3 Mistake 2: Change the Worship Style
3
Mistake 2
Change the Worship Style
By attempting to attract them with cultural relevance, the church accidentally became irrelevant—like when parents try to be cool.
Turns out they don’t want their parents to be cool.
I don’t need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better.
It was almost midnight in New York City and the clock was about to tick us into the New Year. The temperature outside was a brisk 25 degrees, and crowds of expectant people huddled together for warmth.
I wasn’t in Times Square anticipating the famous ball drop. Instead, I was wearing a T-shirt and shorts, shivering in Central Park. I’d flown to the Big Apple to visit a friend, and before I knew it he’d convinced me to enter a four-mile midnight road race.
The clock struck twelve, the gun went off, and I took off running with 4,500 of my newest friends. Bands were playing. Crowds were cheering. Runners even had the option of champagne toasts at each mile marker. It turned out to be quite the celebration!
The most fascinating aspect of the whole experience was the sheer volume of people. There were 4,500 runners, another 5,000 people in the park just for the party, and countless neighbors, friends, and family cheering on the runners at every street corner. It was as if people had nothing better to do on New Year’s Eve. At midnight. In New York City.
In a place known for its one-of-a-kind New Year’s Eve party in Times Square, I was amazed that this many people would be somewhere else in the city. I wanted to turn to the guy running beside me and ask, “You know there’s this really big party going on a few blocks away, right?” That’s the thing about New York. It’s really good at drawing big crowds!
Churches, on the other hand, tend to have very mixed feelings about crowds.
We know that successful ministry isn’t just about numbers. Yet Jesus always seemed to draw big crowds. And most of us sense intuitively that if we’re doing something that really connects, more people are likely to show up.
So when we survey the young adult ministry landscape, it’s normal that we look for places where young adults are actually showing up—places with the biggest crowds. Our natural inclination is to try to imitate what we see those churches doing.
One of the most common strategies for drawing a young adult crowd—and the second-biggest mistake churches make in building a young adult ministry—is to change the church’s worship style.
Recently, my coauthor, Mark, had a year away from his role at his church, giving him time for what he hadn’t been able to do since starting his ministry—visit loads of other churches. I was fascinated by his observation:
What I learned on my tour of churches is that “contemporary is the new traditional.” Even the least likely churches have succumbed to the pressure to do something new and different to attract a younger crowd. I’ll never forget walking into the fellowship hall of a delightful church in a suburban neighborhood for their 9:17 (not kidding) “contemporary service.” Of the thirty-five or so people there, I’m sure fewer than five of them were under seventy, including the trying-oh-so-hard worship leader, an awkward middle-aged woman holding a microphone complete with an orange pop filter, the out-of-his-element-near-retirement pastor, and a fella with a gray ponytail seated on his amplifier providing wailing, electric guitar solos for almost every song.
Too many churches seem to assume that starting a contemporary worship service holds the secret code to bringing back the younger generation. Their biggest mistake is assuming they can (and should) actually pull it off.
It’s time for typical traditional churches to face facts. Unless a church is tending to the foundational priorities required to grow a thriving, healthy young adult ministry—what the second half of this book is about—changing the worship style is one more distraction that will accomplish next to nothing.
S.O.W.L. (Save Our Worship Leaders)
Hang around an “ordinary” church long enough these days, and you’re likely to hear, “Of course twenty-year-olds aren’t coming to our church. Just listen to our music!”
Few topics in a church elicit such strong opinions as music. Everyone has a preference, with many people bolstering their particular musical tastes as somehow more biblical, more theologically orthodox, and less likely to cause someone to stumble. More than a few music ministry jobs have been lost during these decades of debate. And more often, sanity has been sacrificed.
