Got Religion?

How Churches, Mosques, and Synagogues Can Bring Young People Back

Naomi Schaefer Riley

• Publisher: Templeton Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781599474977, 9781599473918
• eBook ISBN: 9781599474632
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

Why are young people dropping out of religious institutions? Can anything be done to reverse the trend? In Got Religion?, Naomi Schaefer Riley examines the reasons for the defection, why we should care, and how some communities are successfully addressing the problem.

The traditional markers of growing up are getting married and becoming financially independent. But young adults are delaying these milestones, sometimes for a full decade longer than their parents and grandparents. This new phase of "emerging adulthood" is diminishing the involvement of young people in religious institutions, sapping the strength and vitality of faith communities, and creating a more barren religious landscape for the young adults who do eventually decide to return to it. Yet, clearly there are some churches, synagogues, and mosques that are making strides in bringing young people back to religion.

Got Religion? offers in-depth, on-the-ground reporting about the most successful of these institutions and shows how many of the structural solutions for one religious group can be adapted to work for another.

The faith communities young people attach themselves to are not necessarily the biggest or the most flashy. They are not the wealthiest or the ones employing the latest technology. Rather, they are the ones that create stability for young people, that give them real responsibility in a community and that help them form the habits of believers that will last a lifetime.

1

Location, Location, Location

How the “Theology of Place” Is Plugging Young Adults Back into Their Communities and Their Churches

IF YOU WATCH ENOUGH episodes of House Hunters, Property Virgins, or any of the other myriad reality shows in which people search for and eventually purchase a home, you find that buyers, and especially young buyers, want three things (in no particular order): a kitchen with granite countertops and stainless steel appliances, an open floor plan, and a location within walking distance of shops and restaurants. When I began to watch these shows a few years after my own migration from the city to the suburbs of New York, I was a little surprised by how commonly this last factor was mentioned. I nearly fell off the couch when I saw a young couple demanding that their agents find them a place “within the Cleveland city limits.”

I once lived in a place with my husband where you could walk to everything—the park, the dry cleaner, the independent bookstore, the coffee shop, the outrageously priced supermarket—but I never dreamed of staying there permanently. The impracticality of not owning a car, the high rents, the tiny spaces (even with an open floor plan) never appealed to me.

It turns out, though, that I am in a minority. The evidence is not merely in reality shows or among the folks in my old neighborhood who liked bringing their newborns to hip bars to hang out. As Alan Ehrenhalt argues in his book, The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City, “We are living in a moment in which the massive outward migration of the affluent that characterized the second half of the twentieth century is coming to an end. And we need to adjust our perceptions of cities, suburbs, and urban mobility as a result.”

A variety of reasons exist for this return to urban life. People realized that extralong commutes were cutting into their time with family, particularly when the hours of professionals were getting longer already. Lower crime rates in urban areas also made cities more desirable. But young people might also crave the kind of close-knit community that their grandparents once had. (Many say that they experienced such an environment in college.) Now, though, instead of living in close proximity to a large extended family, young people have become part of urban tribes, groups of friends who hang out together—even once they marry and have children.

Given this shift, perhaps it is no surprise that churches, particularly evangelical ones, have rediscovered their own urban roots. Perhaps the most well-known pioneer of this trend is Timothy Keller, who was asked by the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) to start a church in New York in 1989. Today Redeemer has well over five thousand people in regular Sunday attendance. In 2001 Redeemer launched a “church planting” center, which has successfully helped to start almost two hundred churches across the country and around the world. Keller is among the most influential church leaders in America, not least because he has advocated a serious Christian engagement with the city.

In his widely consulted book, Center City, Keller writes, “Paul and other Christian missionaries went to great cities because when Christianity was planted there, it spread regionally (cities were the centers of transportation routes); it also spread globally (cities were multiethnic, international centers and converts took the gospel back to their homeland) and finally it more readily affected the culture (the centers of learning, law and government were in the cities).” For these same reasons, though, Christianity in America has experienced it strongest pushback in cities. Urban areas, particularly on the coasts, have gained reputations as centers of an elitist secularism, and for the second half of the twentieth century, many Christians did not see them as particularly hospitable.

