Radioactive Church Attendance

Every now and then I read something that gives me pause. Very rarely do I read something that gives me pause after I had a discourse with a friend about the same topic that had left me on pause. And as you know, if you hit pause twice you get "play" so I decided to blog about it. Here is the article I found by a pastor up in Denver. Dave Terpstra leads a young Gen-X and Gen-Y fellowship and has noticed some things about the modern nature of churchgoing. As he states at the end of this 2006 blog post, he doesn't have stats to back up his points. He just has observations. And he's open to hearing other observations. Read below...

Radioactive Church Attendance: predicting your congregation’s half-life | Out of Ur | Conversations for Ministry Leaders

As a young man in ministry (albeit non-clergy right now), I totally see his points. People do go through churchgoing half-lives, especially in their younger years. Let's take college students. I've discovered second-hand that it's really difficult to get a college ministry off the ground and grow it. I know at my church I have seen some really good people invest in ministry to college-aged students but grow frustrated at the task. Most eventually quit or got too busy to continue. Sadly, I've seen college students become "disengaged" from the church body. Is it the church's fault? Could be. I just know that many who graduate from the high school group never come back to church. This year we have 18 or so graduates in our church. I pray they all get involved in a church during their college years but I know the odds are stacked against that. Many college students leave the churches they grew up in and getting them back in church — any church — is not easy. I know. I was one of them. During four years of college I went to four churches for a total of nine times combined. That's once a semester plus a summer. If not for a "come-to-Jesus" period during my junior year, I may not have gotten back involved in church after I graduated.

It's funny how things tend to come back around in ways you least expect. I now lead the young singles ministry at my church and have struggled for almost two years just to get young adults engaged in the group and in our church. Not even personal invites have worked. In-person invites. Some young adults are very apathetic towards church, especially the church they grew up in. They don't yet see relevance between the Bible and real life. Those who do get it many times feel that the church has overlooked the young unmarried demographic in favor of people with kids at home. While I support the family, as a single man I have just as much value in the kingdom as a married man with kids. And I want to be wanted by my church, too. If a church has given up on young adults altogether, it is not healthy but dying. You cannot ignore a major wound and expect to have good health.

Dave Terpstra makes several good points, especially:

1. "Don't just go after the "easy" target of young families. Students and singles need the church too. Especially considering how unstable their lives are, perhaps they need us even more than young families. Deal with the instability and reach young people for the Kingdom!" One of the reasons young adults are not in church is that we feel the church isn't interested in us. We have "family-this" and "family-that" but a whole segment of the Body of Christ is being left out by default. So we either wander into this world for answers or keep our faith private, personal, and within the confines of our moral conscience.

3. "Pay attention to an increased adult population nearing a transition point. If a couple of families every year become empty-nesters that may not be a significant change. If 1/2 of all your families go through that transition in three years time, you may see a major drop in attendance or participation." Sometimes empty-nesters are just as overlooked as young adults. I had a talk with an empty-nester a few weeks back about this very subject and she told me that the "family-this" and "family-that" focus of the church made her and her husband feel left out, too. They don't have kids at home anymore. They are members of a small group and come to a Sunday service but their family is now just two, so kids activities probably don't interest them. I believe a church needs to help parents make the transition from "child-at-home" to "child-on-their-own." It's a hard time for parents, especially mothers. Just ask any empty-nester.

Finally,

5. "Pay attention to staff members going through transition points as well. It should not be a surprise when a staff member leaves after getting married, having kids, or becoming an empty nester. Life transitions lead to job transitions as well." This one strikes very close to home for me. I'm a staff member going through a very tough transition right now. I'm moving from young single to middle aged single, from job-focused to career-focused, from oriented to disoriented and I'm pretty sure I'm nearing a major life transition. How can a church help a person like me? Will the church even notice? These are the things on the back of my brain as I go in to work every day. All but one of our pastors is an empty-nester. Only one director has a young child at home. So the majority of our major leadership has been through a major transition. If the staff has been through major transitions, the body surely has, too.

Every church is faced with its own demise at one point in its life or another. What I mean is this: a church has to engage generations at some point in order to keep a cycle of life going. A church that loses a generation is in BIG trouble because it is much harder to recapture a generation lost than keep it from going away.

Be God's.

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