Here’s how it happened for Eric. This gifted middle-age musician had been a worship leader in a diverse congregation for twelve years. The church had plenty of grandparents in their sixties, seventies, and eighties—and even more folks in their forties and fifties. In recent years the church had struck a chord with young families in their twenties and thirties. The new senior pastor had a strong vision for reaching teenagers and college students. But leading worship for a congregation that spans seven or eight decades is incredibly challenging.
At a meeting of the strategic planning team, everything hit the fan as leaders read responses from an anonymous church survey:
“The young people hate our music.”
“Can we get something written after the Civil War?”
“Every song we sing is so boring.”
It seemed pretty clear that the resounding cry of leadership was “more guitar, younger musicians on stage, reach the college students.” In equal measure, though, Eric was bombarded by complaints from Sunday worshipers with entirely different opinions:
“Where’s the organ?”
“Would it be so hard to sing just one hymn?”
“I’m moving to the church down the street, where they still care about people in my generation.”
Sadly, more and more worship leaders are caught in a no-win trap. What’s even sadder is that changing the worship style, at least as a starting point, almost never moves the needle toward reaching young adults. Here’s why.
The Irrelevant Relevance Debate
I need to admit upfront that I lead a hip church that has rock-and-roll worship, electric guitars, and stage lights. It looks awesome. My worship leader is very cool—but not because of skinny jeans or a $200 haircut. He’s more like the “I just rolled out of bed and don’t know where I am, but I’m going to rock this guitar” kind of cool.
But I’d never tell you to try to replicate our worship style because it “works with young adults.” Somebody would get fired.
I lead in a multisite church in the Midwest. Some of our campuses have traditional music. Mine has a more modern selection of worship music. Others have ’80s contemporary and still others are “blended,” with elements of traditional and contemporary (if we’re honest, nobody even knows what those terms mean anymore). And our church has seen young adults come and go within each of those settings.
Recently, our hip, young, electric guitar-playing worship leader took a turn leading at our blended worship campus. I watched as some attendees stood silently with their arms crossed, waiting for the noise to be finished, while others passionately engaged in worship.
As I scanned the crowd it was clear there was absolutely no correlation between people’s response and their age. After the service, I was fascinated to overhear a conversation between two twenty-somethings who were lifelong friends. They’d grown up together in our community and now had kids the same age. Demographically speaking, they were the same.
One turned to the other and said, “That blew me away. I’ve been looking for authentic worship like that for a long time. That was amazing!” The other raised his eyebrows and said, “Are you kidding me? I couldn’t wait for it to be over!”
It’s so easy to make cosmetic changes, thinking that a few external tweaks will help us hit the bull’s-eye. We call the sanctuary a “worship center”; we refer to the worship service as an “experience”; we no longer have a “sermon” but “teaching.” It’s time to be honest and clearly declare that none of these surface changes hold the secret to having young adults actually show up and stay.
Young adults have a long list of reasons they’re leaving the church. But the style of worship on Sunday mornings just isn’t the across-the-board deal breaker it’s been assumed to be.
I know I’m committing heresy in some people’s minds, but changing your worship style is precisely the wrong place to start.
What Lies Beneath
Rachel Sloan insightfully describes how she views the surface-level approaches most churches take when attempting to attract more young adults:
The most frustrating part of being a Millennial is that my church does not understand me. Churches often think in this vein: 1) We need more young people in the church. 2) How do we get more young people in the church? 3) We need a room in the church where we can install flashy lights and smoke machines. 4) We need to find a praise band.
If we build it they will come, right? Maybe not.
Despite our love for technology and social media, churches cannot simply slap a contemporary service together, create a Facebook page and call it quits, and then blame us when we do not show up.
Writing for CNN.com, Rachel Held Evans said:
Time and again, the assumption among Christian leaders, and evangelical leaders in particular, is that the key to drawing 20-somethings back to church is simply to make a few style updates—edgier music, more casual services, a coffee shop in the fellowship hall, a pastor who wears skinny jeans, an updated Web site that includes online giving.
What Millennials really want from the church is not a change in style but a change in substance.
