In a world marked by coddling and canceling, let’s call up the next generation. The gospel is true. God is real. The church that reaches the next generation will not be riddled with insecurity but will hold out, with confidence and humility, a serious faith.

Not long ago, I sat across from a pastor of a church known for its attractional (church growth) ministry philosophy. We discussed the methods common to seeker-sensitive megachurches in the 1990s and early 2000s—the attempt to find points of connection with the culture through sermon series based on popular movies or TV shows, the edginess of starting a service with a secular song to demonstrate cultural IQ (and how rocking the worship band was!), and the strict policing of language that could come across too “churchy” or off-putting to the newcomer.

Many of these well-intentioned efforts were built on showing how “relevant” or “in touch” the church was with the world around it. Today, these methods are cringeworthy. Young people who visit a church expect to experience, well, whatever church is. The strangeness is the appeal. Now that fewer people have any family background in church, no one hears a worship band cover an Imagine Dragons song and thinks, “Wow! This isn’t my Grandma’s church!”—in part because Grandma is in her 60s and never darkened the door either.

Young Churchgoers Today

Listen to Gen Z churchgoers today and you’ll hear conversations about powerful worship songs that facilitate an experience with God, about the realness of the preacher who just “tells it like it is” from the Bible, and about the beauty of church architecture and older traditions and recitations.

When young people accept the invitation to visit a church, they’ve already committed to experiencing something unusual. Attempts at being overly accommodating or making the church seem “cool” come off as desperate and insecure. If your ministry is seeker-sensitive and attractional today, remember that the churchiness of church is a draw, not a turnoff.

Unfortunately, many pastors have yet to figure this out. Too many churches still think the way to reach young people is to replicate the entertainment you can get anywhere else, or to lean into the social activism you find at the local university, or to offer the practical advice a podcaster delivers better.

Serious Faith

Young people are swimming in pools of superficiality, with torrents of information flooding through their magical devices. Adrift in a sea without navigation, in a world where moral strictures have been blown up in the name of freedom, many long for paths of formation, growth, and maturity.

Read More