true warmth. Consider these questions: What if young people really felt like they belonged in our church community? What would we gain if we took the steps it would take to be warmer? What would we lose?
Help Newcomers Land Smoothly—and Soon
With your ministry team, assess your church’s approach to visitors, perhaps thinking specifically about different age groups and life circumstances (e.g., single adults, families with kids, or college students).
• What is it like to walk into your building for worship or other ministries?
• How warmly are newcomers greeted? How are they oriented to the building and to the service or program? If you ask guests to stand or raise their hands during worship services, how does that feel to them? How can you make that kind of recognition warmer and less awkward?
• How does the language and direction—or lack of direction—given in worship feel to an outsider? Are there particular phrases that need to be explained from time to time? Are transitions handled in a manner that keeps new people oriented or leaves them confused?
• How easy is it for a newer person to access smaller gatherings, groups, or classes in which they might find relational connection? What is the balance of “open” versus “closed” groups in your congregation right now?
• Do you host any kind of new visitor or new member connection event, like a monthly meal just for recent attenders? If not, what might feel natural and within your capacity to create?
One church-planting friend of ours shared, “We see our job as creating the environment where relationships can happen. We have programs, yes, but more importantly, we build the platforms where people connect. Our strategy has been to create an environment that screams, ‘Stay here!’ after worship. Every week we have food, things for kids to do (all within eyesight of parents), and a football or baseball game on a big screen nearby. We see the time after the service as just as important as the service itself.”
Create a 5:1 Ratio of Adults and Young People
One of the most practical ways churches and families can boost intergenerational relationships is to rethink our ratios. Often in ministry we say we need one adult for every five children or teenagers. But what if we flipped that ratio and sought out five adults for each young person? That vision, sparked by Chap Clark’s research, has inspired leaders and parents nationwide to surround young people with a team of at least five supportive adults.
Who are those five? We’re not suggesting that you now need to recruit five small group leaders for every young person. One may be a small group leader or Sunday school teacher, another a mentor, and still another someone who simply knows that young person’s name and commits to pray for them. Coaches, favorite aunts, and the parents of close friends all carry 5:1 potential. We can tap into that potential to release a flood of support around each young person.
Fellowship Memphis used to look primarily to the “Paul and Timothy” model of one-on-one discipleship, but given the transient nature of our society and the research that supports bringing a cluster of adults around young people, they now talk about the 5:1 ratio as building “greenhouses of formation.” They hope that a committed group of adults will provide a rich, warm ecosystem of discipleship for each young person within their church’s influence.
“During the summer we have a thing called S’mores Sundays that the pastor holds in his backyard on Sunday nights. Everyone is invited. We roast hot dogs and people bring salads and chips, and we play lawn games and maybe sing some songs. We just get to bond with other Christians outside of the church. It’s different than just going to church on Sunday and talking to people afterward. It’s something that young people kind of look forward to, or at least I look forward to!” —Henry, age 15
Another senior pastor shared that his church fosters this 5:1 vision as students enter sixth grade. The ministry leaders work with parents and students to identify five adults who commit to walk with them through middle and high school as mentors and prayer partners. Just last year, the first group of former sixth-graders graduated from high school. When the congregation celebrated this milestone, each student stood at the front of the sanctuary along with their team of five adults. With great emotion, these adults prayed for the young people they had been cheering on over the last seven years. This blessing doesn’t just inspire the graduates; it changes everyone.
You may wonder at this point whether the quantity or quality of intergenerational relationships is more important. The answer is both. One significant adult is better than none. In general, five adults are better than three. Ultimately, it’s not as much about the quantity or quality independently but rather the quantity of quality relationships.
Explore More Intergenerational Worship
Worshiping together across generations is important but can be tricky depending on your context. Functionally, there are three main categories of intergenerational worship:
• All-inclusive worship: Everyone worships together all the time. In some cases, an adjacent room is provided for parents with babies or restless children.
• Partially inclusive worship: Everyone worships together some of the time during each worship service. Perhaps children and youth begin and/or end the service with the whole congregation but exit for age-level worship and teaching.
• Special-occasion worship: Most of the time everyone worships in age-level programming, but occasionally the whole church worships together in one service. In some cases, this happens as often as once a month or quarter. In other cases, particular holidays are celebrated with intergenerational worship.
With your ministry team, assess where your church falls now on this spectrum. Brainstorm ideas of what a natural next step toward more integrated worship could look like in your setting. One option might be moving from one category to the next; another option might be to look at what you’re doing right now and find nuances to make existing intergenerational engagement more vibrant.
