Second, and more damning: None of these pieces are written by Millennials themselves. With all this speculation flying around as to why our generation is abandoning church in larger numbers than our parents’, no one’s bothered to ask us why we’re leaving the church.
So before you start blaming youth pastors or speculating that we were never really converted, please consider our thoughts. This is not an exhaustive list, nor is it the product of official research; it is, however, based in our own experiences, as two Millennial PKs who have struggled to continue our interest in and engagement with the church into adulthood, and on the countless conversations we have had with other Millennials in various stages of church involvement. (We should also note here that we are both white, and as such this article is written from that perspective. Millennials of color likely have other factors at play in their decisions to stay or leave the church. It is not our place to comment on those factors here; however, theirs are equally important voices, and we encourage our readers to seek those voices out.)
1. We’re more educated than previous generations, but the church doesn’t continue to feed our minds.
Statistically speaking, our generation is more educated than any of our predecessors. A far greater number of us have college degrees than any preceding generation. And as high schools step up their requirements and add more college- and AP-level classes, those of us who didn’t attend college are likely significantly better educated than the high-school grads of our parents’ generations as well.
This has several implications for ministry, but the key one is this: For those of us who grew up in church, it’s very rare for us to learn anything new on a Sunday. In our rush to condemn segregated youth programs, we’ve neglected to point out one of the really positive things that those provided: opportunities for teenagers to study the Bible in depth over a long period of time. This means that the average church-raised young person probably has a good idea of what’s in the Bible. They probably even know some Greek and Hebrew words. This is particularly true for the many of us who attended Christian colleges and universities, as our pastors and church leaders encouraged us to do. We’ve spent entire semesters studying the Bible. We know how to use a commentary, and we can exegete fairly well.
So when you’re giving an altar call every week and not much else, we get bored. Really bored. In our youth groups we were taught, exhorted in fact, to want to go deeper, and we’re not getting that from grown-up church. Likewise, a fear of questioning or ambiguity, often justified by the discourse of “simple faith” or “faith like a child,” is something we’ve experienced far too often. In many (not all) of the grown-up churches with which we’ve interacted, there seems to be a fear of questioning, as though it might lead to unbelief. But questioning is at the heart of education: it leads us into deeper knowledge, not unbelief.
2. We came of age in a recession, but the church hasn’t changed its teachings about money.
In case you haven’t heard, the 2008 recession hit our generation harder than any other. It has limited and continues to limit our prospects for current jobs and for future earnings. Add that to the crippling levels of student loan debt that are basically mandatory for earning a degree now, and you begin to get the idea. Sure, some of us are making it. But far more of us are falling through the cracks, stuck in dead-end minimum-wage jobs for which we are over-qualified, doubling our debt by returning to grad school in hopes of increasing our employability, or perpetually un- or underemployed. And no, unfortunately, it’s not a problem that will go away if we simply “pull ourselves up by our bootstraps” or “put in our dues” – this is a financial dilemma on a global scale. The world is pretty grim for us right now.
And yet, in spite of all that, churches continue to preach the same cheery messages they always have. If they’re not teaching outright prosperity gospel, it’s prosperity gospel’s more insidious derivative: the “if you tithe ten percent God will magically put your finances in order” rule. It’s a nice thought, but it just doesn’t always work out that way. Additionally, many of us have to work evenings and weekends – the primary times when church programming is scheduled – which makes it very difficult for us to participate in the full life of the grown-up church. We’re not skipping church because we’re lazy or un-committed; we’re skipping it because we have no other choice.
We can’t keep talking about money, or work for that matter, in the same way we always have. The church needs to acknowledge the huge – and uneven – impact of the recession and work to find an appropriate, timely, Christian response rooted in love.
3. We’re still processing bad experiences with the church, and that’s going to take time.
We are the children of the Moral Majority and the religious right. The religious homeschooling movement. The Reagan era. Focus on the Family. In other words, we grew up in the middle of the conservative reaction against the progressivism/liberalism (depending on your point of view) of the 60s and 70s. Now, none of these things are in and of themselves wrong, but they have created fertile grounds for spiritual abuse – and sadly, physical, mental, emotional, and sexual abuse as well – through their promotion of isolation, exclusivity, and oft-extreme authoritarian structures. Even those of us with more progressive parents, like ours, experienced this from others, both within and outside our churches. In addition to that, there’s a whole host of bad church experiences that fall outside the realm of spiritual abuse: sexism, drama, in-fighting, and of course the general crappiness to which PKs are often subjected.
