14 Paradox 6: Attract Young Adults to Your Church by Sending Them Away

14

Paradox 6

Attract Young Adults to Your Church by Sending Them Away

Indecision is a key characteristic of young adulthood.

But then again, maybe not.

You can’t really ask them to live and breathe the company.

Because they’re living and breathing themselves and that keeps them very busy.

A few years ago, our worship band had become a tight-knit group. The members worked tirelessly on their craft, wrote songs, entered music festivals, and even recorded an album. They dreamed of using their talents in wider circles and made extensive plans about what that might look like. They wanted to make an impact.

Just as the dream was beginning to materialize, one band member landed a full-time job teaching music in another state. Another left for a position in another church. Another pursued missions in Africa. Before long, we had a band of rotating musicians, doing a fine job but definitely not living the original band’s dream.

You know what we call this phenomenon in young adult ministry?

Normal. Absolutely normal.

It’s a rare young adult who puts down roots, works on a project past the promising beginnings, through the messy middle, and all the way through to completion, even if it was their dream in the first place!

There’s no tragedy in this reality; it’s normal. What is tragic, though, are the ways this normal reality totally stymies most churches in their work with young adults. Our churches are, by and large, structured to assimilate people who are geographically and vocationally stable. So we find ourselves focusing our young adult ministry on a tiny slice of the young adult demographic pie.

It’s time to embrace the reality that most young adults are much too transient to fit into our tidy ministry systems, built on an assumption of permanence that’s no longer even close to reality.

Take Jasmine Wanek, for example. In 2013, USA Today introduced the twenty-six-year-old conservation biologist from Baltimore as a prototypical young adult:

[Jasmine] lost her parents a few years ago, then watched as their Forest Hill, Md., home, north of the city, sat on the market for a year with no buyers. Her Realtor even suggested at one point that they throw in one of the family’s vehicles, a 1999 Isuzu Rodeo, to sweeten the deal. Wanek took the house off the market last spring. Then, after putting it up for sale again a few weeks ago, she got three offers, one of which she accepted. Closing day is November 15.

She’s moving to Daytona Beach, Fla., to move in with her fiancé, a flight attendant for Southwest Airlines. They’ll probably move again in a few months—he has a tiny, one-bedroom apartment a few minutes from the beach, and she’s looking for a job down there.

Meanwhile, Wanek is working to settle her parents’ estate—she posted a Craigslist ad offering their “barely used” Toro snow blower for $150. She’s also trying to figure out how to get two pets—Harley, her 15-year-old West Highland terrier, and Tomato, her 7-year-old red-footed tortoise—down to Florida with her.

“Surprisingly, the dog and the tortoise are making things more complicated,” she said. Wanek grew up in suburban Harford County, attended the University of Maryland and still has many friends here, but said, “I didn’t want to stay in one place my whole life. . . . This is a good time for me to check out something else.”

What’s the possibility that your young adult ministry could ever get on Jasmine’s radar when she moves to your town?

A recent US Census Bureau statistic reveals that a whopping 30 percent of Americans in their twenties will move at least once this year, more than double the rest of the population. And according to a Future Workplace survey, more than 90 percent of young adults expect to stay at their current job for less than three years.

Although transience and mobility are a fundamental fact of life for young adults, churches tend to build programs around the mythical young adults who

Reggie McNeal, in The Present Future, describes a very different kind of young adult:

Increasingly we are finding people who “belong” to two or more churches. A young man on a plane recently recounted to me his involvement with four churches that he considered himself a part of (one for worship, one for mission trips, another for their teaching ministry, and a fourth for their need of his technical expertise). The reason church leaders don’t understand this growing trend is the institutional implications: We don’t know how to count this participation or take up the offering in this new kind of world.

For young adults, transience, mobility, and keeping options open are essential ingredients to the recipe for the good life. It’s time to stop building ministries for a kind of young adult who no longer exists.

