“It’s time for a revolution! A revolution that changes those ever-depressing facts we hear about youth and young adults walking away from the church!”
I’ve sat in so many meetings and conferences where I’ve heard someone (or been someone) giving this rallying cry. It seems we all agree that it’s time for something different that stems the tide of decline of young adults in the church.
Yet I sit here wondering: What on earth would that look like?
What does the youth and young adult ministry of the future, the one that brings in this fantastic revival, look like?
How is it different from what we are doing today? What changes? In short, what does church for youth and young adults need to be like to see God bring in the next great revival?
I think that, to look forward, we need to look back.
We often think that the way to reach this generation of youth and young adults is to play a catch-up game with the world. We attempt to take on the entertainment industry and provide the latest in cool, hip and culturally relevant church. Church places itself neatly into the entertainment box for youth and young adults, and then we sit around scratching our heads about how we created a generation of young people who walk out of the church to the nearest bar when they realize that the bar has better music.
As the young people leave our churches, we think long and hard about music styles, lighting shows and youth buildings with the latest technology. The sad truth is that we apparently think that we need to make church look as little like church and as much like the world as possible. We figure that the future must look totally different, but since we struggle to re-imagine it, we base church entirely on the models the world offers us.
The problem is that what we have to offer isn’t about entertainment — it’s about changing lives. When we play the entertainment game, it’s like we have a bag of gold to give to a poor man, but, instead of offering him the gold, we see the stale bread he holds in his hands and desperately attempt to make the gold look as much like his stale bread as possible.
