PRESIDENTS REFLECTIONS

President, Johnson University

GARY WEEDMAN

Missing the Millennials

By Gary Weedman

Born from 1982 to 2004, theyre called by various namesMillennials, Mosaics, GenYers. Computers have always existed for them; Vietnam and JFK are a part of ancient history; and they learned about the Cold War from their parents, if at all. Latest technology is second nature to them; email is so 2009, preferring instead to communicate by texting, tweeting, or on Facebook. They will be the largest generation ever, numbering 80 to 90 million. Approximately 2,300 of them invaded our campus this summer during a ve-week period to participate in programs planned by Christ in Youth or our own staff. They came from different states, congregations, and even denominations. The organizers employed a level of detail that could be exceeded only by plans for a rocket launch! The workshops, worship services, meal times, and recreation left little to chance. One could hardly walk through the campus without feeling the seriousness with which the project was undertaken. Those adults who participated in the programs demonstrated a strong commitment to the care and feeding of the youth of America. Many took vacation time to devote to this project. They made this effort as an investment in these young people, preparing them for successful lives as disciples of Jesus Christ and as future leaders of the church. And they put their money behind the project. The expenditures for these programs amounted to over $600,000 for the ve weeks. They were hard to miss on our campusand yet.

M ILLE NNI A L S E XOD U S FROM THE CHURCH

As I walked through the campus and felt the enthusiasm, saw the prayer groups, heard the energetic (OK, I confess, LOUD!) music, I could not shake off the results of research I had been doing about what happens to these young people between the ages of 14 and 23. The data are among the most sobering that I have encountered in recent years. Study after study, from research organizations such as the Barna Group and LifeWay Research and from university research projects by faculty and doctoral students, agree that the exodus of the Millennials from the church has no precedent in recent history. We are losing our young people from the church at an alarming rate, however well-intentioned, wellplanned, and well-nanced our efforts to keep them. This trend started over 20 years ago. In 1994 Gary Railsback, dean of the School of Education, Point Loma Nazarene University, found in his doctoral research that 52 percent of active Christians were not involved in church after graduating from college.1 The statistics have only gotten worse since then. According to recent studies, 66 to 88 percent of todays youth will drop out of the church before age 23. During one lunch period this summer, I sat down at a table of six students and silently wondered: Which four or ve of them might be out of the church in six yearsand what could we be doing right now to prevent that from happening?
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PRESIDENTS REFLECTIONS

David Kinnaman may know more about this issue than most anyone. Hes president of the Barna Group and author of two books, one dealing with reasons that young people who grow up outside the church dont nd it appealing, and the other dealing with why many of those who do grow up in the church end up leaving it.2 In this second book, You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving the Churchand Rethinking Faith, Kinnaman summarizes the results of a ve-year project that examined almost 5,000 interviews of eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds who disconnected from the church. Kinnaman calls this age group the black hole of church attendance. Three out of ve (c. 59%) quit the church, at least for a time. Your own congregation likely conrms this trend. The Barna researchers found no single cause for this attrition, but rather discovered six negative attitudes these Millennials held about the church: (1) its overprotectiveness; (2) its shallowness; (3) its antagonism toward science; (4) its simplistic and judgmental stance related to sexuality; (5) its exclusive attitude toward differing views; and (6) its lack of openness toward doubt. Kinnaman and colleagues do not make absolute every view of the Millennials toward the church represented in these six themes, nor do they want to give up on the cost of discipleship. But they do want the church to listen to what the Millennials say about the church in order to respond to them more effectively. Of course, these self-reported causes for the exodus from the church may be only the presenting causes, but they do serve as valuable clues, a good place to start to analyze the problem.

double every 72 days. And the Internet has that knowledge just a click away. Though privy to more knowledge than ever, evaluating that knowledge presents an entirely different challenge. How can they evaluate the reliability and integrity of all of this knowledge? What tools or experience do they have to make such judgments? Where can truth be located in the midst of it all? How can the church prepare these persons to be as wise as serpents when it comes to managing such a volume of information? Second, these Millennials feel alienation greater than any other generation. Though technology connects them to a wider group through social media, the shallowness of those connections does not replace the stability of family. Today 41 percent of all births in the U.S. are to unwed mothers; in 1960 the number was 5 percent. The lengthening of adolescence intensies the sense of alienation even more so. Decades ago adolescence was a short transitional period from youth to adulthood and adult responsibility. Today adolescence begins earlier, even biologically, and often lasts until the late 20s. The normal sense of alienation experienced decades ago becomes magnied when the time of adolescence is doubled.

