Sometimes subtly and sometimes overtly, many people expect a pastor like me — a 29-year-old with enough piercings and tattoos to make them think I might have an “in” with my peers but not enough to totally freak them out — to know how to fix it, or even to be a draw. I get the sense that some people believe that if they just put a young person in the pulpit, his or her peers will magically flock to church.
And there is something to be said for millennials seeing other millennials in church leadership. But if you prop up a 20-something in the pulpit merely as a sort of dog whistle to the young people, we can smell the marketing ploy a mile away.
We are the MTV generation. We’ve been advertised to since we were kids. We aren’t interested in flashy marketing or a transparent strategy to lure us in by putting one of our own out front. We’re interested in authenticity, whatever age package it comes in. Remember, Bernie Sanders, the 75-year-old crazy uncle of the Senate, was our guy.
So no, I don’t know what to do about the absence of millennials in church. Most of the time, I don’t want to do anything about it. I don’t want to fix the problem of young people not coming to church, because that’s not the real problem.
I hear people long for the days when everyone came to church because that’s just what you did. But was the church really so much better off when people came because “that’s just what you did”? I don’t think so.
The solution isn’t to go backward, and it isn’t simply to move forward as is, or even to tweak our message and presentation to appeal to a new generation. It’s to reorient ourselves as to what the problem is. Maybe the problem isn’t millennials’ apathy toward the church — maybe it’s the church’s apathy toward the concerns and passions of millennials, and not just millennials but the world outside the Christian bubble.
When people tell me that young adults just need to come to church and see for themselves, I ask them: Why should they care about what’s happening inside our walls when we don’t seem to care about what’s happening outside them? I know that we do care, in our own way — but not in a way that translates to my generation.
Many millennials see the church as exclusive and insular. The church’s problem isn’t attractiveness — it’s that the church is perceived as failing to live up to its own standards. Not that the church needs to be perfect — when people accuse the church of being hypocritical, my response is, “Well, duh, it’s full of humans” — but we do need to be more perfectly honest about our failings, our motivations, our real purpose.
Millennials, far from being lost souls secretly in need of what the church has to offer (how unintentionally patronizing our evangelical efforts can be), are constantly creating community in their own ways. It will take more than a rebranding campaign to convince millennials that the church is a form of community worth participating in. In the meantime, I pray that my loneliness will lead me to seek solutions we haven’t yet dreamed of to problems we can’t quite get our heads and hearts around.
Author’s Note: I recognize that I sometimes use “we” to refer to millennials and sometimes to refer to the church. I decided to leave it that way, even (and perhaps especially) because it might be confusing, since it reflects my own sense of conflicted identity.