But today, the faithful seem ready to engage. Here’s how Christianity Today editor Andy Crouch described the phenomenon in a 2012 Wall Street Journal article:

A new generation of church founders believes that city centers will be the beachhead of a new evangelization. While U.S. cities aren’t growing as fast as overseas metropolises like Lagos or Shanghai, their renaissance since the crime-ridden 1970s is one of the cultural headlines of the last generation, and it has been accompanied by burgeoning urban congregations. On a Sunday morning in any American city the signs of change come in literal form: placards on sidewalks and corners announcing church meetings.

But now church leaders are looking to take this migration a step further. Rather than simply relocate megachurches into an urban environment, pastors are looking to entrench a new church model into American neighborhoods.

Ray Cannata came to New Orleans from a church in suburban New Jersey. He had attended Princeton Theological Seminary and then interned at a church nearby. When he finished his degree the church hired him first as an associate pastor, and then, when the senior pastor left, Cannata took his place. He describes the church as a congregation of young families with about 250 members. “It was a place where people worked long hours and they commuted really far and they were very successful.” The arrangement made it difficult for the church to really build a community since many of the people weren’t even in the vicinity of the church most of the week.

But even when the members were at the church or participating in church activities, the community was not a cohesive one, according to Cannata. He was trying to figure out a way to help them with the problems they did have, but the solutions only seemed to make the communal issues worse. The church, he said, “was very much program-oriented. It seemed helpful to have a women’s ministry and an old persons’ ministry and a singles’ ministry, but then I realized that there are unintended consequences.” He says he was “creating consumers by the way I was perpetuating this model.”

The extent to which religious leaders want to discourage millennials from thinking of themselves as consumers of religion is a theme that came up again and again in my interviews. On the one hand, young adults seem to have a completely me-centered mind-set when they are deciding what church to join—who has the best music, the coolest pastor, the most dynamic crowd, and which is located near my house—but a big part of what they are looking for is the opportunity to serve a community. Whether these two impulses are compatible remains to be seen.

But Cannata is very clear about the problems that church consumers create for community: “I really felt like you have a women’s ministry and what happens is women are hanging out with other women. They’re not hanging out with men. They’re getting into their particular things, which are great and a part of the body [of Christ], but that’s not the whole picture of what the body ought to be. It creates people who are more selfish and a little more ‘Only other women understand me.’ Same thing with men. Same thing with kids.”

Cannata is a tall man with a beard and mustache. He listens intently whenever his interlocutors speak. But if they don’t, he could give an hourlong monologue and you might not notice. Relaxing on a leather armchair in the living room of his shotgun style house at a busy intersection in New Orleans, he could not look more at home as he documents the problems facing American Christianity and the difficulties it must overcome to engage the next generation of young adults.

He worries that American culture is creating an individualistic rather than communal version of Christianity. “Christianity becomes a self-help program in that context. In other words, ‘I’m having trouble in my marriage, so I want the church to provide me with the data that’s going to help me have a better marriage,’ rather than saying, ‘I’m here missionally to serve’ or ‘I’m part of a body, part of the family. I’m here to give and to take.’”

Cannata began to rethink all of the things he was taught about church “growth”—various theories and programs about what would increase the size of a congregation. He says, “Christianity got along fine without this stuff for 1,970 years, but it’s all unique to American culture and it’s unique to suburbia in a lot of ways.” Catering to more congregants in order to grow the congregation seemed to him a fruitless exercise. Indeed, the Faith Communities Survey from 2013 found that young adults are attracted to congregations that place a lot of emphasis on spiritual practices, not necessarily the ones that have special programs for people in their age group.

