Churches are closing their doors. Young people are walking away from faith.
You’ve probably heard these discouraging reports about the church.
The numerical decline in churches that pastors are observing—and congregation members are murmuring about in hallways—is supported by recent research. According to an extensive survey by the Pew Research Center, the share of adults in the US who identify as Christians fell from 78 to 71 percent between 2007 and 2014. The increase in those who identify as “religiously unaffiliated” (meaning atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular”) jumped by almost seven points, from just over 16 to 23 percent. While some denominations are growing globally, no major Christian tradition is growing in the United States today.
Most churches in America are also aging. While young adults ages 18 to 29 make up 22 percent of the US adult population, they represent less than 10 percent of churchgoers. In a recent 10-year study of congregations, people over age 60 increased by five percent and people under age 35 decreased by five percent. What’s more, less than one in three young adults today claim any religious affiliation.
Bright spots on a dark landscape.
In the midst of this bad news, there’s also hopeful news. This aging and shrinking is not happening in every church. Perhaps most importantly, it doesn’t have to be true for your church.
Our research team at the Fuller Youth Institute spent the past four years studying over 250 congregations of diverse sizes, ethnicities, and geographic regions that are unlocking the potential of teenagers and young adults. These churches are bucking the national trends and seeing not only young people, but their entire congregations, thrive. They are bright lights in the midst of the all-too-often gloomy narratives and research.
These churches joined us for one of the most comprehensive and collaborative studies on churches engaging young people, involving over 1,500 research participants, 10,000 hours of staff research time, over 20 denominations, nearly 40 states, and both brand new church plants as well as those with over 100 years of history. Racially, half of the congregations were predominantly white, while one-third were multiracial (see churchesgrowingyoung.com for more details and resources).
The primary goal of our last four years of research has been to uncover what churches are doing well with 15 to 29 year olds. Put more simply, we studied churches that are growing, and growing young.
What your church doesn’t need to grow young.
Here’s more good news: according to our research, much of what pastors assume is required to help their church grow young is more myth than reality. Thanks to our research team’s surveys, interviews, and site visits with churches across the United States, we can cross off these qualities from our list of what churches need to grow young.
A precise size or age. Don’t buy into the Goldilocks fantasy that some churches are too big, others are too small, and some are “just right.” We saw no statistical relationship between church size and effectiveness. Nor did we find significant differences based on church age. We love what we learned from churches that are less than five years old. But we learned just as much, and recorded just as much life change, in churches over a century old.
A trendy location or region. Did our data unearth churches flourishing near bustling urban centers and dynamic college campuses? Sure. But we uncovered equally robust ministry in rural, one-stoplight towns and middle-class suburbia. Your location does not have to be a limitation.
A modern building and big budget. Some of the congregations that are most effective with young people have new, state-of-the-art facilities and a large budget. But not all. Churches that grow young intentionally invest in young people, and most often that translates into a financial investment. But not always. Less resourced congregations with less glamorous facilities creatively support young people in other ways, proving that small budget does not have to mean small impact.
Warm is the new cool.
So what does matter in these churches growing young? Do the churches that bubbled to the top of our research have congregations and leaders with an off-the-charts cool factor? Some did, but those were in the minority. For teenagers and young adults today, relational warmth is thenew cool.
What really stood out was the way the churches made young people feel like family. In fact, the phrase like family surfaced as the most common term young people used to describe their church in our interviews and field visits.
The first time Grant showed up at Thursday night youth group at a West Coast church that is growing young, he clearly wasn’t happy to be there. At one point he declared to his small discussion group that he was an atheist. Committed to warmly welcoming all young people—even those like Grant who aren’t eager to connect—the youth ministry volunteers reached out and attempted to get to know him. He mostly shrugged off their advances, keeping to himself and quickly disappearing at the end of the evening.
But surprisingly, he came home that night and told his sister, “That was awesome. There was love there.” This response came as a total shock to the youth pastor. What’s more, Grant came back week after week. He still wasn’t sure about God, but he felt drawn by the community. The ministry team insists that the church’s emphasis on acceptance and welcome leads to stories like Grant’s. They affirmed, “The first message students hear and experience is, ‘You belong here.’”
At another 200-member, Latino church in our study, the youth ministry adult volunteers made a pact with one another that they would be there for teenagers and emerging adults no matter what, without judging or criticizing them. They didn’t tell the young people about this, they just tried to live it out. Through our interviews and focus groups on site, it became obvious that the young people there feel like they can trust these adults enough to be honest about their struggles. One young woman affirmed, “The adults here actually listen to us.” In other words, the pact worked.
As one young adult who loves his multiethnic East Coast church explained, “The Internet can’t help you move to your new apartment. Only a close community will do that.”
You might be wondering how worship plays into young people’s experience of “warm” versus “cool.” Our data indicates that while many young people are drawn to “casual and contemporary” worship, others are drawn to “smells and bells” high-church liturgy, and everything in between. While the churches we visited were likely to prefer modern worship in some or all of their worship contexts, they didn't depend on that alone as a magnet to draw young people. Instead, they relied on warmth.
Beyond being important to young people, our research revealed that when we develop warm community, everyone in the church grows young. Living as a church family is not only beneficial for young people who need wise elders but also for older generations who need the vitality and inspiration of the young. Faith then is not just passed down; it’s passed around.
To find out more about the worship services, community practices, preaching styles, and justice efforts of churches growing young, visit churchesgrowingyoung.com.
This article was adapted from Growing Young: Six Essential Strategies to Help Young People Discover and Love Your Church by Kara Powell, Jake Mulder, and Brad Griffin (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2016).
