7 Mistake 6: Give Up Too Soon

7

Mistake 6

Give Up Too Soon

Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.

The rise of the “nones” surely suggests it is the end of religion, as we know it. Forget churches; forget priests and pastors; forget the Bible; forget organized religion generally.

Back in the days of the American Gold Rush, a man named R. U. Darby saw his uncle caught up in “gold fever,” taking off for the West hoping to strike it rich. He staked a claim in Colorado and got busy digging. The work was difficult, the results were minimal, but the dream of riches compelled him not to quit.

One day Darby discovered a vein of gold too big to mine without more equipment. He covered the mine, retraced his footsteps back to Maryland, and told his relatives and a few neighbors about his “strike.”

With the help of family and friends, Darby collected enough money for the needed machinery and had it shipped to Colorado. At this point, R. U. Darby joined his uncle to mine the treasure.

As they smelted down the first cartload of ore, the returns revealed that they had discovered one of Colorado’s richest mines ever. All they needed to do was keep mining. With high hopes, they continued to drill—until the unexpected happened.

Without warning, the vein of gold ore disappeared. They kept desperately drilling, but no more gold was to be found. Eventually, they sold the machinery for scrap to a junkyard for a few hundred dollars and headed back home.

On a whim, the junkyard owner decided to call in an engineer to look at the old mine. The engineer calculated that the vein could be found again if the miner followed the engineer’s instructions, based on specific fault lines.

The junkyard owner went to work exactly as directed and found the lost vein of gold—which turned out to be even larger than predicted—just three feet from where Darby had stopped drilling.

How many of our churches are working hard, drilling in the wrong places, losing heart, and giving up, unaware of where the fault lines are? After the initial excitement at the first few brainstorming meetings, too many churches decide “working with young adults just isn’t for us.”

I wonder if all the popular research about young adults has actually contributed to the problem.

The Chicken Little Syndrome

With all due respect to the very helpful surveys conducted by the Pew Research Center and others during the last decade or so, I’m afraid the results may be giving us permission to make the most paralyzing mistake of all: giving up altogether.

The American church has begun to accept—even embrace—the doomsday projections about young adults and the church. And with the power of a self-fulfilling prophecy, these results have led too many church leaders to focus their attention anywhere but on young adult ministry.

It’s been referred to as the crisis of the “nones,” the rising tide of American young adults who check “none” when asked for their religious affiliation. You’ve likely heard statistics such as these:

Young people today are not only more religiously unaffiliated than their elders; they are also more religiously unaffiliated than previous generations of young people ever have been as far back as we can tell. This really is something new.

It is possible that more Millennials who were raised unaffiliated will begin to identify with a religion as they get older, get married, and have children, but previous Pew Research Center studies suggest that generational cohorts typically do not become more religiously affiliated as they get older. And the new survey finds that most generational cohorts actually are becoming less religiously affiliated as they age.

Little hopeful data exists regarding young adults and the church. Almost every study publicized about this generation has the potential effect of motivating us to pack it up, throw in the towel, and hope against hope that a magical resurgence of goodwill toward organized religion will somehow rise up in this generation.

Beyond formal research, most churches have enough firsthand evidence of their own. Many have tried. They’ve started contemporary services, launched young adult programs, and held focus groups. They’ve asked successful youth pastors to lead the young adult ministry. And very little has worked.

Like the turkey and goose confronted by Chicken Little’s incontrovertible proof that the sky really was falling, most of us have a hard time arguing against an avalanche of evidence. The verdict is in that young adults are out, as far as the church is concerned. When it comes to young adult ministry, I’m afraid the Chicken Little Syndrome is alive and well.

The Cost May Still Be Coming

When I asked the leaders of one church, “What happened to your young adult ministry?” here’s what I heard:

This church, by its own admission, used to be a place young adults frequently attended. They had a simple monthly program, young adults in worship leadership, and a good number active in the life of the church. But now, five years later, those young adults are almost totally gone.

