Introduction
Introduction
Success has always been a great liar.
Young adult ministry to me feels like a big mystery.
Most of the questions I ask don’t have any answers.
We had done it.
In just a few short years, we had achieved what the other, older churches in our city had never experienced: we had young adults!
On any given week, in fact, 50 to 60 percent of our attendees were under the age of thirty.
We had a hip, young worship leader: a twenty-one-year-old guitar player with amazing skills and irrepressible charisma. He led a band that wrote its own music, produced its own album, and certainly never seemed to play a worship song that was more than eighteen months old.
Rock Harbor Church was drawing in young adults with a completely nontraditional experience. Our worship space looked like a warehouse. I preached in jeans and an untucked shirt from behind a table, not a pulpit. We didn’t take ourselves too seriously, and college students and twenty-somethings connected naturally with a climate of authenticity—the exact opposite of the ostentatiousness they’d come to expect from church.
Prior to becoming the pastor at Rock Harbor, I served in youth ministry for fifteen years, both in the local church and through Young Life. As a youth pastor, one of the saddest times of the year was graduation season, when our core seniors left the program.
Just about the time young people were beginning to get their leadership legs, they were heading out!
Leading a congregation like Rock Harbor gave me the chance to offer young adults ongoing leadership roles in the church. In our congregation, college students served in key positions, and our leadership team was peppered with twenty-somethings. Young adults regularly invited others to worship, welcomed friends into a relationship with Christ, and volunteered in our community.
I was thrilled to lead a young adult congregation. As a church, Rock Harbor embodied so much about the young adult experience:
We were a “church within a church,” worshiping inside a parent church in a separate auditorium (translation: old enough to move out of our parents’ basement but not quite able to do so).
We still relied on our parent church to cover our financial costs, which, of course, they were happy to do.
But we were accomplishing what many had tried and very few had actually done: we were thriving in our ministry with young adults.
It felt incredibly energizing to pastor a brand-new church, reaching the very demographic that experts said simply wasn’t interested in church. Anything felt possible. The congregation was willing to try anything, and people were energized by the momentum of change. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, the chance to live the dream God had placed on my heart, a dream you may be dreaming as well.
By now, you’ve probably noticed the past tense in much of my story.
Five years after opening, Rock Harbor Church closed.
In Search of Sustainable Young Adult Ministry
We had plenty of reasons for closing the church that had nothing to do with young adults. Being physically located within a larger church provided a host of challenges related to identity. Were we an additional worship service? A separate church?
With all the energy and enthusiasm around worship, we struggled to maintain a vision beyond the Sunday morning worship experience. And our worship space was too small for a critical mass to grow.
Some reasons for the closure related directly to the unique dynamics of creating a church focused on young adults, not the least of which was finances. Young adults just don’t have access to as much money as churchgoers twice their age, and their giving patterns are much more diffuse and less institutional than the generations who came before them.
Building a sustainable budget proved impossible when such a significant portion of our congregation lived on ramen noodles in dorm rooms. At one point I even took another role in our multisite church to keep my salary out of our congregation’s budget. I would lend my preaching each week, but leading the congregation could no longer be my primary responsibility.
We were dealing, by definition, with a transient population. Though our overall attendance stayed almost exactly the same for the final three years, congregational “membership” turned over almost entirely during that same time frame. As a result, we had a lot of new visitors but very few owners of the church’s mission and ministry.
One month we’d have an entire group of college students who loved everything about our church; the next month we’d discover that same group had moved to another church in town because someone in the group started dating someone from that church. Although we didn’t have difficulty attracting new faces, at times it felt like trying to scoop water with a butterfly net. We just couldn’t gain traction.
After adding up all those pieces, we realized our church couldn’t sustain ministry any longer in its current form. We considered merging with another campus in our multisite church, but the opportunities just didn’t align. We considered moving to another location or hiring another pastor to take the church into the next phase of life, but the financial cost was simply too high.
After much discernment and prayer, we realized a couple of things. First, we knew God wanted us to be “sent.” We weren’t sure how or where, but we realized the DNA of this church was important and God didn’t want it to be lost. Second, we had no single option in front of us to do that. Luke 14:33 was always close in our prayers in those days: “In the same way, those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples.”
