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5 Things Young Adults Need from Church

2. Mentor and Create Space for Leadership

Mentorship is influential, life-changing and empowering. But we don’t always do this well. We’ve tried creating a structured way for mentorship to happen and it just didn’t work. Young adults don’t want to be awkwardly paired or to feel like they are needy kids. I think the younger generation should ask someone they respect to mentor them. It should start with their initiation, but I believe we can create an atmosphere in the church where this can happen more fluidly. Let’s create an environment where mentoring is accepted, encouraged, and modeled.

Friend, are you being mentored? Are you mentoring a younger leader? It’s what they need from church.

Two years ago, at the Global Leadership Summit, Chris Brown, a pastor at North Coast Church talked about creating room in your chariot for a young leader. Oscar Muriu, pastor of Nairobi chapel in Kenya, brought with him a whole team of young adults who were growing, leading, serving and being coached and mentored at the church. He believed you must never do life and ministry alone. He said, “The impact of your life is not on how hard you worked but on how many leaders you raised up.”

I’m sure you’re aware of this, but young adults are not just the future of your church, they are the present. What are you doing to teach, equip and empower your church?

3. Community

We talk about community all the time, but it seems to be the buzz word we don’t have a clue about. What is community? How do you facilitate it? Is it something you attend or is it something that just happens?

Community is simply defined as a group of people gathered together, yet we give this one little word so much power, weight, resources and agenda lines. Why? Because it matters. It’s what they need from church. Fellowship is a group of people, but one with friendly relationship, shared interests, feelings or values. Webster says it’s a state of being comradely. That’s closer. Maybe what we mean when we say we want community is that we want church. Not the building, but the body of Christ. We long for ecclesia, the called out, living, breathing, and functioning body of Christ.

In The Unfinished Church, Rob Bentz writes, “The church that Jesus is building is an eclectic, intriguing, quirky, diverse mess of humanity. That’s God’s way.”

We can’t customize church and community. Bentz shares, “If it were up to us to choose, God’s church would look a whole lot like you and a whole lot like me. The Church of the Mirror.”

There is joy and momentum in diversity. Community isn’t always pretty and attractive. Sometimes it’s messy and broken because people are messy and broken, but they’re also vibrant, forgiven and beautiful.

“For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.”
Romans 12:4-5

What young adults need from church is to find community where people are loved, valued and invited to play a unique role in God’s Church. How can we continue to model this and set up others well for community?