Young People in the Church

[Susan Snook]

A friend of mine, Tamie Fields Harkins, wrote this blog post about
attracting young people to the church, and I thought you all might
want to see what she says. She was the Episcopal campus chaplain at
Northern Arizona University for four years.

http://owlrainfeathers.blogspot.com/2010/11/ah-church.html

Blessings,

Susan Snook+

[Ann Fontaine]

This is great. What I tell churches all the time -- Ann

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[Azet...@aol.com]

That is absolutely marvelous.  Thanks so much for posting it!

Andee

[Steven Horst]

I'll add a few thoughts of my own, from being around churches and
colleges for a few decades.

1. Get to know them.

2. Treat them as people, and as just as much a part of your
community as elders or families with children. Don't think of them
as a curiosity that occasionally wanders in between Confirmation and
marriage and won't stick around -- unless you're into self-fulfilling
prophecy. Welcome them and treat them as you would the people your
parish is best at welcoming, whether that be new young families,
retired bishops or tithing orthopedic surgeons. (Don't leave them
out of Foyer invitations. When appropriate, give them their own place
in the parish rolls ... and pledge cards.)

3. Don't assume you know who they are, what they care about, what
they believe. (For example, the late teens/early 20s in my parish
are probably more conservative, on the whole, than the people of my
generation. And I remember the exasperation I felt at a very good
chaplain who could not seem to get it into his head that, no, this
particular group of college students did not spend their time
worrying about nuclear war, as all the adults supposed.)

4. Give them work of ministry to do. Not the things YOU like to do,
or liked to do at their age. (They're may not be interested in
Daughters of the King.) Find out what THEY are inspired to do and
empower them to do it.

5. Don't be judgmental, but be ready to talk about your beliefs and
values and listen to theirs. (If you're not in general ready to talk
or listen, it's time to make a change.)

6. If they bring friends to church, treat their friends as persons
worthy of respect as well, and as people who might decide to become
important members of your church...if you let them.

7. Be interested in their gifts and talents and prepared to make use
of them if they are willing to share, even if that means looking
outside of the ways you have always done things. (Our ministry to
young people grew out of their desire to start a praise band and have
a monthly alternative worship service. They were NOT interested in
singing in our chancel choir or being acolytes, though most also do
participate in bell choir.)

8. If you are in a position to be thinking about staffing for growth,
think about hiring someone with a real expertise in ministry with
young people. Let the young people you have be part of the vision
and search process. Make it a real position with benefits, and try
to get someone good and keep them around for a long time.

9. Help them find their way into the peculiarities of the worship
and community of a church, and in the transition to adult faith from
their childhood religiosity (or no faith at all). You'll probably
find that they are not the only people there who would benefit from
help in that transition, either; it's just that some have had to wait
a long time for it.

10. Develop the habit of looking beyond the fact that someone is
wearing a heavy metal T-shirt, pants pulled down almost to their
knees, green hair, hair on only one side of their head, tattoos, or
an entire hardware store worth of piercings. Then extend this habit
to older people who come in "looking different" too. If you have a
hard time with this, think about how odd Jesus' clothes and grooming
would look in your church, or yours in the synagogues of his day.

--
______________________________________________________________________
Steven Horst, Ph.D., Alternate Lay Deputy, Diocese of CT
Dean of Middlesex Deanery
Church of the Holy Trinity, Middletown, CT (http://www.holytrinityct.org)

Professor of Philosophy
Department of Philosophy
Wesleyan University
Middletown, CT 06459 USA

http://www.stevenhorst.com

[Allie Graham]

The one thing I would add to this:
Realise there is no "worship that young people like" No one would
presume that everyone in their 50's likes the same sort of worship,
why would everyone in their 20's?

The young adult's group that developed at my parish happened
naturally, and is now larger than the chaplaincy at the local
university. The group has parents, grad students, young professionals
and academics, and I'm sure others I'm leaving out. We all have very
different backgrounds, and many of us are going to transition out of
the area. What has made our rector extremely useful for us is
recognising that both the importance of the group to us and the
fludity of the group. She also realises that we all have different
things we need out of the parish, and doesn't try to get us all into
one ministry.

