If church isn’t challenging, you’re probably not doing it right
About a year ago, we ran a story in ChristianWeek about a study completed by the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. According to the research, vibrant faith communities, and relationships with believers who are living out their faith, are key to keeping young adults engaged in church. It was the best kind of news—the kind you can use.
Similarly, you may recall a few months back when a popular Christian blogger by the name of Rachel Held Evans wrote an article explaining why millennials, the generation born after 1980 (though the exact year is somewhat debatable) are leaving the Church en masse. In her editorial, Evans spouts a laundry list of millennial gripes with the Church, calling for more attention to substance and less obsession with styles of worship (the age-old 'hymns versus choruses' debate), an end to culture wars, a truce between faith and science, and most of all, a Church that is identified by what it stands for—not what it stands against.
Whether you're from the G.I. Generation, a proud member of the Baby Boomers, or somewhere along the axes of X or Y, the topic of young people leaving churches is one of great interest, and everyone's got an opinion on it. And in general, these are great conversations to have—it's important to have an idea of where the Church is going, if we care about it succeeding in the long term.
At the same time, talking points and prescriptions on popular topics like this can often oversimplify the problem. It's a little silly to think that it's any one thing that's keeping a general demographic of people, "the twenty-somethings," out of churches. It's hard to pinpoint the "x-factor" that causes "Gen Y" to stop going to church. For all the young adults that leave church because of a perceived over-emphasis on performance, there's young people who really connect with rock worship and smoke machines. It's not a simple case of saying, "We want this, but not this."
"...Perhaps we're asking the wrong questions when we make the issue what the Church needs to do to keep young adults from leaving...
But more to the point, perhaps we're asking the wrong questions when we make the issue what the Church needs to do to keep young adults from leaving...It's a little selfish to say, "When the Church is good enough for me, then I'll consider coming back."
As much as I defend my fellow members of Generation Y, I can't help but feel a little betrayed by those who ask that the Church change for their benefit. It's a little selfish to say, "When the Church is good enough for me, then I'll consider coming back." It's not the Church's job to cater to your interests and values. It's not the Church's obligation to bend its knee to what you think it should be about.
In ChristianWeek's case, I often wonder how much good it would do if we just stuck to the safe and happy, and never challenged our readers to look beyond the perspectives with which they already identify. While there are good and bad ways of doing that, it's something we continue to strive for. Being an independent news source means we have the freedom to address many issues, even the tough subjects, or ones that might stir up controversy.
As a ministry we're expected to call people to something better—to hold individuals, organizations and institutions to the standard that they declare for themselves. Sharing a broad range of perspectives and serving a variety of interests is what we seek to do. It's not meant to be easy—just like how we relate to the Church.
If what we do isn't challenging, we're probably not doing it right.
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