Your church will attract who you are

I mentioned in yesterday's post that I had attended an event that had Tony Campolo as the featured speaker.  At one point in his presentation he referred to a common statement we often hear in smaller churches: they want to reach young people because they are the future of the church.  I have addressed in previous blog posts, but Tony gave it a slightly different slant that I have.  He said two things significant about this statement.

One is that if your church does reach young people it will likely benefit other churches.  If you want to reach young people because you think that will grow your church you are probably mistaken.  Reaching these young people for Christ is reason to celebrate, but it is often the case they will grow up and leave your church.  Their schooling or employment will cause them to move away, or they will marry someone and end up going to that person's church.  Even when I married young people who attended our church they almost always began attending the church their new spouse had attended.

The other point he made reminded us how difficult it is for smaller churches to effectively reach young people.  It may be a great goal, but the reality is that when the congregation is made up of primarily older people it is very hard to reach young people.  It would probably be a much more effective strategy to reach out to people who are most like the ones already in our congregation.  I have long found it interesting that few smaller churches specifically target senior adults.  We want to go after young families with children because we think that will help our churches grow faster, but these are the folks who are already overwhelmed with time and family demands.  Maybe we think all the older people in our communities are already Christians and don't need the Gospel.  Most churches would soon find out that is not the case if they contacted even a few senior adults.  In fact, what many of our churches would learn is that these are the people who are thinking about eternal matters and might be most open to what the Gospel says.  They know they are nearing the end of their lives, and many of them have a lot of questions about that.  The church is really the only institution equipped to answer many of those questions.  Our Gospel message is the only one that offers a word of hope to persons who are dealing with end of life issues.

The small church I pastored called several youth ministers to help us reach out to younger people.  Some of those we called were very effective youth ministers, but we were never able to effectively reach young people.  Our church grew through middle-age and senior adults who were invited by our members to visit our services.  I wish today we had replaced the youth ministers with someone who was given the specific task of ministering to the senior adults in our community.  For many of our smaller churches with older members that may be the best way to impact our communities.  At the very least, I think it is something worth considering.