Renovate Your Worship Gathering into a Family Room
The temptation to increase the performance value of our Sunday mornings is everywhere. Whether we’re focusing on crafting better sermons, staging a well-rehearsed band or choir, or investing in state-of-the art lighting equipment, the drive for polished worship events dominates many leaders’ agendas. Often this push is fueled by well-intentioned congregants who want a “professional” worship experience.
Rather than lean into the allure of viewing the worship service like a trip to the theater, imagine it as a gathering in the family room. Whether you meet in a sanctuary filled with pews, a contemporary auditorium, a high school gymnasium, or an actual house, envision your worship experience like a family room.
In some cases, restructuring your physical space in order to see one another more clearly and reduce the distance between worshipers and leaders might help. But you may not actually need to rearrange the furniture. Instead, encourage your worship planning team to look for ways worship can include both vertical (people–God) and horizontal (people–people) encounters. Here are a few practical ideas:
• Weave more personal stories of struggle into sermons that help humanize the pastor as “one of us.”
• Add sermon illustrations that include young people or speak to issues they care about.
• If your liturgy is relatively formal, lean into the sacredness of this formality without assuming formal has to mean cold. Buffer the highly structured parts of the service with elements that exude more warmth. For example, add an informal “passing of the peace” or other greeting into your liturgy. Give people a few minutes to talk to one another, and perhaps provide a question for folks to ask each other to break the ice.
• Include opportunities during or after the sermon or homily for conversation with others sitting nearby or for discussion with the pastor or priest.
• Offer “prayers of the people” that invite congregants to voice their own brief prayers of petition and thanksgiving from where they are sitting, standing, or kneeling.
• Reframe mistakes and awkward moments in the flow of the service as reminders that we gather not to consume a slick show but to worship a great God.
• Invite young people to help write and deliver sections of the liturgy. Better yet, engage young people in your worship service planning or even sermon preparation meetings. One pastor who does this shared, “Teenagers are quick to point out words and ideas that lose them.”
• If language differences exist in your congregation, consider which language might feel more like “family room” dialogue to parishioners from different cultural or generational backgrounds. If possible, include prayers, Scripture readings, or songs that reflect the different languages or preferences represented among your people.
• Experiment with a teaching series that spans age groups. Usually this idea means youth and children’s ministry take their lead from the pastor or lectionary to decide the passages they will share. But in one medium-sized church in our study, the pastor leads a different way. A question from a seven-year-old girl caught him off guard one Sunday. She wondered why they studied different passages of Scripture in Sunday school and during the worship service. After this, he decided to connect the sermon to Sunday school and used the Sunday school lessons as his lectionary.
Pray Warmly
A logical starting point for churches that want to build greater intergenerational warmth is one of our most basic, but profound, community practices: praying for one another. One Sunday each month in a Minnesota congregation growing young, members share “prayer Post-its.” At the beginning of worship, people of all generations write down prayer requests on sticky notes and post them on a wall. Later in the service, others take down those notes and commit to pray for the requests. An interviewee reflected, “It is just really cool to see elementary students put their prayer requests up, and then the college-age kids put theirs up, and they all take notes with them. There is something incredible about the different generations in our church committing to support each other in prayer.”
What prayer practices could foster warmth across generations in your congregation? Here are a few ideas to spark your imagination:
• Invite small groups or Sunday school classes to pray for specific youth or young adult events, retreats, and mission trips. Encourage the young people to visit those groups beforehand to share requests and report back in person afterward about how God moved.
• Create prayer bookmarks for adults in the church that feature names, faces, and contact information about college students or graduating high school seniors. Ask them to commit to pray for that student throughout the school year.
• Match elementary students and teenagers in back-to-school pairs to pray for each other during the year.
• Designate a prayer wall where children and teenagers can trace handprints (on the wall or on large sheets of paper) and write their names. Encourage adults to write prayers and passages from Scripture in the handprints.
Generate Tiny Churches
While we can’t structure warmth, our structures can work to support it. Small groups represent one of the most common strategies incorporated by churches growing young. At a church in the Southeast, young people describe their small groups this way: “We’re not a church with small groups but a church of small groups.” The small group community is so important that it becomes like a tiny church. So much so that people may be willing to miss Sunday worship but not their small group.
“We are increasingly moving toward a family metaphor for church rather than the corporate America model. We’re asking, ‘What does it mean to be the people—the family—of God? How do we as a team of leaders function as family?’ That’s messy, and hard.” —Rafi, pastor
While we can’t tell you which small group format will work best for your community, we encourage you to consider how what you’re doing now fuels warmth through peer friendships and intergenerational connections. Evaluate how your current small group leaders are trained and supported. Gather them and brainstorm improvements to make your small group strategy even more effective for nurturing warmth.
