How your church can be more welcoming to millennials
Meet us where we are, not where you think we should be.
As a millennial nonprofit leader, I’m constantly around Christians of every stripe and generation. The past few years especially have been an interesting time to see the widening gap between age groups. The most noticeable division is older folks making cultural assumptions about why millennials leave their church instead of talking to them to discover why.
One of the most alarming trends in the American Church today is the rate at which young people are leaving. If you believe millennials leave your church because of liberal media, progressive politics, their university educations — all those other things that are often given as explanations — you’ve missed the forest for the fewest of trees.
When you actually talk to millennials who have left a church — and I’ve talked to a lot of them over the years — you’ll hear common themes emerge:
- They have specific stories of feeling judged and controlled.
- They learned that older church leaders weren’t investing in their future and had no plans to do so.
- They were exasperated by bureaucracy, patriarchy, and hierarchy impeding their ability to follow Jesus and serve others.
