This is a huge topic of conversation in both denominational and local church circles. I don’t have a lot of answers about how to bring young people back into our more traditional churches but I do have some ideas about how to keep those we have. One is that the Church needs to be the Church; the Church needs to be the Spirit-infused and loving place it was intended to be.
I always go to certain places in the New Testament when I think about what I believe God intended the Church to be at its inception. I think about the Church in Acts where we’re told that the members shared all they had with each other. I think of admonitions in the Epistles to always take care of each other and bear each other’s burdens. I go back to the beautiful letter of 1 John where followers of Jesus are told to love one another. I have no wish to idealise the early Church - it certainly had its share of problems - but I do wish to pull us back to a vision of what the Church could be. Perhaps if our churches more closely resembled this ideal we’d be more dept at keeping our young people.
Let me give you an example. I am at this very moment clearing out my elderly parents’ home in Florida in order to bring them back to live with me at my home. My mother has been a faithful member of a local church for most of the 20 years they have lived here. She has served as an elder, missions’ committee chair and choir member. Due to this move and earlier transportation problems she has not attended church or been at choir rehearsal since early in January. I have been here for two weeks and not one person from that church has contacted her to see why she hasn’t been at choir rehearsal or at Sunday services. Yet my mother loves this church and leaving it is causing her the greatest amount of grief about this move. Watching this is breaking my heart. If I was a young person sceptical about faith or the Church, watching this happen, why would I want to be part of an organisation that treated its faithful members in this way? Even at my age, if I was not so enmeshed in the Church, I might be done with Church after seeing this happen. I don’t think my mother’s church is the only church where this kind of thing happens.
The Church needs to be the Spirit-infused and loving place it was intended to be
I guess what I’m saying is if that if our children and youth were to actually witness the Church being the Church - sharing what they have with others and bearing one another’s burdens as difficult and frustrating as that can be at times - they might begin to get a vision of what living in the reign of God is really like. They might begin to see how there is a different way of life than what the world offers us. And if they are continually told that we who identify with God’s Church love others in practice, not just in theory, because this is what people who follow Jesus do, they might begin to believe there is really something important about this ‘Jesus stuff’, and want to stick with it.