I was curious. The pastor explained:

They were mostly a core group of really connected high school and college students who just kept that connection in the following years. They stayed here, and they stayed together. But as they got older, got married, and got full-time jobs (often out of town), they ever so slowly lost their connection to the church. Their connection with each other was the only thing keeping them here, and without it they had no real connection to the church.

“What would have helped them connect beyond their group of peers?” I wondered aloud. His response was fascinating:

A combination of things, I’m sure. But ultimately, I think we just stopped trying to move our church’s culture toward them, and we started expecting them to move toward us. We stopped innovating in all of our ministry areas. We stopped asking questions about what that generation was looking for. We ran into enough resistance from older generations to feel like it wasn’t really worth the fight. And now they’ve almost all left.

As we spoke, I could hear the regret in his voice. In fact, we were talking because the church was struggling. They were now a congregation of people mostly age fifty-five and older, with attendance in a downward trend despite the fact that their community was growing.

The pastor admitted, “The community has changed, but we haven’t changed with it. It would have been a lot easier to keep our young adults involved than to have to start all over like we’re doing now.”

On one hand, it’s easy to look at your church today and say, “We’re okay. This just isn’t an issue we have time or energy for right now.” But churches are never static; they’re always moving, growing, shifting, and merging into their next chapters. Too often churches put off making a significant investment in young adult ministry; determining that the startup costs are too high, they give up altogether.

Most churches look at today’s financial bottom line, and as long as today’s bills are getting paid, they feel little motivation to change. Even in the face of stagnant growth or declining attendance numbers, many churches can reason the challenges away, assuming a temporary lull rather than a trajectory of decline. This pastor’s experience can easily be any church’s experience.

The Missing Future

When it comes to why it has given up on young adult ministry, each church seems to have its own unique cocktail of excuses:

But our excuses will cost us. Dearly.

Sure, the fact that churches are doing virtually nothing when it comes to young adult ministry is a loss for young adults. But it’s an even greater loss for the church.

That’s because so much about what drives young adults resonates deeply with the gospel. This generation elected a president who authored The Audacity of Hope. Living a life of meaning, a life that makes a difference, profoundly matters to them. They’re committed to leaving the world better for their children. Whether it’s putting an end to Majority World poverty or bullying on the playground, this generation steadfastly refuses to believe that the status quo has to remain in place.

Trevor Neilson of Global Philanthropy Group says, “61 percent of young adults are worried about the state of the world and feel personally responsible to make a difference.” They can make this impact driven by their faith or not, but most will invest their hours, resources, and passion into making a difference somewhere.

It’s true. Good young adult ministry will make things messier for a church as it pushes for a faster pace of change. Young adults have little patience with “business as usual.” They tend to be impatient with incremental reform, preferring more radical change instead. No wonder most churches are simply annoyed, confused, and frightened by them.

If young adults take a greater leadership role in our churches, they may take us to places we had never planned to go. But consider the alternative.

If we don’t allow, invite, and embrace their voices, it will likely cost us even more. Beyond the imminent threat of churches simply going out of business, we’ll miss the out-of-left-field kingdom impact that might never happen apart from a partnership with this generation.

Back in 2011, our church almost missed out.

Anna, one of our college students, was home for a semester and volunteering in our church. As time came for her to return to class, she struggled with the inevitable loss of her church community. She hadn’t connected with a church near campus and was saddened by the limited options for Christian community on campus.

So her mother presented a ridiculous—yet simple—solution: “I could sit in the front row on Sunday mornings with my laptop and Skype the whole service to you.”

That idea sparked something even bigger in Anna. She began thinking, “Out of seven thousand students, there have to be other people on campus looking for the same thing.” She latched onto the idea and started putting legs to a dream.

Anna returned to school and gathered a group of friends to pray and dream together. They reserved a lecture hall for Sunday mornings, recruited a few musicians to lead worship, and bought some bagels and coffee. Week after week, they tuned in for a live stream of our Sunday morning sermon, from an actual video camera, not just a video chat recorded on her mom’s laptop.

