A couple weeks ago I got to spend an evening with one of elementum’s partner ministries. During the groups normal Friday night gathering Steve, the leader, asked the dozen or so young adults and college students who were present what they liked about church. The uniformity of their answers got me thinking. Across the board everyone’s answer was some variation on the relationships and community found in their churches.
In my experience this holds true throughout the larger body of young adults that I’ve experienced and done ministry with, and that reality has some significant implications for how churches operate. If young adults are coming to church and staying in church because of the community there are things we need to do to encourage them to stay engaged, and things we need to intentionally strengthen our focus on due to the lack that this overriding value of relationships can sometimes create.
There are at least four things that church leaders should do in response to this if they want to reach young adults and disciple them toward maturity in Christ.
1. Orient your church towards cultivating community
If you want to engage young and emerging adults deeply and lastingly within your church, you need to create real community. That means prioritizing things other than Sunday’s large service, or at least shaping that service in a way that gives space for meaningful relationships to develop. A five minute greeting time to smooth the transition between announcements and the sermon isn’t going to cut it.
The newcomers to your church will increasingly be there because of relationships they already have with others who are already present, not because they wandered in off the street or had a sudden urge to go to church or were impressed by your website. Orient your church toward cultivating an inviting community and you will see growth.
2. Don’t assume anyone knows the Biblical basics
If community is the number one priority of younger generations, you can expect that they will most likely have significantly less biblical literacy than other generations. Many (but not all!) young adults are willing to bend the truth or sideline their beliefs for the sake of a relationship, often because they don’t have a clear vision for how the truth they know integrates into the relationships they have.
When you meet someone in their 20’s who has grown up in church, don’t assume they have a biblical worldview, biblical literacy, or even a correct definition of the Gospel. Instead make a plan and a pathway to help them develop what they’re lacking in Biblical basics.
3. Teach the hard truths in light of the big picture
That lack of biblical worldview and literacy comes, in many cases, because most young adults don’t have any grasp of the metanarrative of God’s grand story. They’ve grown up learning a disconnected set of moral imperatives with minimal backstory to give the big “why” behind them.
Contrary to much of what’s been written about young adults’ attention spans and lack of interest in hard topics, I’ve seen plenty of college students stay up until 2AM discussing theology and worldview. I’ve seen young adults have three hour conversations about homosexuality, God’s sovereignty, and more. Don’t shy back from teaching hard truths thinking that it will help cultivate community.
Instead, press into the hard truths, but always do so in light of the big picture. Ground the Gospel message (and the doctrine of sin) in the creation reality. Rather than point people away from the things they love, point people up beyond them. In his book Center Church, Tim Keller talks about finding the good in the culture helping people see how much better God is. Give your young adults hard truths in light of the big picture.
4. And teach them primarily in the context of relationships
Preaching isn’t dead – it’s a critical and biblical mode for communicate truth – however, it can’t be our only (and I don’t think it should be our primary) mode of communicating the truths of our faith. With young adult’s emphasis on relationships, we need a mode of communicating those hard truths that comes in the context of relationships that last beyond the statement of facts.
What we need is to practice true disciple-making. Whereas Jesus often preached, the crowds generally either didn’t understand or outright rejected much of the truth he was communicating. It was the group of disciples and close followers that he had who, in the context of their relationship with him, actually learned the truths that Jesus was teaching.
Create spaces in your church for groups and conversations that deal with hard truths in a context where they can process and discover things, asking questions and finding answers together.
If young adults do value the community and relationships within the church most highly, there are powerful opportunities and challenges that come along with that. They key for leaders today, as in any day, is that we stay clear-eyed and see both the positives negatives of the wiring of each generation that we work with. Then it is our responsibility to uplift the positives and confront those negatives, guiding both toward Christ and the cross.
May God give us the wisdom, and the relational influence, to disciple the younger generations towards Him.
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