By Adam Lynch
When I attended church for the first time, a tall guy with a soul patch (the seemingly universal requirement of a male youth pastor) approached. He said he saw my sister and me in service and wanted to invite us to the youth group that met later that night. I said, “Yeah, maybe,” which meant “no.”
Yet I remember thinking how great it was to have someone approach me and invite me to something my first time at church. It made me feel like church was a place I belonged rather than a place for “old people.”
After graduating high school and entering college, my experiences with churches became much different. Several times, I walked into a church, sat down and walked out after a service without anyone talking to me. Sadly, as I work with more young adults, I find out this is common in many churches today.
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“I think a mass exodus of young adults from the church does not result from Millennials and Generation Z wanting to miss church, but rather because people in the church do not try to connect with them.”
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Who’s Being Overlooked?
In Acts 6, widows were neglected. The church grew every day, but these widows were overlooked in the daily food distribution.
In their book, “The Slow Fade: Why You Matter in the Story of Twentysomethings,” Reggie Joiner, Chuck Bomar, and Abbie Smith ask, “What if college-aged people are the widows of a twenty-first-century church?”
In a Barna survey, 59 percent of young adults with a Christian background report they have stopped attending church after going regularly in high school.
I think a mass exodus of young adults from the church does not result from Millennials (born between the early 1980s and mid-1990s) and Generation Z (born between the mid-1990s and early 2010s) wanting to miss church, but rather because people in the church do not try to connect with them.
NextGen Engagement
The church leaders in Acts 6 became aware of the need, assessed the need and, as a community, met the needs of the overlooked widows.
What will you do now that you know the need?
Will you try to re-engage younger generations who are being overlooked?
Are you also engaging the next age group, Generation Alpha, whose members were born since the early 2010s?
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Adam Lynch is an alumnus of Spring Arbor University and Wesley Seminary. He previously served congregations in Indiana and Michigan as a young adult pastor and a college pastor, and he now serves as the lead pastor of a church in Ohio.
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