Young Adults and the Future of the Church
By Ann A. Michel

How are twenty-and thirty-somethings shaping the future of American religion? Robert Wuthnow, a noted sociologist of religion, considers this question in After the Baby Boomers (Princeton University Press, 2007). Unfortunately, much of his data suggest the future of the church is being shaped more by the absence of younger adults than by their presence. Not only are young adults less likely to be involved in church today than a generation ago, but those that are active are an unrepresentative cross-section of their generation. With few exceptions, the church has failed to respond to the changing life patterns and social trends that characterize contemporary young adulthood. Unless religious leaders take younger adults more seriously, says Wuthnow, the future of American religion is in doubt.

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Ministering to the Missing Generation
by Carol Howard Merritt

When I began as a twenty-seven-year-old pastor of a small rural church, ministering to young adults seemed like an impossible task. Newspapers and magazines often dressed young adults up as greedy slackers, ever-sponging off our parents and never assuming responsible roles in society. I often did not recognize the people our popular culture described. No matter what cause united moms, how much volunteering dads engaged in, or what trends twenty-year-olds began, they were inevitably compared disparagingly to Baby Boomers, the civil rights movements of the sixties, and were eternally dwarfed in that Boomer-looming shadow. How can the church understand young adults if it continually looks at them through the tinted spectacles of older adults? I loved studying books like Soul Tsunami, but I realized the great gulf between where we were as a church and where we needed to be to implement the suggested ideas.

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Leaders do not need answers.
Leaders must have the right questions.

Performance evaluation sessions do not tend to be among the favorite things supervisors, including church supervisors, like to do. When the session is with a well-performing person, the task is much easier. But these sessions need good questions as well, such as:

What would make you want to stay here?
What might lure you away?

Editors:  Lovett H. Weems, Jr. and Ann A. Michel
Production and distribution:  Joe Arnold

Copyright © 2007 by the G. Douglass Lewis Center for Church Leadership. Leading Ideas material may be freely distributed with attribution (exclusive of material protected by separate copyright).