So then Cannata began to wonder about the suburban element of the equation. He was invited to interview for a position at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New Orleans just before Hurricane Katrina hit. “I fell in love about thirty seconds after we got here,” he recalls of the visit he made here with his wife. The congregation was small, and he did not form much of an impression of the church or its current leadership. For Cannata, it seemed to be all about, to borrow a phrase, “Location, location, location.”

There were a lot of things Cannata wanted to do differently when he arrived to take over three months after Katrina. And thanks to the fact that there were only seventeen church members left when he showed up, he had a blank slate. He wanted a more liturgical service, weekly Communion, and a different kind of music. But most of all he wanted something that was “neighborhood-y, that had a sense of place.” He had begun to think about the “theology of place.” The church had to be focused, he told me, “on one geographic area and really minister to that.”

The Bible is very focused on places, notes Cannata. In any passage from the Bible, he says, you are likely to be told where something occurred. While the sermons are focused on “ethical issues and morality,” he thinks that the specifics are important. The Bible mentions the places, he says, “to remind you that it’s an earthly thing. It happened in a place. It’s not a fairy tale. It’s not ‘Once upon a time.’” Someone once told him that “having a theology of place is acting like the incarnation really happened.” At the end of the day, says Cannata, “We believe Jesus is God in the flesh, breaking into time and place in history. And he is really there in a real place in a real time. He didn’t pick Greece. He didn’t pick Illinois. He picked Bethlehem.” (The way Cannata talks, some might think Jesus should have come to the Big Easy instead.)

Cannata has read Jane Jacobs’s masterwork, The Death and Life of American Cities, four times now. Her book was the first and perhaps most important critique of urban planning in the middle of the twentieth century. She called for neighborhoods to block government-led urban renewal projects and instead form their own grassroots campaigns to revitalize city life.

Cannata looked at the city of New Orleans and wondered what happened to the once dominant Catholic parishes that served the city neighborhood by neighborhood. The geographical lines drawn by the archdiocese determined what churches people attended and what religious schools their kids would go to, which served as a way of creating tight-knit communities.

Over the years the Catholic population in New Orleans has fallen off, and the Protestant churches became more and more like they are in the rest of the country. Today, they are large and they are competing with each other, trying to draw people from across the city to their pews.

Rachelle Garner grew up in a small town in Michigan. She recalls that the church she was raised in was a twelve-minute drive (“eight minutes if you hit the lights right”), but after college she and her husband moved to Montreal. They found a church they liked but it was a forty-five-minute drive from their home. “It just doesn’t make sense to do that and not be able to invest in people’s lives,” she tells me.

That seems to be Cannata’s thinking. If people come from across the city to Redeemer, he doesn’t turn them away, but he does ask them if they have looked for someplace closer to them. And he emphasizes that all of the work of the church will be to serve the uptown community where it’s located. The small community groups that meet weekly, he insists, will only take place within a certain radius of the church.

By becoming a neighborhood church, he believes that people will run into each other outside of church, too. And it seems to be working. Many of the parishioners I interview mention that the people they see in church are the same ones they see listening to music on Saturday nights. Or hanging out in the local coffee shops. Redeemer has created a community, but it has also created accountability. People behave a certain way when they expect they will run into their fellow churchgoers. Will Tabor, a campus minister at Tulane University, says he often sees other congregants during the week. “That is a positive.” He feels as if the church has “submitted” itself to the purposes of the neighborhood.

Eileen McKenna is a violinist who moved to New Orleans with her husband, a drummer, a couple of years ago. She actually trains horses during the day and then plays music with him in the evenings. But she insists that the “church scene” is not a separate part of her life. “I see people at my church in my daily life” and at her music gigs as well.

