Millennials and Church

There have been a spate of articles telling us why Millennials are leaving the church that have gone around lately, I just read two of them, and I want to write about why I think they are leaving the church.  Some of what I say will overlap, but a good portion is a perspective that I haven’t read, or even seen thought about. 

The problem is generational.  That doesn’t mean what you might think; I’m not talking about a generation gap, or the shiftiness of “cool”.  What I mean is that for a century and a quarter we have been allowing each generation define what is important about church.

In the 1970’s Evangelicals made a choice to come together as a super-denomination, and call themselves non-denominational.  As part of this coming together we jettisoned a large amount of historic Christian theology.  Why?  Well because you have trouble when educated Presbyterians and educated Baptists come to the church together.   What they offered instead was the “experience of Christ”.  And this was a success, as a good portion of changes are, for the first generation.  They were actually able to have a fuller Christian life I might even admit.  But it was because they had both things: Theology (which they knew but generally ignored) and Experience.

When they had children, my generation, we were raised on “Experience of Christ” with little or no theology.  Our church was the youth group.  We were carefully put in an experienced based situation instead of church, where all the boring stuff happened.  And as we grew up there, we made great friends and hung out a lot.  My generation suffered the beginning of the cultural disintegration that began after the Cold War, and so we found solace in our youth groups.  So when we came to define church, since we didn’t have theology to bind us, we reject our parent’s definition of church based on individual experience and went for a “communal experience of Christ”.  

All of us Gen X’ers should remember how the church changed for us.   Our parents looked at church as a place to go for teaching and feeding, assuming that they could still learn from the Word, because they had a foundation of theology and an understanding that there was something special in the preached word by a called servant.  But for us, we were there for the communal experience.  We came together as a group to experience something at the same time, something that would define us.  So it had to be an experience, loud, well scripted, impactful and special.  So we made church based on preferred experience.  Anyone over 35, think back, there is a good chance you can remember this sea change.

So the good churches got very good at this “communal experience”.  And they were able to put on a good show every week.  But what drove us together, the fracturing culture, drives them elsewhere.  We needed church as a touchstone, but they don’t, they have their groups outside of church, in the world.  For any little interest, there is a group you can find on reddit.  You don’t need church for the communal experience. What you want is an “authentic experience”.  Church that is slick doesn’t work, because they see things slicker than church every time they grab their phone.  Community doesn’t work because they have a more specific one on the computer.   What do they need the church for?  According to them, they need it for authenticity.  Ask what that means and they have no idea, but it’s what they want.

Authenticity is defined negatively most of the time, here is a stab at it from an article running around:

What millennials really want from the church is not a change in style but a change in substance.

We want an end to the culture wars. We want a truce between science and faith. We want to be known for what we stand for, not what we are against.

We want to ask questions that don’t have predetermined answers.

We want churches that emphasize an allegiance to the kingdom of God over an allegiance to a single political party or a single nation.

We want our LGBT friends to feel truly welcome in our faith communities.

We want to be challenged to live lives of holiness, not only when it comes to sex, but also when it comes to living simply, caring for the poor and oppressed, pursuing reconciliation, engaging in creation care and becoming peacemakers.

You can’t hand us a latte and then go about business as usual and expect us to stick around. We’re not leaving the church because we don’t find the cool factor there; we’re leaving the church because we don’t find Jesus there.

Like every generation before ours and every generation after, deep down, we long for Jesus. (Rachel Held Evans “WhyMillennials are Leaving the Church”)

My favorite one, in a list of everything Millennials are against is “We want to be known for what we stand for, not what we are against”, but that is logic, not authenticity. The one that make me want to stab my eyes is “we’re leaving the church because we don’t find Jesus there”.  What do these all have in common?  They are cultural hot buttons.  Our parents organized church around the Christian Experience, we organized it around a Communal Experience, and our children want a Cultural experience.  

Does the Church teach about holy lives outside of sex?  Every church I’ve been to has.  But the culture attacks the church as sexually repressive and obsessed, so our children believe it is true.

What about welcoming the LGBT?  Well sure come on in, but recognize that you are a sinner and you seem intent on defining yourself by your sin.  Much in the same way as if a man cheating on his wife required you welcome him to church and required that you look at his infidelity and then if you mentioned the 7^th commandment or any of the prophets screamed that you hated him.  The Bible is clear here, is there love for sinners?  Yes, but for penitent sinners.

Most of the list would be fixed if a Millennial read a single systematic theology.  But they would still run, because the culture is their theology and their experience.  Want to stop a Millennial exodus?  Teach them that there is a reason for what we do, and give them something to stand up to culture with.