Perhaps you hadn’t already heard about millennials leaving the church in droves, leaving many church leaders scratching their heads as to what to do about it. The late Rachel Held Evans came out with a piece on CNN.com, stepping into the gap to explain why they are leaving.
Apparently it struck a nerve; it was shared over 170,000 times. Speaking as the voice of a generation, she raised issues like our exhaustion with the culture wars, poor handling of teaching on sexuality, gay marriage, science and religion, and putative weakness on social justice. Instead, millennials want, and need, a deeper encounter with Jesus.
Of course, as the college and young adult guy at my church, as well as a millennial myself (freshly 27), I read her piece and the follow-up with great interest. I saw a number of those 170,000 shares in my Facebook feed, with loud cries of “Amen!” and some disgruntled nay-saying. I probably uttered both as I read it.
While there were a number of insightful, reassuringly critical and helpful interactions with her piece, addressed to the churches and readers in general, I wanted to briefly address myself more directly to my fellow millennials here.
Millennials Leaving the Church
I’ll be honest, my initial instinct when I come to pieces like these is to balk a bit. I worry that we can tend to come off as whiny, demanding or entitled.
Even worse, there’s a sort of myopia involved in thinking Christianity must change or die every 30 years or so.
We’re not the first group of young’uns frustrated with the church, and maybe we need to question ourselves a bit more here. That said, I want to acknowledge that I think we were failed. This failure was more than weak, harmful teaching on sexuality, or false science/religion dichotomies.
RELATED: Perhaps Millennials Are Seeking Community
Those errors are there, to be sure, and ought to be dealt with, but the failure I’m thinking about goes a bit deeper.
One thing I think the pop Evangelical church has truly dropped the ball on is talking to us about the church.
I mean, honestly, during all the Sunday School lessons, high school talks and special Bible studies, I’m not sure I heard any solid teaching about the church until I hit college. This was a problem because once I hit my bitter phases, I didn’t really have much of a doctrine of the church to fall back on; to me, the church wasn’t really the beloved bride of Christ; I hadn’t been forced to consider the import of Christ’s body to which He has inseparably bound Himself as its head; there wasn’t really a people of God, elected to be spotless and pure in Him.