Working with the Grain

What if churches choose to work with—not against—the grain of who young adults are amid transition? What if we stop trying to build young adult ministries on the same kind of foundation we have built ministries to the far-less-transient populations of children, youth, and older adults?

It’s easy for church leaders to complain about the young adult penchant for transience, for always keeping their options open. The words of one pastor echo the sentiments of hundreds of others: “Transient people often have a consumer attitude toward church. They attend one church as long as it meets their needs better than another. You don’t know who you can count on. People are fickle and tend to be critical. Rather than saying, ‘We’re part of this and we’re going to make it go,’ they act as if the church is on probation.”

At one level, of course, this pastor is absolutely right. But I wonder if he isn’t missing some of the fundamental advantage that comes with working with a generation “on the move,” a generation untethered. Consider the opportunities:

If we hope to seize the opportunity presented by this “untethered generation,” we’ll want to consider ministry for and with them in radically different ways, ways that challenge our traditional template.

Could the mobility and transience of young adults offer an unmatched opportunity for ministry?

Key Shifts Required for Reaching a Generation Untethered

If you’re convinced and want to switch to a ministry approach that takes seriously the transient reality of young adults, I propose six strategic shifts you’ll need to make:

1. Shift from speaking to the group to speaking to the one. If you’re part of an average church, you rely heavily on traditional forms of church advertising—bulletin announcements, bulletin boards, video announcements, Facebook posts, maybe even group texts or emails. These methods can create visibility for young adult ministry but will never be enough to actually get one off the ground.

This approach to promotion and engagement is based on the underlying assumption that everyone is simply waiting around for something (else) to engage them—spiritually or otherwise—and all we need to do is invite them in an interesting way, and they’ll show up.

Young adults (and increasingly the rest of the population) simply don’t live that way. With the average American bombarded by an estimated three thousand advertising messages a day, most have learned to survive the onslaught by expertly filtering out almost every advertisement in their lives, especially if the next step is somewhat complicated or requires lots of initiative.

Some young adults are actually surprised to find a church that connects with them beyond blanket advertising. I saw it clearly on a recent Sunday morning.

I had a conversation with twenty-something sisters visiting our church with their significant others. We chatted for a few minutes after the service and then said goodbye.

The sisters’ mom, a member of our church, caught me the next day and said—to my amazement—what an “incredible impact” our conversation had on her daughters. “It’s all they talked about over lunch,” she told me.

I replayed the conversation in my head and, for the life of me, had no idea what she was talking about. She must have seen my confusion, so she explained: “They’ve never really connected in a church before and are both on the verge of disconnecting from faith altogether. They were so surprised that someone would take a genuine interest in them personally. Church is usually a place where they come, listen, and leave. They finally felt connected.”

We’ll never engage a significant number of young adults in church life by relying on shotgun communication. (I’m including those ever-so-convenient, impersonal group emails and texts.) Especially at the beginning, one-on-one communication is always our best bet for building a group from the ground up.

Sure, there will be time for group communication after the group has coalesced or when people need reminders of commitments. But until then, talk to the one, not just the group.

2. Shift from stadium events to small cohorts. For years, the church has bought into the mentality that “bigger is (always) better.” And though we certainly want to engage as many young adults as possible, their transient, often-disconnected culture precludes the likelihood of launching a young adult ministry with a model that begins with large, attractional events.

We can easily shrink the scale by focusing on creating smaller shared experiences. In a room designed for a thousand, one hundred young adults will wonder, Where is everyone? But when you meet two people for coffee and four show up, it feels as if lots of people are investing in this project.

Shrinking the scale allows us to create meetings that always feel full, based on the context we create. When you set up the meeting with an email saying, “I’m having a few people over to . . .” you’re able to set expectations for something other than a huge gathering.

