Chapter 1
The Secret to Reaching the Next Generation
KEVIN DEYOUNG
Getting a book published is a funny thing. People youâve never met suddenly think youâre amazing. Other people youâve never met (who may leave a review on Amazon) think youâre the scum of the earth (and not the good Pauline kind). And lots of people expect you to be an expert in things you donât know much about.
After my first book came out, Why Weâre Not Emergent, pastors and other Christians started asking me how my church reached out to young people. âWe donât want to go emergent,â the questioner would explain. âWe need sound doctrine. We need good preaching. But what do you do in your church to reach the next generation?â My usual response was, âNothing.â I wanted people to understand that thereâs nothing fancy or brilliant about our church strategy. We are just trying to be faithful.
But after a while I began to sense that ânothingâ was not a terribly helpful answer. So I talked about our campus ministry, and staff structure, and our small groupsâall of which matter. Yet this answer seemed like more of the same. âIf you want to reach young people, you have to have this program or capture this feel or go for this look.â Donât get me wrong; thinking about strategy, structure, and feel is not sinful. Iâm thankful for all the people in our church who work hard in these areas. I try to be wise in these areas. But this is not the secret to reaching the next generation.
There have been times as a pastor when Iâve been discouraged by the slowness of numerical growth in my congregation. Iâve thought, âWhy is that church over there so successful? Why did they go from 150 to 1500 in three years?â Iâve even been borderline snippy at times: âLord, if I get to heaven and find out there was some secret musical style or movie clip or new program I was supposed to use in order to be successful, Iâm going to feel pretty bummed.â But in my saner moments Iâve come to see two things: (1) Itâs more my sinful flesh than my sanctified spirit that wants success. And (2) the secret is that there is no secret.
Reaching the next generationâwhether they are outside the church or sitting there bored in your churchâis easier and harder than you think. Itâs easier because you donât have to get a degree in postmodern literary theory or go to a bunch of stupid movies. You donât have to say âsweetâ or âblingâ or know what LOL or IMHO means. You donât have to listen to . . . well, whatever people listen to these days. You donât have to be on Twitter, watch The Office, or imbibe fancy coffees. You just have to be like Jesus. Thatâs it. So the easy part is you donât have to be with it. The hard part is you have to be with him. If you walk with God and walk with people, youâll reach the next generation.
Let me unpack that a bit. After thinking through the question for over a year, Iâve come up with five suggestions for pastors, youth workers, campus staff, and anyone else who wants to pass the faith on to the next generation: Grab them with passion. Win them with love. Hold them with holiness. Challenge them with truth. Amaze them with God.
Grab Them with Passion
Increasingly, people do not go to church out of a sense of cultural obligation. This is true especially among the young. Newer generations will not give Christianity a second thought if it seems lifeless, rote, and uninspiring. They will only get serious about the Christian faith if it seems like something seriously worth their time. You can have formal services, so long as you do not have formalism. You can have casual services, so long as you do not approach your faith casually. Your services can have a lot of different looks, but young people want to see passion. They want to see us do church and follow Christ like we mean it.
We would do well to pay attention to Romans 12. âLet love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good. Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lordâ (vv. 9â11). We would be far less likely to lose our young people and far more likely to win some others if the spiritual temperature of our churches was something other than lukewarm. People need to see that God is the all-consuming reality in our lives. Our sincerity and earnestness in worship matter ten times more than the style we use to display our sincerity and earnestness.
Iâm tired of talking about authenticity, as if prattling on about how messed up you are or blogging about your goldfish are signs of spiritual maturity. We need passion, a zeal fueled by knowledge (Rom. 10:2). Young people want to see that our faith actually matters to us. They are like Ben Franklin when asked why he was going to hear George Whitefield preach. âYou donât even believe what he says,â people told Franklin. To which he replied, âI know. But he does.â If our evangelical faith is boring to us, it will be boring to others. If the gospel is old news to you, it will be dull news to everyone else.