It is probably not a good idea to build a church around a particularly charismatic pastor—what happens when he leaves?—but Cannata has so thoroughly come to embody the theology of place that it’s hard to think about Redeemer’s success in his absence. His love of New Orleans extends, needless to say, to its food. He has eaten at almost all of the city’s seven hundred independently owned restaurants. Literally. In fact, there is a documentary film coming out about him called The Man Who Ate New Orleans.

Despite this, Cannata has not packed on the pounds because he also walks several miles every day. In fact, he drives almost nowhere. He lives in a historic house near the intersection of two busy streets and a short walk from a bustling district of restaurants and shops. The office of the church is a few blocks away and so are the coffee shops where he tries to write his sermons.

Marty Garner, Rachelle’s husband, tells me that Cannata “does a good job of belonging to this place, contributing to it, serving it, loving it.” He has become part of the Mardi Gras parade, joining something called the Krewe of the Rolling Elvi, which is essentially a group of men who dress up as Elvis for the party. They also get together at other points during the year as well to raise money for worthy causes around the city.

While the parade has a kind of wild reputation, the Elvi, and Cannata in particular, want to make sure that people understand it’s about more than just a party. It’s a gathering of a community. When I visited shortly after Mardi Gras, Cannata mentioned in his sermon that some people at the parade were mocking a young girl who was developmentally disabled. When the Rolling Elvi found out, they offered her a kind of personal apology, staging their own gathering and giving her “throws” (the necklaces that are offered by parade marchers to the revelers along the route).

Also, Cannata’s visible presence in the community on a daily basis, says Ashley Marsh, “bridges the gap between nonbelievers and believers.” Marsh, who came with her husband, Anthony, to New Orleans from Kansas City, says there are many people in New Orleans who “do not have Christ in their lives. I think it’s excellent to meet Ray as a neighbor . . . you know, a fun guy and then to know that he is a pastor.”

But it is not just Cannata who is unique. It is New Orleans. In the aftermath of Katrina, the city has become a magnet for young people looking to help rebuild. Becky Otten grew up in a suburb of Milwaukee and decided she wanted to attend Tulane. She arrived with her family on August 27, 2005. The president of the university greeted the freshman class and then asked them to leave. “We’ll see you in a couple of days,” Otten recalls being told. Despite her parents’ concerns, she did return to the city for the second semester.

Otten grew up in a very religious home. Her mother was a Quaker, and her father was from a Christian Reformed Church. The family attended the latter. She went to a school associated with that church as well until eighth grade and then a public high school. That was when she started to question her faith, or rather, she says, her church. “I felt like everyone else acted like they were perfect. It was a combination of judgment and hypocrisy. I knew there were struggles in my peers’ lives and in their parents’ lives, but it always came out as, ‘You are not good enough. You are not Christian enough.’” Her Christian friends questioned her decision to attend public school. At the same time she was aspiring to the popular crowd in high school, which meant drinking and partying. As her behavior worsened, she felt less and less like she belonged in church. She didn’t want to be part of the “hypocrisy” she saw around her.

Finally at the end of her senior year of high school, she felt things start to come together. She went on a mission trip to Juarez, Mexico. She says the group she went with was “very real about faith and that they had messed up but that was okay. I really had started to feel my sense of purpose.” Otten came to school in New Orleans knowing that she wanted to be involved in community service work. The first couple of years here she did things like gut houses with her friends in the Lower Ninth Ward and act as a teacher’s assistant for a fourth grade class. She didn’t feel much pull to participate in religious groups on campus. But then she found Redeemer.

In that, Otten is an outlier. Most college students I’ve spoken with don’t tend to feel very comfortable going to local churches unless there is already a critical mass of students there. The campus religious groups are much better at catering to their needs and their schedules. And they are l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Location, Location, Location
• 2. The All-American Mosque
• 3. Joining the Service
• 4. What’s NEXT?
• 5. A Ward of Their Own
• 6. When No One Needs Church Anymore, How Do You Make Them Want It?
• 7. The End of Sheep Stealing
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index