Cheers!
allie

[Susan Snook]

Allie's and Steven's comments both highlighted an important point about young people and worship for me.  Steven's comment about the chaplain who thought young people should be interested in nuclear disarmament (presumably the hot issue of his/her own younger years) could be extended to worship too.  Just because Baby Boomers were delighted with guitars, folk masses, etc. back in the 70s doesn't mean that young people are necessarily delighted with guitars, praise bands etc. today.  As a matter of fact, in a previous parish we tried a "praise band" worship service and found that it was mostly populated by Baby Boomers (going to church for the second time on a Sunday - not really an evangelistic outreach!).  

Tamie mentioned using candles, incense, and true, rich music with deep roots.  For me, the broader principle here is to do what we're good at and what is authentic to us.  Young people are attracted to (demand) authenticity.  If there is any broad generalization that could be made about their worship preferences, one might suggest a casual atmosphere that accepts people in whatever manner of dress or appearance they might be sporting (Steven gives some delightful descriptions); involving them in worship design such as writing and leading elements of the service (and accepting that it might stretch our boundaries a bit); allowing space and time for quiet meditation; and including opportunities to offer ourselves for the service of others and to develop true community among ourselves.

My congregation is a new church plant.  We offer two services:  a 9:30 traditional Rite II service with traditional Anglican music, and an 11:00 Inspirations service that incorporates the elements described above. At the 11:00 service, we sing traditional American gospel music, on the theory that it is a rich, deep, authentic American religious tradition that has a strong relationship to rock music, and therefore is a bit closer to the average young American heart than 17th century Anglican hymns.  Plus, we have a music director and some singers who do a spectacular job with it.  The 11:00 service brings in an average of 70 people per Sunday, mostly teenagers and their parents.  (The 9:30 service is larger and much grayer.)  We have a full-time children's and youth director who helps bring the teenagers together.  We find out what ministries the kids are passionate about doing, and the parents, teachers and staff support them in whatever way we can.

Blessings,

Susan
 

The Rev. Susan B. Snook

Priest Missioner
The Episcopal Church of the Nativity
7010 E. Chauncey Lane Suite 100
Phoenix, Arizona 85054
(480) 307-9216 Office
(602) 980-4970 Cell
www.TheNativity.net

---

From: Allie Graham <allie....@gmail.com>
To: episcopal-...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sat, November 13, 2010 10:47:58 AM
Subject: Re: {Episcopal Evangelism} Young People in the Church

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[Sarah Dylan Breuer]

I am afraid that the substance of Allie's insights are being lost here.

"Young people" are not attracted universally to a casual atmosphere any more than all people over the age of 35 are attracted to a formal atmosphere.

Some GenXers and Millennials like Taize. Some like rock music. Some like the 1982 Hymnal, WLP, LIVAS, and so on. Some like jazz. Some like Gregorian chant.

I work with a gathering composed almost entirely of totally unchurched men from age 18-25. Because I met most of them by working at the local Guitar Center, they're all musicians. Because the Guitar Center I worked at was the one closest to the Berklee school of music, they are almost all rock modern, and jazz musicians. I often chuckle to myself thinking of how things might look if, instead of the congregation coming organically into being around me working with and hanging around with these guys, a diocese had decided to "reach out to them."

I cannot for the life of me imagine an official committee saying, "hmm ... we want to found a congregation of young heterosexual and slightly homophobic rock musicians to meet spontaneously upon summons via any member's text message ... I know: we must find an overweight, disabled 40-year-old married lesbian, put her out of work, and get her stacking amplifiers for minimum wage in a store somewhere, and then have her exercise a ministry of presence until they all are singing worship music at jam nights in local pubs."

Susan hits the proverbial nail on the head when she says that authenticity is the key. If the invitation coming from our hearts is "The Episcopal Church welcomes you to become a pledging unit and volunteer labor force to keep our institution alive and our programs running" -- which is what a lot of 'evangelism' programs are about -- that's just not appealing to most sane people. As long as our goal is to assimilate people, we're pretty much like the Borg from *Star Trek: The Next Generation*. If we're serious about making disciples among all 'ethnoi,' all cultures, we're going to have to live amongst different cultures to help them find an authentic articulation of the Gospel in their own cultures, rather than expect that we will create a church culture that somehow will miraculously attract, nourish, and allow for the full expression of the spiritual gifts of the people we want to "reach."