We cannot pass on what we do not feel. Whitefield blasted the church in his day because âthe generality of preachers [in New England] talk of an unknown and unfelt Christ. The reason why congregations have been so dead is because they have had dead men to preach to them.â1 The next generation, every generation really, needs to hear the gospel with personal, passionate pleading. There is a time for dialogue, but there is also a time for declaration. People donât need a lecture or an oration or a discussion from the pulpit on Sunday morning. They need to hear of the mighty deeds of God. And they need to hear the message from someone who not only understands it but has been captured by it.
If we are to grab the next generation with the gospel, we must grab them with passion. And to grab them with passion, we must be gripped with it ourselves. The world needs to see Christians burning, not with self-righteous fury at the sliding morals in our country, but with passion for God. As W. E. Sangster put it, âIâm not interested to know if you could set the Thames on fire. What I want to know is this: if I picked you up by the scruff of your neck and dropped you into the Thames, would it sizzle?â2
Win Them with Love
The evangelical church has spent far too much time trying to figure out cultural engagement and far too little time just trying to love. If we listen to people patiently and give them the gift of our curiosity, we will be plenty engaged. Iâm not arguing for purposeful obscurantism. What Iâm arguing for is getting peopleâs attention with a force more powerful than the right lingo and the right movie clips.
We spend all this time trying to imitate Gen-X culture or Millennial culture, and to what end? For starters, there is no universal youth culture. Young people do not all think alike, dress alike, or feel comfortable in the same environments. Moreover, even if we could figure out âwhat the next generation likes,â by the time we figured it out they probably wouldnât like it anymore. Count on it: when the church discovers cool, it wonât be cool anymore. Iâve seen well-meaning Christians try to introduce new music into the church in an effort to reach the young people, only to find out that the ânewâ music included âShine, Jesus, Shineâ and âShout to the Lord.â Thereâs nothing worse than a church trying to be fresh and turning out to be a little dated. Better to stick with the hymns and the organ than do ânewâ music that hasnât aged terribly well or do the new music in an embarrassing way.
The evangelical church needs to stop preaching the false gospel of cultural identification. Donât spend all your time trying to figure out how to be just like the next generation. Be yourself. Tell them about Jesus. And love them unashamedly. I think a lot of older Christians are desperate to figure out what young people are into because they are too embarrassed to be themselves and too unsure of themselves to simply love the people they are trying to reach.
Jesus said it best: âBy this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one anotherâ (John 13:35). Jesus did not say, âThey will know you are my disciples by how attune you are to new trends in youth culture.â Or âThey will know you are my disciples by the hip atmosphere you create.â Give up on relevance, and try love. If they see love in you, love for each other, love for the world, and love for them, they will listen. No matter who âtheyâ are.
Talk to people. Notice visitors. Invite new people over for lunch. Strike up a friendly conversation at the greasy pizza joint. Let your teenagersâ friends hang out at your house. Love wonât guarantee the young people will never walk away from the church, but it will make it a lot harder. It wonât guarantee that non-Christians will come to Christ, but it will make the invitation a whole lot more attractive.
Hold Them with Holiness
Let me make this clear one more time. Iâm not arguing that thinking about music styles or paying attention to the âfeelâ of our church or trying to exegete the culture is sinful stuff. Iâm not saying we shouldnât be asking questions related to cultural engagement. What Iâm saying is that being experts in the culture matters nothing, and worse than nothing, if we are not first of all experts in love, truth, and holiness.
Look at what God says in 2 Peter 1:5â8:
For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Did you pick up on the promise in the last verse? If we are growing in faith, virtue, knowledge, self-control, steadfastness, godliness, brotherly affection, and love, we will not be ineffective ministers for Christ. If ever there was a secret to effective ministry, these verses give it to us. Grow in God and youâll make a difference in peopleâs lives. If nothing of spiritual significance is happening in your church, your Bible study, your small group, or your family, it may be because nothing spiritually significant is happening in your life.
I love the line from Robert Murray MâCheyne: âMy peopleâs greatest need is my personal holiness.â Iâve given that advice to others dozens of times, and Iâve repeated it to myself a hundred times. Almost my whole philosophy of ministry is summed up in MâCheyneâs words. My congregation needs me to be humble before they need me to be smart. They need me to be honest more than they need me to be a dynamic leader. They need me to be teachable more than they need me to teach at conferences. If your walk matches your talk, if your faith costs you something, if being a Christian is more than a cultural garb, they will listen to you.