So we’re still processing these issues and attempting to heal. For some people, the pain is too much: I can’t tell you how many young people I’ve met who’ve walked away from severely spiritually abusive churches and never looked back. And I don’t blame them. For those of us who are still on the fence, please understand that healing takes time, and often space as well. Please be kind and understanding, and to the best of your ability supply us with positive, healthy tools for processing past hurts. And please, above all, acknowledge abuse in all its forms and take steps to provide safe, healthy places for the victims, not sweep it under the rug or, worse yet, perpetuate the cycle.
4. We have good ideas, and nobody cares.
Another positive thing about youth groups is that they give teenagers a voice. They speak their minds, they state their preferences, and they are heard. When we graduate and head out into the big bad world of grown-up church, this changes. We’re still “kids” in the congregation’s eyes – usually until we’re married or we’ve had children or whatever arbitrary rite of passage it may be – but we no longer have a pastor whose primary job is to listen to our needs and concerns as young people and respond. We have good ideas – we’ve been developing them since we were in youth group – but no one seems to care. The church leadership is still dominated by those of our parents’ and grandparents’ generations (a fact that likely contributes to the other issues discussed in this post), and the hierarchy is usually pretty entrenched. So we’re back to square one, having to work our way up through the ranks in hopes of maybe one day having our voices heard and being able to change the status quo. Or not, because that sucks. Which is when leaving starts to look pretty darn attractive.
5. Everyone assumes we’re leaving the church because we want to sin, but that’s simply not the case.
For some reason, the underlying assumption seems to be that we’re leaving the church because we want to join “the world” so we can drink, smoke, swear, and screw in all manner of positions that aren’t even missionary. Articles like this one, about Abraham Piper’s excommunication from and return to his father’s church, don’t do much to dispel that idea. (We’re not arguing that he is being inauthentic, or that those were not his real reasons for leaving the church. We’re not decrying the truth of his rejection of and return to Christianity. We’re simply pointing out that his experience is likely the minority, but that it’s being presented as the norm.) In our experience, that’s simply not the case for the vast majority of Millennials who’ve left the church.
We don’t think that young people reject the church at the point of sin; we think they/we reject it at the point of empathy. We leave our Christian bubbles and begin to befriend people who don’t believe the same way we do. We realize they’re pretty cool people and not the Satan-worshipping drug-pushing evolution-believing sex fiends we’ve been told inhabit the entire non-bubble world. We think about inviting them to church because, hey, that’s what we’re supposed to do right? And we totally want to have wicked cool harp jam sessions with these pretty cool people in heaven. So we think about it. But then we start to empathize, to see church through their eyes. Would they feel welcome here? Would this confuse or frighten them? Would they understand what’s going on? Would fellow churchgoers accept them or look down their noses at them? Would this give them a positive impression of Jesus – the Jesus we know and love?
When you start to realize that church isn’t the safe place you thought it was or that you want it to be for your friends, well, it’s a pretty short walk out the door.
We don’t know about you, but we have a hard enough time feeling that we fit in at church ourselves. We’re certain none of our non-churchgoing friends would find it to be a welcoming or safe environment. This goes double for friends who belong to groups that Christians have traditionally ostracized – LGBTQ persons, unwed parents, and intellectuals, to name a few. And when you start to realize that church isn’t the safe place you thought it was or that you want it to be for your friends, well, it’s a pretty short walk out the door.
There is so much wrong with these premises that I don’t even know where to start...
In his second to last sentence he tips his hand - we're leaving church because it speaks against sin.
1. We’re more educated than previous generations, but the church doesn’t continue to feed our minds.
translation: We’re WAAAAY too smart to keep believing in this God business.
2. We came of age in a recession, but the church hasn’t changed its teachings about money.
translation: We want to be preached a Prosperity Gospel that affirms our sense of entitlement.
3. We’re still processing bad experiences with the church, and that’s going to take time.
tranlation: Where the Church and I are concerned, forgiveness is a one-way street.
4. We have good ideas, and nobody cares.
translationz: Just like how these big corporations won’t take me seriously when I apply for the CEO job.
5. Everyone assumes we’re leaving the church because we want to sin, but that’s simply not the case.
translation: You can’t want what you can’t define. And our education has seen to it that we’re clueless about sin.
There is always a choice...
1) So you are more educated. That only tells me that you have more to UNlearn because most of your education is not spiritual. You say the church should feed you ... what about feeding yourself? Pick up a book on christian apologetics and learn to first defend and then teach the word yourself.
2) Dave Ramsey is a good place to start to learn about the management of money.
