Deconstructing Millenials
Why the Church is chasing a dragon.
After 4 years of seminary and 3 years on church staff, I took a long break from the over-crowded world of Christian research and strategic planning. As I’ve recently started wading back in, the one topic that I find emerging time and time again is “Millenials.” [Back when I entered seminary it was “Postmodern”, then it became “Emergent”.]
A long-time student of sociology and social history, I found this quite intriguing, as I’m a guy who sits on the far back-end of the Millenial bus. Depending on who you ask — or who is doing the research — the birth-date range of the Millenial generation varies. Strauss and Howe (in their epic generational study The Fourth Turning) marked 1982 as the starting point and generally held to a 20 year cycle. Some have suggested 1980-2000. Others have pointed to 9/11/01 as the official end of the Millenial births. So, if we were to just go with general numbers we might peg our Millenials as now being 13-33 years old.
In terms of trend, that’s a pretty old target demographic — especially when you look at the Church’s historic ability to roll out change. Case in point, look at how long it has taken for a Gen-X-directed service to achieve market penetration. Sure, the trend-leaders were getting the ball rolling 10-12 years ago, but there are still a large number that are slowly making that change… and this is coming on the heels of the Boomer-centric “Seeker Sensitive” model of the 90's that (again) reached the majority a decade too late.
[And there’s something interesting to be seen here: Some may say, “well, better late than never,” but that’s totally untrue. If you look at trend adoption in the mainstream, you’ll see that the older generation are the mid-to-late adopters of what their kids are interested in (see middle-aged growth rates on Facebook circa NOW). So, you’re not really hitting the target market a decade late… that generation has already moved on to the next trend that you’re already late for.]
This is what it means to be chasing a dragon. Your idea of what you’re chasing is based on a myth and your methods for catching it always involve running after this non-existent target.
So, why not take aim at the next generation — what Strauss and Howe have dubbed “Homelanders” — those born post-9/11? “What?” you may say. “You want the Church to target 8 year olds?” No. Not at all. What I want is for the thought-leaders to start thinking about what that generation is going to look like 8 years from now and begin shaping the Church to serve them in their journey of faith.
What does that look like? I have some ideas that I’ll drop on you later. One thing I can be pretty sure of, though: it’s not what the Millenials are looking for now and it certainly won’t be what anyone is looking for when Millenial-focused services got a wide-spread roll out a decade from now. We must embrace our responsibility of preventing that and losing another generation of faith.