Paul told young Timothy to keep a close watch on his life and his doctrine (1 Tim. 4:16). âPersist in this,â he said, âfor by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers.â Far too much ministry today is undertaken without any concern for holiness. Weâve found that changing the way we do church is easier than changing the way we are. Weâve found that we are not sufficiently unlike anyone else to garner notice, so weâve attempted to become just like everyone else instead. Todayâs young people do not want a cultural Christianity that fits in like a Baptist church in Texas. They want a conspicuous Christianity that changes lives and transforms communities. Maybe we would make more progress in reaching the next generation if we were making more progress in holiness (1 Tim. 4:15).
Remember, the next generation is not just out there. They are also in here, sitting in our churches week after week. We often hear about how dangerous college can be for Christian teens, how many of them check out of church once they reach the university. But studies have shown that most of the students who check out do so in high school, not in college. Itâs not liberal professors that are driving our kids away. Itâs their hard hearts and our stale, compromised witness that opens the door for them to leave.
One of our problems is that we have not done a good job of modeling Christian faith in the home and connecting our youth with other mature Christian adults in the church. One youth leader has commented that how often our young people âattended youth events (including Sunday school and discipleship groups) was not a good predictor of which teens would and which would not grow toward Christian adulthood.â Instead,
almost without exception, those young people who are growing in their faith as adults were teenagers who fit into one of two categories: either (1) they came from families where Christian growth was modeled in at least one of their parents, or (2) they had developed such significant connections with adults within the church that it had become an extended family for them.3
Likewise, sociologist Christian Smith argues that though most teenagers and parents donât realize it, âa lot of research in the sociology of religion suggests that the most important social influence in shaping young peopleâs religious lives is the religious life modeled and taught to them by their parents.â4
The take home from all this is pretty straightforward. The one indispensable requirement for producing godly, mature Christians is godly, mature Christians. Granted, good parents still have wayward children and faithful mentors donât always get through to their pupils. Personal holiness is not the key that regenerates the heart. The Spirit blows where he will. But make no mistake, the promise of 2 Peter 1 is as true as ever. If we are holy, we will be fruitful. Personal connections with growing Christians is what the next generation needs more than ever.
Challenge Them with Truth
In the church-growth heyday, scholars and pastors were wrestling with how to reach out without dumbing down. Today I would argue that we reach out precisely by not dumbing down. The door is open like never before to challenge people with good Bible teaching. People want to learn doctrine. They really do, even non-Christians. Whether they accept it all or not, they want to know what Christians actually believe. Young people will not put up with feel-good pablum. They want the truth straight up, unvarnished, and unashamed.
Thom Rainer did a study a number of years ago asking formerly unchurched people the open-ended question, âWhat factors led you to choose this church?â A lot of surveys had been done asking the unchurched what they would like in a church. But this study asked the formerly unchurched why they actually were now in a church. The results were surprising: 11 percent said worship style led them to their church, 25 percent said childrenâs/youth ministry, and 37 percent said they sensed Godâs presence at their church. For 41 percent, someone from the church had witnessed to them, and 49 percent mentioned friendliness as the reason for choosing their church. Can you guess the top two responses? Doctrine and preachingâ88 percent said the doctrine led them to their church, and 90 percent said the preaching led them there, in particular, a pastor who preached with certitude and conviction.5 One woman remarked,
We attended a lot of different churches for different reasons before we became Christians. I tell you, so many of the preachers spoke with little authority; they hardly ever dealt with tough issues of Scripture, and they soft-sold the other issues. Frank and I know now that we were hungry for the truth. Why canât preachers learn that shallow and superficial preaching doesnât help anybody, including people like us who werenât Christians.6
When it comes to reaching outsiders, bold, deep, biblical preaching is not the problem. Itâs part of the solution.
The next generation in our churches needs to be challenged too. In his book on the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers, Christian Smith coined the phrase âMoralistic Therapeutic Deismâ to describe the spirituality of American youth. They believe in being a good ...