AC C ES S IB ILIT Y, AL IENATI ON, AU T H ORIT Y

The real reasons may lie elsewhere. Kinnamans own take on the Millennials concludes with three realities that characterize the group.

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Thomas Bergler describes the effect of this trend as the Juvenilization of American Christianity.3 He points out that some traits that should be included in Christian maturity have been decoupled from adulthood in post-1960s America, and this change has encouraged juvenilization. Consequently, Bergler observes, many Christians in their early twenties, having come through an adolescent-oriented youth ministry, had faith dened in shallow ways that no longer sufce. Third, the Millennials question authority greater than any other generation has done. The pluralistic world that comes crashing in upon them from media, the disconnect felt from the Bible to their work-a-day world, the post-modernist rejection of modernisms denition of truth all combine to remove the traditional locus of authority without replacing it with anything.

First, they have access to a world greater than any other generation. They know and participate in knowledge that explodes exponentially. In 1900 human knowledge took 150 years to double. Today it takes an average of 18 months. By 2020 it will

SUMMER 2012

P RODIGAL S , NOMADS , EXI LE S

Kinnaman not only identies these three realities of access, alienation, and authority; he also offers some hope by seeing variations in these Millennials who have exited the church. They are not all following the same path, and some may ultimately return to the church. He identies three groups: the prodigals, the nomads, and the exiles. The prodigals, about 10 percent of those who have left, actually have lost their faith. They consider themselves no longer Christians, rejecting the major tenets of Christian orthodoxy. This group proves to be the hardest to bring back to the church. They resent their experience with Christianity, although many maintain positive relations with Christians, especially within their own families. Prodigals have a sense of release without any sense of real loss. The nomads, about 40 percent of those who have left, have abandoned the institutional church but still claim to be Christians. They are not hostile to the church but see it as irrelevant or amusing. Some become spiritual experimentalists, seeking out new expressions of worship. Some nomads will return to the church in approximately three years, but a significant number never come back. Of course, the church has for many decades experienced members in their late teens and early adulthood years wandering away from the church, only to come back later in life as they married and started families. But the Millennials differ from previous generations. Impacted by the alienation from the traditional structures of society and having no grounding for authority in something or someone outside themselves, more of these nomads do not return.

culture where they live. They reect more of Richard John Neuhaus claim that all American Christians live in a foreign land, even in the United States.4 Kinnaman points out that only a small minority of young Christians has been taught to think about matters of faith, calling, and culture. They dont have the theological underpinnings to move them beyond the emotionally satisfying, self-focused nature of many youth groups. They want their vocation and their calling to be one and the same, but the church has not helped them nd how that can be.

W H E R E T O NOW ?
Ive sketched a discouraging picture. Our best efforts to reach the Millennials seem to have missed them. Frankly, I confess that I dont have better solutions. I hope that we can start a conversation and engage youth leaders to address the problem differently. One good place to begin is with Kinnamans You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving the Church and Rethinking Faith, especially Chapter Twelve, Fifty Ideas to Find a Generation. I am convinced, at any rate, that Albert Einsteins denition of insanity was right: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Whenever we miss the Millennials today with our youth programs, we will miss them tomorrow in our churches.

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1 G.L. Railsback, (1994). An exploratory study of religiosity and related outcomes among college students. [Dissertation]. Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles. 2 David A. Kinnaman, Unchristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianityand Why it Matters. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2007; You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving the Churchand Rethinking Faith. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2011. 3

Thomas E. Bergler, When Are We Going to Grow Up? The Juvenilization of American Christianity, Christianity Today, June 2012.4

The exiles, about 20 percent of those who have left, have done so out of disillusionment with the church, but that feeling has not carried over to the faith commitment in their personal lives. Unlike the other two groups, exiles actually want faith to matter, but they dont nd from the church that it does. They see the church equating Christian faith and practice with a certain American political culture that does not resonate with their reading of Scripture or the

Richard John Neuhaus, American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile. New York: Basic Books, 2009, p. 120.

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