At that stuck moment, we were one of the coolest, hippest churches in town, reaching the demographic Holy Grail, yet we were unable to continue the church without some kind of intervention. I hoped we might experience the church version of the hero narrative, with someone showing up in the nick of time with an answer—a building or a big, anonymous check in the mail.
Instead, I stood before my congregation and announced we’d be closing our church in six weeks. That’s a sermon I never want to preach again.
I hope you never have to preach it either.
The Tumbleweed Diaspora
In hindsight, I see a bit more clearly some of the crucial mistakes we made in our ministry with young adults and college students. And unfortunately, I see the vast majority of churches doing almost exactly the same things.
These mistakes are easy to make because they look so smart, so innovative, so exciting. But they simply don’t work in the long run. The thing about mistakes is they often don’t look like mistakes when you’re making them. In fact, they often look like success. Young adult ministries that launch and consequently fizzle may be the single most common narrative for this kind of work in churches.
One unintended consequence of our church’s closing was the fruitful sending of young adults to serve and lead in other ministries and churches. As a congregation, we began to identify closely with the tumbleweed.
You may not know that tumbleweeds begin as green plants that grow in the ground until it’s time to reproduce. When that time comes, they draw all their moisture and nutrients into the seeds at their core, turning the rest brittle, dry, and essentially dead. Eventually, the plant breaks off at its stem, and the wind blows it away.
This is when tumbleweeds turn into that bundle of thistles blowing between the good guy and the villain at high noon in old Westerns. But here’s the fascinating thing: everywhere a tumbleweed bounces, it leaves seeds behind to grow a new plant, spreading life wherever it rolls.
The Rock Harbor story is a tumbleweed story—one that, thankfully, isn’t finished. Our unintentional experiment with becoming a tumbleweed church continues to plant the seeds of passionate young Christians wherever it bounces, creating a veritable tumbleweed diaspora.
Yes, there’s deep sadness that our story ended as it did, one and done. I wish we could have become more of a tumbleweed greenhouse, repeating the process over and over again, multiplying seeds for many more years. But the mistakes we made from the very beginning set us up as unsustainable.
I write this book during the first years of planting a new church. So far, it’s been an amazing ride, but I know we’re just getting started. All our past mistakes were only compost for our ministry’s 
Leaving the Harbor
As you read this book, I hope you’ll become convinced, as I am, that ministry with young adults is within the reach of every church in America. It is not the exclusive responsibility of new, hip (and too often short-lived) churches. Through trial and error, accident and providence, we’ve stumbled onto a few principles for working with young adults that almost every church can adapt and apply.
If you’re not already, I hope that by the end of this book you’ll be convinced that if we miss out on reaching this generation, we’ll have missed the opportunity of a lifetime. I hope you’ll become even more convinced that a church like yours can seize this specific moment in history and pass the baton to the next generation by working a deliberate, sustainable process where the gospel flourishes among young adults.
And if you find yourself running headlong into ministry with young adults and college students, if you have the greatest ideas about reaching the next generation in unique and amazing ways, I hope you’ll pause. As Otto von Bismarck famously said, “Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise [person] learns from the mistakes of others.”
My invitation, then, is for you to not just push the pause button but to know the landscape of other people’s previous mistakes before you catapult headlong into young adult ministry with the same disappointing results.
Style Decisions
Before launching into the meat of this book, a few explanatory notes are in order.
About names. I share lots of stories based on my conversations and ministry experiences. I decided to change the names in every story, and when it felt necessary, I changed a few details to protect people whose story I’m telling.
On the use of “I” versus “we.” Although this book has been a partnership from start to finish between me, Scott Pontier, and my coauthor, Mark DeVries, we decided to write it almost entirely in the first-person singular. Here’s why: though we may periodically use we or our (as I just did), we’ve always imagined this book as a conversation. So we’ve crafted it deliberately as a conversation between you, the reader, and Scott, the coach, pastor, and young adult ministry consultant. But rest assured, Mark’s annoying compulsion for clarity is evident on every page!
As we begin, imagine it’s just the two of us sitting across a table dreaming about how to succeed with young adults.
So grab a cup of coffee, and let’s get started!