5 Reasons Young People Are Leaving Your Church

I wonder, what keeps you up at night?

When it comes to your church or ministry, what issue is forefront? You find yourself saying, “If we don’t fix this...we might be in trouble!”

For me, it is the reality that young people are increasingly missing from our church. We have tons of kids, teenagers, parents with kids, middle aged people and, increasingly, older people. There is one age group missing from that list; 20 somethings.

I’m guessing you’re in the same boat. If not, I invite you to leave copious suggestions in the comments below.

While we haven’t solved the problem yet, we are working very hard at becoming a church that keeps and attracts young people. We’ve studied all the research and conducted surveys and exit interviews ourselves.

And so, I’d like to share 5 reasons why young people are leaving churches and offer a few suggestions on how to change the script.

1. Lack of Authenticity

Something that we’ve learned from our own research, as well as an important book on this subject, Growing Young, is that young people value authenticity.

By authenticity, I mean that people from our church, especially those speaking, talking or singing on the stage appear to be real people with real lives and real struggles.

At my church, one of our values is excellence, which is a great value to have. Our hope is that everything we do in our services is done well.

Our musicians are technically great, our lighting and sound all enhance the experience. Our preaching is done without notes and with a high level of skill. The entire service is scripted down to the minute.

All of these facets of our service are fantastic except for the part that they can inadvertently make us appear overly produced, too polished, too slick and even fake.

What we’ve learned is that the younger generations (Millennials and Gen Z) place a much higher value on authenticity than on polish and perfection. Repeated feedback has shown us that the most appreciated moments of our services are when we go a bit off script, when something breaks down and we have to adlib or when the preacher shares a meaningful story from their personal life.

Why?

Because in these moments the audience gets a glimpse of real people. The audience feels like they actually get to know the worship leader or speaker.

Authenticity isn’t about sharing your most embarrassing moment, a deep dark secret or anything like that. It’s about feeling like you are getting to know the person with the microphone and that the person on stage isn’t afraid to be real.

Over and over again, research has shown that young people are leaving churches that feel inauthentic. So, if you want to keep and attract young people to your church, find ways to be appropriately authentic.

2. Lack of Warmth

Another value of younger generations is warmth. This is a term I’m stealing directly from Growing Young.

When you walk into an environment that is warm, you feel like the people there are happy that you just showed up. You feel like they care about you and want to make sure you have a great experience.

If you want to have a warm church, we’re talking about great hospitality.

Let’s think of a few examples:

You get the idea.

What research and our own experience has taught us is that younger generations place a high value on warmth. They are very likely to choose a church that makes them feel like they are actually wanted.

So, if you’re wondering where all the young people at your church went, you may want to evaluate your hospitality ministry: parking attendants, greeters, ushers, information desk people, etc.

Also, great coffee will help.

3. Lack of Community Engagement

One of the main reasons young people are leaving churches is that they don’t believe their church cares about the needs of the community. For Millennials and Gen Z, a church that is perceived as selfish is just the worst.

And, the churches that are attracting young people are the churches that are engaged in projects and partnerships to serve their community.

Our church recently shifted the way we talk about community engagement. For years, we have served our community in a variety of ways without much fanfare. During our weekend services, we didn’t talk that much about what we were doing as a church in the community because it felt sort of like bragging.

But, what we’ve recently learned is that we need to talk about what we are doing in appropriate ways because our young people, in particular, are dying to know if we actually care about our community. They perceive our church to be all about ourselves - getting bigger, more campuses, etc.

One of our main focuses for the next few years is to become a church that leads the way in serving our community, both because that is what a church should do and also because we want to influence young people and young people want to be part of a church that is active in the community.

4. Lack of Courage

Here’s something that I find surprising: With as pluralistic and tolerant as our society is, you would expect that younger generations would prefer that we keep silent about difficult and controversial issues.

Based on my experience, this is actually false. Younger generations want to belong to churches that have the courage to engage the issues of the day.

When a tragedy strikes our nation, young people want their church to talk about it in church. And, even more surprisingly, they want us to talk about what we believe as followers of Jesus, even about controversial issues from politics to LGBT.

Of course, they want us to speak with grace, kindness and empathy, but it feels inauthentic and even manipulative to skirt around controversial topics.

When we avoid talking about difficult issues, the vibe we send is that we are more concerned about not offending people than speaking the truth. In other words, we are more concerned about our attendance than speaking up in a way that could possibly offend someone.

Now, this is obviously an area where we must tread carefully, but if you are serious about keeping and attracting young people, I would encourage you to create appropriate environments for talking about difficult topics from theological and biblical perspectives.

5. Lack of Leadership Opportunities

The last reason young people are leaving our churches is that there aren’t opportunities to lead and serve in meaningful ways.

For a variety of reasons, some good, some bad, we have a tendency to require leaders in our churches to be older. Obviously, some leadership positions should require wisdom that only comes from life experience, but many other important roles could and should be open to younger people.

Younger generations grew up with social media. They are accustomed to being heard, speaking up and making an impact, even from a young age.

In almost every other aspect of their lives, age has no bearing on their ability to influence and lead. And yet, in the church they are often required to sit back and watch because they are the church of tomorrow.

This makes us feel archaic and irrelevant.

If we are interested in keeping and attracting young people, we must allow - actually we must empower, them to be the church today.

If you are a church that is losing young people, I would encourage you to evaluate where young people are allowed to lead and serve and wherever possible, find ways to include them in appropriate ways.

Wrap Up

Let’s be honest, many of our churches are growing older because we are losing young people after they graduate from our youth groups.

There are a variety of reasons why this is happening.

The five I’ve described in this post are just a few that I’ve experienced or encountered in research. Hopefully, this post has encouraged and challenged you to consider how to include, welcome and empower young people.

We’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas in the comments below.