Young Adults in Church

01/09/2012

3 Comments

 
I ran across this blog post from Emily Morgan, entitled A Letter to the Church about Young Adults and Worship. Many churches want to "get more young people" in church. Morgan considers this question from many angles, as a young adult and a churchgoer herself.

A point that really sticks with me is the difference between ministry to young adults and ministry with young adults.

A good friend of mine is pastor of Redemption Church in Pennsylvania, a new church start that intentionally reaches out to college students and young adults in Bucks County outside of Philadelphia. They have young adults at every level of leadership and are reaching new people all the time.

They have so many young adults, in fact, that they are trying to reach out to older people. Instead of the typical question, "how do we get more young people?" they are asking, "how do we get older people to join our church?" A unique problem to have.

I am reminded of churches that want to be more culturally diverse. How do we get more people who don't look like us to be a part of our community?

Themes from Morgan's article can be applied to each of these situations. Now I'll p. What would you add?
 


Comments

Leah
01/09/2012 1:34pm

I like her blog post and the ideas it bring up about letting young adults take a leadership role, which is important to giving young adults a feeling of ownership. However the execution of that idea will probably go most smoothly as long as everyone involved recognizes that the time constraints of, say a young parent or a person just starting their career, may be different than that of a retiree or empty nester. This can certainly be worked around, by considering meetings at non-traditional times (say, late evenings, before work or on lunch break) and/or being creative about leadership roles that a person may be able to work on from home with flexible hours (i.e. website design, coordinating schedules, etc.)

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Disgruntled
01/09/2012 4:42pm

I once attended a church that was in a young family neighborhood, but we didn't have many young families--our Sunday School was dying. So we made up a flyer that gave brief details about SS and listed the time. We started it out with "Want an extra hour and a half of sleep? Drop your children off for Sunday School -- see you at 8:30."
It produced results--our Sunday school program swelled. Then we made sure children were participating in service by singing at least once a month (the first 30 minutes was kids choir practice, 15 minute children's worship, 45 minutes SS class).
Parents started coming to church once a month, some started coming more often--helped swell attendance in church, too. Suggested we try something at WPC and was told 'oh it will never work'. Yeap you are right Rev (not you)--it won't work if you shoot down every idea.
We are right next to the political PTB--what have we done to welcome the politicos into church (we can be your church home away from home). Yeap, you're right--nothing. If a church hierarchy is already convinced they can't do anything to make a difference, they won't make a difference. Disgruntled

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Rev. Dr. Libby Boatwright
01/09/2012 6:05pm

Face time is so important. If we fail to encourage and engage people into worship they will not believe they belong or can participate. I intentionally try to find different generations to participate in worship that follow the demographic of the congregation. Personal invitations with sincere consistent followup is also important. Allow them some time to breathe and check things out, but also engage them in conversation about things that matter to them--do they have area of service they'd like to be a part of, are they interested in finding other young couples/singles to engage in conversation or study? In other words, let them know there participation matters/is significant and that there are others who want to seek a meaningful relationship/friendship within the church. We're on a slow and steady rise with our young adults, but we have engaged young adults and couples to form ministry around what matters to them.

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