3) If spiritual abuse is a problem then find a different church
4) The “good ideas” that I have heard from the youth often don’t stand up to wisdom of age. These ideas most often are along the lines of spending alms or tithes and have very little to do with actually spending time. It is often a “lets raise some money” vs “lets go do some work”. Granted raising money is important, but putting in your time is equally important.
5) All the questions that were presented as to why NOT to invite friends to church show a severely limited understanding of salvation and it’s impact on a person’s life. It seems to me that someone who is more worried about offending their friends than saving them from an eternity of torment is no friend at all.
Teens and young adults always imagine that they’re the first to think certain thoughts, that older people are just too narrow and constrained. It’s always been thus. It’ll be the same for the author in later adulthood.
What I don’t grasp is, why does this author (didn’t check to see but it sounds like a young lady for some reason) seem to believe that all actions must occur within the church? If (s)he is wanting to have “wicked cool jam sessions,” nothing is stopping her from doing so. (S)he says it’s not a desire to go out and sin.
So, what’s the problem? The church has to do it, too? There are others whose tastes may not run in that direction. Let’s not be selfish.
IT’S NOT ABOUT MEEEEEE!
Anyway, the millenials I know and are kin to go due to their love of God and the history of God in their lives. The ones that don't go are too busy with work and their entertainment after work which they enjoy and find friends who are of like mind. Such is the same thing I did growing up...although I found that when I heaped up a pile of sins my life was not a lot of long term joy!
Want more out of Sunday School and youth groups????....be a teacher if you have time!! I've never seen a shortage of the need for them in any church.
Deny yourself????
Young people get everything they want in church these days. They get liturgy removed, they get noise called “Christian rock” to replace good theology in music, and they get shorter messages (please, don’t call them “sermons”) that replace the meat they need to live a Christian life.
And they still blame the religious right.
Too many of today’s young people simply won’t embrace a cause, or a God, bigger than themselves.
You walk away because nothing seems to make sense. Certainly in the context of the culture you live and breathe, it seems to make no sense. The problem is that growing up in church and knowing God are two different things; they do not automatically accompany one another. They could and should but its not automatic.
At some point, though, you begin to realize God is playing a much deeper game and you’re part of it.
And you begin to love him; not just believing in him but love. That doesn’t happen on anyone’s time table and it doesn’t happen when someone ticks off your check boxes as in the above article.
You begin to know more than you can explain, and what you want to know can’t even be put into words. The issues listed in this piece are just surface flotsam.
Real church doesn’t happen when you sit your seat into a pew, but when the Spirit takes up residence in and around you and begins to move the furniture around in your life to suit himself. Until that happens nothing is ever going to satisfy or make sense.
Often in the name of ‘social justice’ the youth minister, often with a Master’s Degree... get’s paid the same as the janitor.
Despite the fact that many good pastors will tell you that the YM is the lynchpin in their parish for long term growth.
Ping for later
being doers, not hears only] James.
I would argue that in large pert the problem is old folks that are constantly engaged in petty skirmishes to exert control over this or that.
I love reading these threads where all the old farts around here heap scorn and derision on the author rather than actually read what the author says. I guess it’s much easier to ridicule instead of admit that there’s a problem with the process and make changes that work. Comfort zones and all that...
But that’s OK. Churches that are stuck in their earthly ways of yesteryear will just die off as new churches are born.
A friend of mine just started a church last week. I wish him God’s blessings in all he does to reach people that the old churches refuse to welcome.
When there is no tangible, moral consequence for leaving the church (aka the Body of Christ and Biblical doctrine), then why not leave? Of course what one does not see until much time passes is the spiritual consequences of the separation.
The church must unapologetically construct itself on the Gospel and sound doctrine. If the result of this is a smaller church, than so be it. We must never allow ourselves to redefine God based on who we wish Him to be. That is nothing more than self-worship.
So, basically, they want their church-going experience to be welcoming and ear-tickling. When it isn’t, they leave.
Got it.
As for tithing, it works. Perhaps it is not working for them because they’re not giving in faith or blessing?
Ok, we are being honest:
Church is boring.
And.. You keep telling them what they want is not acceptable, but every other outlet tells them it’s ok.
And..every time we’ve “ trusted” an elder, we’ve gotten screwed.
I think that pretty much sums it up.
Bump for further study
Well I didn’t read all the comments so I might be repeating someone but...
The Cross of Christ is an affront to all of us if we’re honest and the “self-life” is still very popular among fallen, sinful human beings. Not much has changes has it? Millennials are just the latest to be offended by it. It is still God’s path to life eternal and the path to growth for the believer. It will never lose its power PTL!