In reviewing the young adult response to Evans’s article, Brett McCracken, author of Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide, points out that, “The line that I saw shared on Facebook more than any other is this, ‘We’re not leaving the church because we don’t find the cool factor there; we’re leaving the church because we don’t find Jesus there.’ ”
Could it be that, despite the popular caricature, young adults don’t want to be catered to?
Hopefully by now you’re starting to hear the steady drumbeat: young adults aren’t looking to your church to create the coolest new program where they can attend as spectators.
Read that last sentence again: young adults aren’t looking to your church to create the coolest new program where they can attend as spectators.
I know, you’re not convinced. You’re thinking: If young adults don’t want to be catered to and if changing the worship style isn’t the key ingredient, then why are young adults in our town flocking to the one hip church that does cater to them?
And you’d be right.
Almost every major city now has at least one large (often multisite) church that puts on a worship production every Sunday specifically targeting young adults. And in many of those places, young adults are leaving the churches they grew up in and showing up in droves to the cool new production.
How then can I possibly say with a straight face that young adults aren’t looking to be spectators of great programs, geared especially to their tastes?
Consistent with their paradoxical nature, both realities are true for young adults.
They long for something beyond a consumer role in the church. As one commentator writes, “They are looking for true, deep, intellectually robust spirituality in their parents’ churches and not finding it.”
At the same time, their attendance patterns indicate that, at least on one level, they absolutely are looking for a place where they can be consumers of excellent music and compelling, entertaining teaching.
I’m not arguing that new churches (they’re almost always new) with a worship focus on young adults don’t work, but that when a traditional church tries to imitate the worship of the hip church in town, it almost never works.
When an established church (with very little budget or stomach for production) decides that “for the sake of reaching the next generation” it will create an “alternative worship service,” it almost always turns out to be an embarrassingly poor imitation of cool. Awkward musicians, usually in their fifties, step out of choir robes for an hour to hold microphones and sway uncomfortably as they sing Chris Tomlin songs. They call it contemporary, but it’s usually closer to hip replacement than to hip.
Changing your worship style to attract young adults almost never works for a few very good reasons:
1. Young adults aren’t all of one mind in their worship-style tastes.
2. Very few churches have the resources to pull off excellent, compelling, contemporary worship week after week.
3. There’s a massive difference between a new church that launches with the DNA of newer styles of worship and an established church that tries to affix a newer worship service onto the side of its core ministry.
4. A poorly executed contemporary service is more of a young adult repellent than a high-quality, highbrow traditional service ever could be.
I may be dreaming here, but I’d like to declare the traditional-contemporary worship-style debate over. Continuing this conversation, especially when it comes to building a young adult ministry where none exists, is a massive exercise in missing the point. Changing our worship style (or any other modernizing change, for that matter) isn’t a bad thing. Most churches certainly could use a little more innovation when it comes to worship!
Your church may need to change its worship style; just don’t do it as a starting strategy for reaching the next generation. When it comes to building a sustainable young adult ministry, updating to a “young adult friendly” worship style should be more like step three hundred, rather than step one, in a five hundred-step process.
The great news is that if your church can’t afford (because of financial reasons, church politics, or lack of volunteers) to create a high-production, attractive worship experience for young adults, you still can create a thriving young adult ministry.
The Slow Road to Success
Big, sweeping changes to worship can be a costly venture for a congregation. It costs leadership credibility, time, and energy—and often can cost members.
Though it’s usually painful and risky, changing your church’s worship style is a surface-level solution to a much more complex challenge. The solution starts with the awareness that no external change can provide a quick fix.
While most churches focus on quick changes they can make in order to get young adults in the door, few have thought through a clear vision and game plan to integrate them into the leadership and fundamental DNA of the church.
Let’s take a few years for a moratorium on the quick-fix worship overhauls in the name of reaching young adults. Let’s focus instead on building a ministry to young adults that’s effective in the long haul.