Young adults have plenty of options for large gatherings, and they’re certainly drawn to big events. But to help them actually connect and find a place that feels like home, they need people who know them. Young adults will find far more reason to stick around when they’re engaged with friends than when they’re entertained in a crowd. Find a way to scale down by drawing smaller cohorts of young adults together, and you’ll find stronger connections and deeper impact.

3. Shift from brilliant messages to transformational environments. Young adults thrive in self-directed learning environments. They’ve learned to follow up on their questions immediately and find new information on their own at warp speed. It’s not surprising that so many of them have a hard time with traditional, presentation-style church programs.

If you have doubts, try this experiment: ask a group of young adults to spend an hour with you without access to their smartphones, tablets, and laptops. If you can get them to agree, pay attention to how often they instinctively reach for a device to look up some information as the conversation rolls along.

Who was the actor in that movie we’re talking about? What was the score of last night’s game? What is the distance between the earth and the sun? As a reflex, young adults have grown accustomed to having all the information they need at their fingertips. They’ve been socialized into learning interactively and finding ways to interact even when someone up-front is presenting information.

By contrast, many pastors have been taught to spend an hour of preparation for every minute of preaching. By this rule of thumb, the average pastor writing a twenty-minute sermon should spend roughly half the workweek preparing excellent messages for the congregation!

Though this strategy may have worked in generations past (though I wonder), it definitely won’t build an effective young adult ministry. The best “sermons” might take place at Starbucks, over email, on a blog, or in settings in which no clear teacher is giving “right answers.”

Rather than spending disproportionate hours on our presentations, we can create environments where transformational learning takes place. In a cohort or community marked by the authenticity of sharing doubts, failures, and hunches, we can begin looking at the right questions, the kind that will connect deeply with the faith of young adults today. We can listen and point to the ways that faith (and its unsettling sister, doubt) becomes real.

4. Shift from long-term contracts to short-term intensity. Even cell phone companies are getting the message. More and more are offering no-contract plans. Marketers are learning they may have a better chance of earning loyalty by not locking customers in (can you hear the prison doors clang?). Ironically, customers may be more likely to stay with a cell phone provider when they aren’t expected to make a long-term commitment.

This approach flies in the face of the membership model most churches have been built on—a model that doesn’t make sense to the average young adult. Especially at the beginning of your ministry launch, think in terms of shorter, more intense opportunities rather than plans dependent on long-term commitment. A weekend retreat or Saturday morning service project followed by lunch out has a much better chance of helping move a young adult ministry forward than launching a sixteen-week discipleship class.

One-off experiences with a reunion four weeks later give the potential for longer-term engagement without a requirement of commitment on the front end. Young adults are also much more likely to invite their peers to a single event than to an established group that’s been meeting weekly for years.

5. Shift from depth to challenge. Pope Francis is a great example of a church leader gaining the admiration of young adults. Chosen in a conclave in 2013 after the unusual resignation of Pope Benedict XVI, Pope Francis immediately began making waves by modeling his faith with more than just words.

Sometimes referred to as Pope Francis the Revolutionary, this iconic leader of the Catholic Church has rejected fancy robes in exchange for modest attire. He has stooped low to wash the feet of female prisoners and transformed the mansion of a German bishop into a soup kitchen.

In his first papal exhortation, Pope Francis wrote, “I prefer a church which is bruised, hurting, and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security.”

Young adults can sense when a church is mired in routine and tradition so long that it no longer offers a challenge to the wider culture of the church and world. Though this generalization may not apply to every young adult, they tend to be less interested in deep intellectual and theological conversations and more awakened by a spiritual challenge to be lived out in the real world.

Though conflicting statistics abound regarding how few Christian young adults actually exist, it’s fascinating what kind of Christians they are. It’s not surprising that in the late 2000s and early 2010s, Shane Claiborne’s book The Irresistible Revolution, David Platt’s book Radical, and Francis Chan’s book Crazy Love were top sellers for this generation of Christians. They all offer an unapologetic call for Christians to give everything they have for the sake of the cross and reflect a young adult desire to be challenged in their faith.

