I recently drove past the Chicago-land church I was contracted to re-start way back in 1990.  In those days, the church had fallen from a high attendance of 550 people down to 35 people.  The average age was 63 years old.  I remember meeting with each individual privately and asking them one simple question: “What’s the problem”?  The consistent answer was: “All the young people have moved away”.  Well, being new to the area, I thought I had better verify their perception, so I did a demographic study of the community and found that the average age was 26 years old, predominately young married couples with infant children.  Furthermore, there were over 500,000 people with a ten minute drive of the church!

The problem was not that the young people had moved away from the church, the problem was that the church had decided long ago to move away from the young people.

With God’s help, the ministry grew 400% in that year…all in young adults.  Ten adults accepted Christ through the ministry in that year.  But when my one-year contract was concluded and I moved on to plant a new church in Michigan, the church became dysfunctional once again.  Fifteen years later, the church finally closed its doors. 

I believe churches die for one primary reason: they become self-serving rather than Christ-serving.  No church ever has to die.  However, as you are reading this article, the vast majority (some believe 98%) of churches in North America are positioning themselves for death within the next 15-20 years.  This is because most ministries have a significant attendance drop between the ages of 17 and 33 years of age.  This age group makes up approximately 35% of the North American population.  Yet within many of our churches, they average less than 5% of the congregation.  George Barna tells us that by age 29, 65% of the young adults that were raised within our churches will abandon church all-together.  In addition, when you consider the CBS focus group study of January 2005, where the Echo-Boomer generation made it abundantly clear that they do not trust church institutions (0% trust factor), then we come to understand that we are not attracting young adults into our churches, and we are not keeping the one’s that God has already given us.

The problem is really quite simple to nail down and fix…our Boomer controlled churches must stop deciding to move away from the young adult.  Just because our Boomer model of ministry worked for us does not mean that it suffices for the emerging generations.  If our church leaders find it politically dangerous to transform their current presentational/program-driven ministry model into a postmodern paradigm, then I have two recommendations:

1)       Plant A Church.  Let your Boomer-model ministry die in 20 years, but give life to as many postmodern child-churches as possible.

2)       Start an Online Ministry.  A complete online ministry can run concurrently with your established church programming, without forcing the current programming to change.  The online ministry will also provide your ministry with the young adult core you require to plant child-churches.

Our nation is one generation away from paganism.  I pray that God would enable your ministry to be a part of the solution rather than a part of the problem.