We have a problem whenever we start from the assumption that we own real spirituality, which we will generously translate for and impart to outsiders so they can become more like us. Maybe they have spiritual gifts and wisdom from their own experience of God in Christ, and we need to acknowledge our own thirst for direction and our own need for leadership from their ranks to better understand what the Good News of God in Christ means in our neighborhoods and our world today.

But the biggest problem we have -- a massively huge problem -- that TEC has in reaching unchurched people is that we tend to muscle our leaders into spending most of our time with churchy people in church programs, we tend to measure success in terms to how many "outsiders" we bring into official congregations rather than by how many of our congregants spend time and energy getting to know unchurched people and listening to their experience of their walk with God, and we fall almost without fail for any hip-looking person who wants to sell us a book and deliver a keynote to tell us how we can attract "them" to our churches.

Thing is, we're a lot more comfortable interacting with hipster professional Christian consultants than we are interacting with and particularly with listening to and standing beside non-Christians.

Blessings,

Dylan

_________________

Sarah Dylan Breuer

http://www.sarahlaughed.net

dy...@sarahlaughed.net

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[Steven Horst]

As usual, I love what Dylan has to say on this.

A few thoughts...

I agree about demographics not predicting tastes in worship. When
some of our young people (then all teenagers) started a praise band a
few years back, it grew into a monthly Saturday night service. But it
did not become a youth service. A number of our seniors love it, and
the band's friends have come and gone, but a lot of those who are
regulars are younger boomers and older X-ers. If there is a growth
group there, it may be something like people who have grown
dissatisfied with the Evangelical-lite experience in the local
equivalent of megachurches.

I would want to caution with respect to Dylan's wonderful story that
we should not assume that new worship initiatives will begin with
experienced and theologically educated people like her. If you've
got people with a vision for a different worship experience, let them
give it a go. They need to understand that many efforts fail for
reasons that do not reflect ill upon those who tried them, but the
leadership needs to understand that some also succeed!

It also occurs to me that starting a new type of worship service in
Boston is different from doing so in a town with only one Episcopal
church. Where people can easily travel to a few dozen churches by
public transportation, one can hope that things will spring up that
will allow everyone who is really looking to find worship that suits
their taste. If you're the only church in town, or the only one
within 100 miles, it may be different. Though in one sense it is
not: Dylan's story is about building a worship experience that suits
the people she found herself among. In her case, it was people who
shared a background in particular musical styles. But somehow I
suspect that she would find a way to do the same sort of thing in
other sorts of contexts as well.

[Steven Horst]

For those of you recovering from having to compete with Black Friday weekend for your congregation's time, I forward excerpts from a sermon for Advent and the Sunday after Black Friday, pointing to the notable offer God made on another Friday. :-)

You wouldn't know it from reading the newspaper or watching the television, but today is the first Sunday of Advent, the beginning of the Church year. 

You'd hardly even know it was just Thanksgiving, because that too has been eclipsed by this strange new holiday called Black Friday.    It's the biggest shopping day of the year, a time when merchants have special deals to lure us in. Some people wait out in the cold all Thanksgiving night to be the first ones in the doors of the big box stores. If you wait until 10 am, it may be too late to get a good deal on a television or refrigerator.

       

Well, God has a special offer for us too.  It's not a Black Friday deal.        It's a Good Friday deal.

Jesus was up the whole night before, getting it ready.

He gave it everything he had until 3 in the afternoon. 

It's the best deal of all time.

       

With this deal, you won't just saveŠyou'll be saved.

       

What do you get?  You get forgiveness of your sins.  You get God's own Spirit to guide you. You get adopted as God's own son or daughter, with a whole new family of millions of sisters and brothers.  And you get everlasting life.

       

It's absolutely free.

       

There's enough for everybody.

       

And it's still available where you live.

       

You don't need to drive to the mall or go online. Jesus stands at the door and knocks.  If anyone will open the door and invite him in, he will make his dwelling with them. (cont'd.)

[Stefani Schatz]

Steven, thanks for sharing this.  

our preacher on Christ the King made a similar point as the reading for the day actually was Good Friday. 

we do live in interesting times !! 

any sermon connections for Cyber Monday?  :-) 

peace, -- Stefani (in Reno NV) 

On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 5:08 PM, Steven Horst <sho...@wesleyan.edu> wrote:

For those of you recovering from having to compete with Black Friday weekend for your congregation's time, I forward excerpts from a sermon for Advent and the Sunday after Black Friday, pointing to the notable offer God made on another Friday. :-)

You wouldn't know it from reading the newspaper or watching the television, but today is the first Sunday of Advent, the beginning of the Church year. 