Several weeks after launching, Anna called me, saying, “Last night at 1 a.m., a friend drunk-dialed me and asked if she could come to our church on Sunday morning,” which she did. Today that community has grown to more than sixty college students who run the ministry by themselves, passing the reins to a new group of seniors each year.

Our leadership team never would have considered creating a mission to this college ten hours away. If we had waited for this ministry to be part of a top-down strategic plan, it never would have happened. But our congregation gave the opportunity to a twenty-year-old who led the way for us to help her make an impact in an unconventional way. This work exceeded all our expectations.

Yes, young adult ministry brings unique challenges. But it also brings unimaginable possibilities for the future of our church. Neil Howe and William Strauss, in their book Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, take this view:

As a group, Millennials are unlike any other youth generation in living memory. They are more numerous, more affluent, better educated, and more ethnically diverse. More important, they are beginning to manifest a wide array of positive social habits that older Americans no longer associate with youth, including a new focus on teamwork, achievement, modesty, and good conduct. Only a few years from now, this can-do youth revolution will overwhelm the cynics and pessimists. Over the next decade, the Millennial Generation will entirely recast the image of youth from downbeat and alienated to upbeat and engaged—with potentially seismic consequences for America.

Surprised?

By and large, in my research and interviews, most approaches to young adult ministry boil down to a few random shots in the dark, a vaguely anxious “I sure hope this works” or “I’ve got a great idea” attitude. Sadly, most churches try a few things, don’t see rapid results, and decide (or decide by default), “We don’t really do young adult ministry. We’ve tried, but it just doesn’t work here.”

But young adult ministry won’t work anywhere when we “try a few things.” You don’t grow a tree by dipping the roots in the dirt once every few weeks!

When we stop trying, we cut off the source of possibilities in our future ministry that we couldn’t even dream of today. Unfortunately, churches tend to value stability for today so much that they stop investing in the very thing that might bring them success in the future. This refusal to work on ministry with young adults ends up wasting amazing potential and results in our missing out on young adults such as Rachel.

A Place for Rachel

Rachel, who’s in her final year of college, has no upbringing in Christianity and no real reason to believe in God. She’s a classic “none” in the Pew Research study.

Last spring, Rachel attended a stage production of the Easter story with some friends from our church. Afterward she asked, “Wait, who is the Judas guy?” She wasn’t averse to the church, just unfamiliar with it and its stories. But she’s been coming to our church for almost a year now and was recently baptized.

Rachel talks about how thankful she is for “her” church and how often she finds herself in prayer throughout the day. After worship each week, Rachel stands in a circle with a dozen others like her. They talk about the service. They talk about what’s happening in their lives. They go to lunch together most weeks.

Young adults are here. They aren’t in hiding. They’re searching, exploring, and in some places engaging.

At the same time that Rachel’s story is unfolding and many other young adults are searching, the church in the United States is losing members, losing focus, losing hope. The church in America needs help.

Enter the next generation.

Researcher Thom Rainer interviewed a young adult named Leslie, who identified with pinpoint accuracy why most young adults are frustrated with the church:

“I’m not antichurch,” Leslie explained to me. Leslie grew up in a Christian home. She appreciates her parents’ clear convictions and sacrificial service in the church. . . . “But so much of what takes place in my parents’ church is just keeping the doors open. Pay the staff. Keep the building nice. And give 10 percent or more of the church’s income for someone else to do missions,” she told us almost breathlessly.

“But that’s plodding Christianity,” she continued. “It has no urgency about it. It’s more concerned about the people in the church than those outside the church. It breaks my heart that . . . so many churches have members who argue about Robert’s Rules of Order or which members will serve on the personnel committee. We just don’t have time for such foolishness.”

Too many churches have decided that young adult ministry is more trouble than it’s worth. They’ve tried creating new programs, launching new worship styles, expecting young adults to act like predictable consumers—and then they quit when it doesn’t work.

We may be mortgaging a bright future for a stable today, missing out on the potentially unimaginable impact these young disciples of Jesus can have on a world in desperate need of God’s healing love.

Maybe it’s time to try a new approach. Maybe we just need to dig three feet deeper. Maybe we’re that close to striking gold.

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