But I often find those churches that call themselves “contemporary” or “seeker -sensitive” to be facile and sophomoric. We now actually have young adults, those in their late teens and in their twenties, who were raised in a seeker –sensitive environment, who are now joining “liturgical” churches. When asked why, some answer to the effect that after experiencing fluff, they’re now looking for substance.

I have just read where the Presbyterian Church, USA (PCUSA) lost 102,791members for the year ending December 31, 2012. This is a more than 5% decrease from the previous year, and the biggest decline since the Presbyterian Church US (PCUS) and the United Presbyterian Church USA (UPC, USA) merged thirty years ago in 1983. The membership of this denomination, which stood at 3,131,228 at the time of the merger, now stands at 1,849,496, or a 41% drop in its thirty years of existence. The antecedent denominations to today’s PCUSA peaked in 1965 with 4,254,597 making the losses suffered since then a whopping 56% drop. This is not a decline; words like “disaster,” “exodus,” and “nosedive” come to mind.

For conservatives, however, the big elephant in the room is that they are not doing much better. I am a missionary to Africa about to complete a one-year home assignment. As I travel from one Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC) or Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) church to another, I find congregations that look like retirement homes. In some of them, there will be one couple with children that have to be taken to the Baptist church for youth activities. In others, my ten-year-old will be the first child they’ve seen in a long while; they have nothing for him during Sunday school hour, so he sits by himself and play games on his iPod.

Much of the Sunday school hour is spent taking prayer requests for operations, chemo, and therapy. One of my supporting churches has recently dissolved itself because of aging and lack of new members. Missionaries are justly concerned because the generation that has supported them is rapidly departing from the scene.

The PCA boasted for years that it was the fastest growing denomination in the country, but it was all transfer growth; when the transfers from the PCUSA stopped, so did growth for the PCA.

My denomination, the EPC, is currently going through what the PCA did twenty years ago. It became the destination of choice for churches bailing out of the PCUSA, and has experienced a more than doubling in size in the last few years, but it’s now screeching to a halt, especially as the new kid on the block, the Evangelical Covenant Order of Presbyterians (ECO), which is closer to the PCUSA than to the EPC in doctrine, siphons off currently dissident and departing churches.

We are losing our young people. All too often “Reformed” becomes in the minds of some youth a synonym for “archaic” and “irrelevant.” But I often find those churches that call themselves “contemporary” or “seeker -sensitive” to be facile and sophomoric. We now actually have young adults, those in their late teens and in their twenties, who were raised in a seeker –sensitive environment, who are now joining “liturgical” churches. When asked why, some answer to the effect that after experiencing fluff, they’re now looking for substance. Youth groups have been charged with being inadequate to prepare Christian youth who will go to college and encounter agnostic or atheistic professors who will treat them like adults.

And so we find that it is no longer adequate to yell “Liberals!” and expect to prosper by simply separating ourselves from them. I understand that Reformed University Fellowship (RUF) is doing an outstanding job of reaching the college – age adults with the gospel of Jesus Christ and the Reformation message. I wonder if this could be extended to high and junior high kids? I don’t recall my seminary doing anything to train people to do youth ministry, even though churches were posting notices on the bulletin board for youth group leaders; and not many were looking for senior or solo pastors.

Larry Brown is a minister in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, a member of Central South Presbytery, and serves as Professor of church history, world history, hermeneutics and missions at the African Bible College in Lilongwe, Malawi.