You'd hardly even know it was just Thanksgiving, because that too has been eclipsed by this strange new holiday called Black Friday.    It's the biggest shopping day of the year, a time when merchants have special deals to lure us in. Some people wait out in the cold all Thanksgiving night to be the first ones in the doors of the big box stores. If you wait until 10 am, it may be too late to get a good deal on a television or refrigerator.

       

Well, God has a special offer for us too.  It's not a Black Friday deal.        It's a Good Friday deal.

Jesus was up the whole night before, getting it ready.

He gave it everything he had until 3 in the afternoon. 

It's the best deal of all time.

       

With this deal, you won't just saveŠyou'll be saved.

       

What do you get?  You get forgiveness of your sins.  You get God's own Spirit to guide you. You get adopted as God's own son or daughter, with a whole new family of millions of sisters and brothers.  And you get everlasting life.

       

It's absolutely free.

       

There's enough for everybody.

       

And it's still available where you live.

       

You don't need to drive to the mall or go online. Jesus stands at the door and knocks.  If anyone will open the door and invite him in, he will make his dwelling with them. (cont'd.)

-- 

______________________________________________________________________
Steven Horst, Ph.D., Alternate Lay Deputy, Diocese of CT
Dean of Middlesex Deanery
Church of the Holy Trinity, Middletown, CT (http://www.holytrinityct.org)

Professor of Philosophy
Department of Philosophy
Wesleyan University
Middletown, CT 06459 USA

http://www.stevenhorst.com

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" .... hold more suppers, greet more strangers, give more responsibility to the young, laugh more. " Tom Ehrich  

[Steven Horst]

I am curious to hear how others work in their churches with people
who say they want to accept Christ or renew their commitment.

Our prayer team is available every week during communion to pray with
people for healing or any other need. When the rector mentions us
during announcements, we get more people coming back. She also says
that if anyone wishes to turn over their lives to Christ or recommit
them, we are available to pray with them in that as well. However,
that mostly only happens on occasions when people are invited to do
it in the sermon as well. (I believe the first time we did this, we
had five people who committed their lives to Christ.)

We have sheets with short prayers of acceptance on them available. I
had recently noticed they had disappeared and wrote up new ones for
this past Sunday, when I was going to do my evangelistic Good
Friday/Black Friday sermon. But it got me thinking about how we do
this, and wondering how others approach it.

As I think about it, I am not at all sure that ushering people
through a quick conversion prayer is the best approach. I'm keen
enough on the idea that it can be a good thing to have a particular
moment in one's life when one explicitly turns everything over to
God. I did that 30-some years ago and have never looked back. And
I'm not thinking here about the people for whom the standard
Evangelical model does not make sense, and have to be reached in
other ways. And of course I believe that when people wish to commit
to Christ, they should also be offered resources for spiritual
formation -- it's not like getting the flu shot, after all.

But when someone comes and says "I want to turn my life over to
Jesus", there has probably been a lot going on that we at the prayer
station do not know about. In that particular context, with other
people waiting in line for prayer, we don't have the opportunity for
extended conversation and discernment. In some cases, the people who
come may not want to talk to us about the particulars, and sometimes
they are people who are just there for the day. (For example, a few
weeks back a visitor whose wife had recently died a holy death wanted
to pray to renew his faith and have the sort of faith and hope he saw
in her.) And indeed, those who we see every week may particularly
not want to share the parts of their lives that they wish to give up
and move beyond. I may suspect that they would benefit from seeing a
priest for the sacrament of reconciliation, but I cannot offer it
myself, and am not sure that it is my place to suggest putting off
the act they came to perform for that or any other reason. (I think
there ARE moments of particular grace in our lives that should not be
allowed to pass by without taking action.) Yet part of me, I am
realizing, would be more comfortable seeing conversion come in the
context of some sort of counseling and spiritual direction before the
fact.

I apologize if my thoughts on this are not clear enough to lead to
specific questions, but am hoping I might start some discussion that
would draw upon collective wisdom and experience about the wonderful
if daunting ministry of assisting others in making a commitment to
Christ.