As We Have Opportunity (Pentecost 11C)

 

[NOTE: This sermon was done in note form, so it is not the sermon verbatim. Also for context, I was preaching on the book, "Lasting Change by Carey Nieuwhof]

Last week for this sermon series - next week we will have Bashor Children’s Home as guest speaker.

I would say I have a lot to cover - about half the book, but come to Sunday School over the next 6 weeks, and we are going to go more in-depth than I could ever do justice for in a 20 minute sermon. 

But we will be covering two topics today - Why are Young Adults Walking Away from the Church? And What Cultural Trends Are We Missing? 

Why Are Young Adults Walking away from the church? 

Culture changing rapidly

No group is leaving more quickly than those Carey identifies as “millennials” - generations under the age of 30, which is objectively wrong. 

I am from the millennial generation - or at least I feel like I belong more to it than Gen X (the one before). Millennials (in broad terms) are people born between the years approximately 1980 and approximately 1996. Some researchers have even thought of branding older and younger members of this group with other subclassifications like “xennials” (those born on the edge of Gen X & Millenials) but I’m getting off-topic here. 

 As a class, millennials grew up coming of age around the year 2000. We are described as the first generation that grew up in the Internet age, generally shown by the familiarity of Internet usage, mobile devices, and social media. Pew Research Center identifies a few key events in the millennials collective memory as the September 11th terrorist attack, & the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Unlike two weeks ago, when I talked about who the church is failing to attract, our focus today is on those who once attended and have left for various reasons. 

Getting Faith to Stick in Kids & Teens

If there’s such a large group of people walking away from church, or even faith, shouldn’t we be doing something? 

That’s the question. But the answer is not simple - but here’s what some of the research says. Carey points to a study that said that 40 to 50 percent of students who are active in their youth groups the last year of high school will drift away as young adults. Let me repeat that….

This is not 40 to 50 percent of ALL kids - but 40 to 50 percent of the ACTIVE ones. That even got my attention. The study that he cites is from 2014, which now is 8 years old. I tried to find a similar study that was taken more recently. There is another one from Pew Research Center from 2019 where 65% of all American adults described themselves as Christian, which is down 12% over the last decade. The sample size for the study was huge - at about 35,000 people. According to the same study, only about half of millennials (49%) describe themselves as Christian, four in ten are religious “nones” (which means they identify with no faith tradition), and one in ten identify with non-Christian faiths. 

Of that 49% who self-identified as Christian, only one in three say they attend services more at least once or twice a month. Roughly 2/3 attend worship a few times a year or less, including 4 in ten who say they seldom or never go. 

The question we are left is… why? The point of preaching on this book was not to harshly assess the church’s culture, but to confess its flaws so we can learn and address them. We cannot stick our heads in the sand and keep going thinking that everything is fine. 

Here’s three reasons that Carey thinks that millennials have abandoned the church: 

1. The church is irrelevant, the leaders are hypocritical, and leaders have experienced too much moral failure.
1. I know - that seems like it should be three. But they are related. Talking to my peers, and to be completely honest, there were times in my life when I felt so far removed from church that this was true. But if you talk to those who don’t attend church, they’ll probably start their list with this or something similar. We see this play out in headlines all the time. Leaders are caught in a scandal. This one might hit a little closer than I want it to this week…. But here I am preaching about it. Christians have been burned by the judgment of insiders. 
2. How to reverse it - lead with a culture of integrity, authenticity and grace. These are things that are absolutely critical to me in my ministry. Let us be known by our grace, our love, and our integrity. Is it difficult? Yes. Is it boring? Absolutely. But when there are other entities who are saying and preaching completely differently than us, condemning people who disagree with them, close the doors to anyone who confront them, and lead with contempt for those who believe differently, thinking that they are the only ones who are worthy of salvation - we have got to do something. 
2. God is missing from the church
1. This may seem counterintuitive, but people who are going to church, they want to feel the Holy Spirit, they come to worship our Creator, but what happens when they leave the service just as lost as before? It’s easy to point fingers at maybe a church who worships using guitars, or speaking in tongues, or false healings, but there are churches who see God as a vehicle to bless individuals through their depth of faith, or how deep their pockets are, and the services are geared around each individual’s experience.
3. Legitimate doubt is discouraged.
1. To gain authenticity, we have to be able to sustain questions to our faith. We have to know that it has been wrestled with, and that God will remain through those tough conversations. But those of my generation, when asking questions, get canned answers or even told to not question your faith. Now, that doesn’t seem right. How are people supposed to trust and grow from this level of contempt.

What do we actually want to change?