Finding Young People? It might be easier than you think…

A couple of reports crossed my desk a few days ago, and when I read them together, they actually seemed pretty hopeful.  That may be surprising, since one of the reports was a study of death rates in United Methodist congregations (seriously!) and the other was a look at the fairly grim findings of the recent Pew study about religious affiliation.  I was probably encouraged primarily by the thoughtful writing of the folks whose reflections I was reading.  The first came from the Lewis Center for Church Leadership.  Executive Director Lovett Weems writes in “Pockets of Youthfulness in an Aging Denomination“ that the death rates in United Methodist churches indicate that there are plenty of unaffiliated young people to be found in the communities that surround most United Methodist churches.  Weems uses an interesting and wholly credible extrapolation of the statistics to arrive at his conclusion: “These findings,” says Weems, “suggest that reaching people whose age is representative of the general population in one’s area is a goal that appears to be well within reach…”  In other words, you can do it!  The big question, of course, is, “How?”  

Some clues to that might be in Eric Guy’s thinking about the Pew report, “Faith in Flux:  Changes in Religious Affiliation in the U. S.”  Guy, in charge of leadership development around young adults and generational ministries for the United Methodists in Iowa, reflects on the the top reason, according to the study, that American adults who are currently unaffiliated with a religious community left.  Namely, they “gradually drifted away.”  This reason tops “stopped believing,” and “dissatisfied with worship.”  Guy interprets this to mean that, ”Far more people are leaving our faith communities because of our benign neglect at their ‘drifting away’ than that they have intentionally chosen to dissacociate with the teachings in whch they no longer believe or have left a worshipping community they no longer find meaningful.  Theology may matter, worship may matter,” says Guy, “but relationships matter more.”

Both of these writers come out of the United Methodist tradition, but my guess is that much of what they say could be applied to most traditional Protestant denominations.  Could it be true that reinvigorating our congregations could be as “simple” as developing relationships with the unaffiliated young people in the communities surrounding our churches?   Yes, I know.  I put “simple” in quotation marks for a reason.  Nothing is every completely simple, is it?