Several churches in our study are experimenting specifically with intergenerational small groups. These groups intentionally bring people together across the life span for spiritual formation. Often this means more emphasis on shared meals, life stories, and prayer requests than on intensive Bible study. In some cases, it means young children join for portions of the gathering but leave during more serious conversation. Other such groups invest in their neighborhoods by serving local needs together.
One larger church preserves both age-level and intergenerational small groups by reducing its overall youth ministry and adult programming. Every teenager is encouraged to participate in a weekly peer-based discipleship group and a monthly intergenerational group (along with their families). In order to make space for that in students’ schedules, the youth group meets as a large group only once a month. While this rhythm may not work in your context, consider the small group tempos and structures that can best support the warmth you hope to nurture.
Create Both On-Ramps and Road Trips
Like us, you may live in a community where young people tend to be transitional. How can we create warmth in such highly mobile populations?
In my (Brad’s) church—which was independently nominated for this study12—we use on-ramps and road trips as metaphors for increasing levels of commitment to community. Not everyone is ready to jump into a 12-month road trip level of commitment to a small group. For many young adults in particular, shorter experiments in community give them freedom to explore new frontiers until they’re ready to settle in more permanent relational territory.
On-ramp experiences may include monthly community dinners open to everyone, 6- to 10-week life groups based on particular interests, service opportunities, or Bible studies. Options range from craft nights to basketball teams to book clubs. Sometimes the group itself is continuous but participation is fluid. For example, we walked through the book of Mark for 18 months in our worship services, and an ongoing group met to reflect on the passage and sermon from the prior Sunday. The leadership of that group was consistent, but there was no commitment level required from participants. This allowed anyone to engage a smaller group experience of studying Scripture without any expectation that they would return week after week. Ironically, this freedom actually led to some highly committed participants who might never have signed on to an 18-month study.
Another successful on-ramp is our annual whole-church retreat. All generations trek to a mountain retreat center over a spring weekend. We exhale city life for a few days and inhale both fresh mountain air and the slow pace of a relaxed schedule. The retreat is intentionally under-programmed, freeing up time for games, hikes, or sitting by the fire. What inevitably emerges are new relationships forged over board games, shared meals, and worship. Those friendships travel back down the winding mountain road, deepening our shared life from week to week. What starts as a small investment of one weekend yields high relational returns.
A higher commitment road trip might be a six-month group exploring vocation, a yearlong commitment to a prayer group or an intergenerational small group, or participation in a dialogue-based “understanding group” around issues such as human sexuality, immigration, or the formation of a local arts collective. Understanding groups tend to begin without a formal end in place, giving the group the space it needs to do the hard work of exploring culture, tradition, Scripture, and the stories of the people in the community. The resulting deeper understanding is then shared in dialogue with the broader church.
Promote Small Group Leaders Along with Students to the Next Grade
You probably know a volunteer who has served young people in the same age level for years, perhaps even for decades. Families look forward to multiple children experiencing this leader at that particular age and stage. This kind of commitment is to be commended.
What you may have heard less about is an emerging model that encourages small group leaders or Sunday school teachers to move up with students each year. Some churches do this through the elementary years, others through middle and high school. One church described a small group model in which the same students and leaders traverse from fifth grade through senior year together. A volunteer from another parish shared, “My husband and I have taught the same kids’ Sunday school group since they were in second grade. And we have moved up with them every year. This year we’re freshmen. Now we are in high school.”
We love how this woman uses the pronoun we when referring to this group. She and her husband see themselves journeying into high school right alongside their students. Talk about warm! In your own context, see if there are a few small group or Sunday school leaders who would be willing to move up with their kids as an experiment at the beginning of the next ministry year. Choose leaders who are respected and whom other leaders would listen to so that if their experience goes well, they can be your champions for a broader experiment.
Support Graduates Well
When students graduate from high school, it can be easy to think our church has done its part in their formation and simply wish them well as they exit the door. While we’ve written quite a bit about what can be done to change this phenomenon in our churches (see StickyFaith.org for more resources), we couldn’t share this chapter on warm communities without pointing out that many churches growing young are supporting graduates well.
An Evangelical Covenant congregation intentionally reaches out to college students—both those from the church and those who have come to their city for school—through “take a college student to lunch days.” Adults adopt a college student or two for the afternoon and take them to lunch after worship. Simple. And warm. Looking back on a year of college programming, the ministry leader reflected that it was one of the most effective things they had done to connect with students. In fact, students asked to repeat this event more than any other.
If your congregation includes college students, try a similar initiative. Food is often the pathway to the heart of this age group! For graduates who are far away, encourage adults to send care packages (including snacks or coffee gift cards) and to connect through social media.