6. Shift from gathering to sending. We often think evangelism and discipleship have different goals: one attracts outsiders to the truth of God, and the other gathers followers of Jesus around his transformational power so they become more like him. Step 1: Draw them here. Step 2: Anchor them here.

For many in the church, discipleship has been about meeting for the purpose of engendering long-term stability and spiritual growth. But the transience of young adults is forcing us to understand that discipleship may come just as profoundly (maybe even more so) through sending as through gathering.

In the first-century church, being a disciple and being sent out with the gospel were one and the same, not two different things. Disciples grew in their faith as they were sent beyond Jerusalem. Paul lived out his discipleship in missionary journeys. Although it’s certainly possible to do faithful discipleship with a gathering-focused approach, it may be time to reclaim sending as a key discipleship strategy.

Because we know most young adults won’t stay in one place for long, we can focus on preparing young adults for the next stage of their journeys, which—for most—won’t include our particular church. We can spend the short time we might have with them aware that it is likely they will—sooner or later—leave for another faith community.

In my youth ministry days I ran a student leadership program for high school juniors and seniors. At that time, many youth pastors—myself included—viewed student leadership as the core of our existing programs. Student leaders became the primary influencers and inviters of friends and underclassmen, providing us with invaluable input about retreats, programs, and events.

But a mentor gave me a different perspective: “The main thing in student leadership is to prepare them to be another church’s best volunteers. I want them each to be able to walk into a church in their first year of college and become an effective leader in that ministry, not simply helping our ministry be more successful.”

The same lesson can be applied when it comes to young adult ministry. This is expressed clearly by a wise pastor:

Now I view departures from a broader perspective. Our church is able to have an impact on people across the country and world. Three of our members are in Saudi Arabia right now, leading small groups. Whatever we give people that is good, right, and helpful—introduce them to a new ministry tool, give them a solid, biblical philosophy of ministry—they will take it away from here and multiply it elsewhere. So it’s not a total loss. In one sense we’re privileged. We’ve become a sending church.

Reframing ROI

Somewhere along the line I’m sure I’ll hear from readers: “We’re just not getting the return on our investment that we were hoping for.” Most of us hope to have a ministry that ends up filling our churches with spiritually alive young adults. And we assume the best way to get there is to get them here and keep them here.

Because the reality is more complex, let me share an old parable from The Edge of Adventure by Keith Miller and Bruce Larson:

A note was found in the desert beside an old rusty water pump that said,

Dear Friend,

This pump is all right. . . . I put a new sucker washer in it and it should last for at least five years. But the washer dries out and the pump has to be primed. So under the white rock to the north I’ve buried a bottle of water out of the sun and corked it up.

There’s enough water in the bottle to prime the pump, but not if you take a drink first. Pour about one-fourth of the water and let it soak the leather washer. Then pour in the rest medium fast and pump like crazy. You’ll get water.

This well has never run dry. Have some faith. Then, when you’ve pumped all the water you need, fill the bottle and put it back where you found it for the next feller who travels this path.

—Desert Pete

I want to make the audacious claim that your best hope of having a church flowing with young adults is to risk being a church focused on sending them away from your church. It’s time to stop working against the untethered tendency of college students and twenty-somethings and instead find ways to embrace and work with it.

If this kind of paradox feels familiar, it’s because you’ve heard it from Jesus—and seen it in his life. God’s economy works differently from ours. We can redefine the notion of a “sending ministry” as a “flowing ministry.” Sending isn’t losing; it’s creating a space for young adults to flow through our churches in ways that are life-giving for them and for us.

Churches that have the courage to change their assumptions, to build a ministry geared toward adults who will be around only for a little while, will find that the impact on their own congregation (not to mention the larger church) might be more profound and vital than it ever could’ve been using the old model.

You might find exactly what you’re hoping for—just not in the way you thought.

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