This is not your grandfather's church

A number of years ago  General Motors ran a series of ads trying to save their Oldsmobile line of cars. The slogan was "This is not your father's Oldsmobile." Young people were shown driving the car to try to impress upon people the Olds line was no longer a luxury line of cars just for the middle aged and older. The commercials did not work, and within a few years the Oldsmobile line of cars was gone.

I've gone back another generation in this blog title. The church is no longer your grandfather's church although many seem to think it is. Many churches haven't changed a thing since our grandfathers attended there and wonder why they are not attracting younger people.

This thought came to me as I began reading Marshall Goldsmith's book What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful. As the title indicates, this is not a book about churches. It is a book about how successful people can become more successful by working to change the things that might be holding them back. Still, the concept is valid for churches.

For a long time many declining churches believed if they just worked harder at the things that helped them grow in the past, that growth would return. These churches did not believe they needed to change anything; they just needed to work harder and get the few younger people who did attend there to become more committed. Unfortunately, that mindset was not effective.

Churches that have remained healthy, and have even grown in recent years, are convinced they just need to continue doing what they've been doing. After all, it's been effective so there surely can't be any reason to change anything. Again, that mindset will prove ineffective in time.

We are being called to reach a generation of people who are nothing like our fathers and certainly not like our grandfathers. Their mindsets are very different. The Builder generation and even the early Boomers (like myself) had a high regard for institutions. Millennials do not share that same regard. We had a fairly high regard for the denominations in which we were raised. Millennials also do not share that mindset. The list of differences could go on and on, and we cannot expect to reach this generation until we understand these differences.

Your church may be doing a lot of things right, but until it engages the new generations it will not reach them. It may just be one small thing that needs to be changed before you can effectively engage the new generations, or it may be that a lot of things have to be changed. But, until you make those changes do not expect to have much impact on Millennials and the generations that follow. Remember, what got you here won't get you there.