Redirect Budget to Facilitate Warmth Whenever You Can
At one multiethnic church, we were struck when volunteer leaders shared that they all have meal budgets. Every small group leader in the youth ministry is encouraged to take students out for meals or treats regularly as part of their formation process. The students trumpeted the value of this investment as well, as you’d expect from teenagers who are getting fed. But it wasn’t just about food; when describing their meal conversations, students used many of the phrases common to warm communities that we’ve discussed in this chapter.
You might wonder how the church manages to carve out budget for this expense. In many ways, it’s a trade-off in a ministry that lacks a building and avoids heavy programming. Their entire ministry philosophy is built around volunteer leaders investing in students. Small group leaders meet with young people in homes or public spaces. Since the church has a policy against a leader meeting one-on-one with a student in a home, meeting over smoothies or bagels in public is somewhat unavoidable. The ministry’s volunteers cannot all support that kind of expense personally, so every volunteer is extended a meal budget.
That strategy will not work in every church, but it’s a fascinating take on rethinking the youth ministry budget. Occasionally, we meet youth and young adult leaders who cannot convince their church board to extend a food expense budget to them (as paid staff members), let alone their whole volunteer team. Whether it’s meals or something else, what kinds of budget changes might heat up the warmth in your ministry? What ideas can work well without any budget? Who needs to be involved in a conversation about this in your church?
“This church does really well creating a sense of ‘This is home.’ That actually gives you a fighting chance with young adults. College students are willing to take a risk and show up again, because no matter how long they have been gone, someone will know their name and be glad they came back.” —Brandon, ministry intern
Remember That Warmth Can Be Slow
Warmth may not seem like a big secret. But it does come with a hard truth: warmth is often slow. Really slow.
Stability, patience, faithfulness to a local community. These inglorious and unsexy traits give roots to churches that grow young, eventually producing the fruit of warmth. It takes time and commitment to move past the superficiality of lobby hellos into the intimate spaces where authenticity reveals deep pain and loss.
In the name of trying to stay up-to-date and relevant, sometimes churches have forced both cool and community too quickly. This kind of accelerated progress inevitably backfires. Instead, let’s take the time needed to foster community practices that fuel warmth.13 Slow progress may not look impressive five months from now, but the kind of warmth that forms young people deeply may take five years to cook up.
“This church has stretched my definition of community. Like others, I had an idea of Jesus’ love—who it was for and what a Christian community meant. What this church has taught me is far greater than any definition I’ve heard, because it’s truly organic. I would imagine that ‘Slow Food’ movements encompass completely organic ingredients because time is on their side; this is also true of my church and what makes it so beautiful. Community is not defined; it’s a posture toward people that creates space for everyone at the table. Our table always has room.” —Tasha, age 23
Chapter Highlights
• Structure is necessary for growing young, but it’s not enough. Churches that grow young sometimes actually program less in order to free up more space for relational connection.
• Warm is the new cool. More than flashy worship, young people want authenticity and connection. When they talk about their churches, they talk about people and warmth. Regardless of whether you meet in an auditorium or a house, consider how your worship service can feel more like a family room.
• Churches grow young by weaving warmth into their DNA. The most common phrase people used to describe their churches was “like family.” Other words describing warmth included welcoming, accepting, belonging, authentic, hospitable, and caring.
• Honest relationships and the ability to be real or authentic are not only preferences for young people; they also build stronger churches.
• Intergenerational relationships grow everyone young by helping them break out of the silos of age- and stage-based ministry and create connections across generations. Two of the most common ways churches invest in intergenerational relationships are through mentoring and corporate worship.
• Fueling warmth helps us live out good ecclesiology, our theology of church. The relationship of the Trinity and the metaphor of the body of Christ remind us that we belong to one another.
Strategic Questions to Help You Fuel a Warm Community
Research Findings
On a scale of 1 to 5 (with 1 being “we’re struggling here” and 5 being “we’re nailing this”), rate your congregation on the research findings presented in this chapter:
1. Young people describe our congregation as relationally warm (welcoming, authentic, hospitable) overall, like a family.
1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2. We avoid relying on programs and structures alone to build warmth.
1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
3. Our congregation fosters honest friendships in which struggles can be shared authentically.
1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
4. We intentionally connect generations within the church and support intergenerational relationships.
1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
5. Our worship gatherings feel warm and inviting.
1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Ideas for Action
1. What are you already doing to help fuel warmth in your congregation?
2. In what ways does your congregation struggle with relational connection?
3. Given your ranking of the findings in the previous section, as well as the ideas you’ve read in this chapter, what one or two shifts might you or your church want to make?
4. Who else needs to be part of this conversation?
5. What can you do in the next few weeks or months to move toward these changes?