Consider the widely disseminated window into the faith of young adults, or “Millennials” – so called because they are the first generation to come of age during the new millennium. According to the Pew Research Center, the headline is that this collection of teens and twenty-somethings are “less religiously affiliated” than previous generations. To be specific, one in four Americans age 18-29 do not affiliate with any particular religious group.
As Stephen Prothero rightly observed in his essay in USA Today, this is not news; it is a “sociological truism that young people cultivate some distance from the religious institutions of their parents, only to return to those institutions as they marry, raise children, and slouch toward retirement.”
Similarly, many of the “next” churches we flock to – as attendees or leaders – have little of the true “next” about them. More often than not, what is behind the attention is little more than a gifted communicator or a niche-focus or tried-and-true contemporary approaches in a traditional context, maybe one or two twists on previously envisioned programs – coupled with a growing edge of town. Yet the seduction of the “next” lures us to race to their conference to find the “secret” to success.
But racing toward the “next” is more than just deceptive – it can be dangerous.
According to James Katz, who directs the Center for Mobile Communications Studies at Rutgers University, our current level of engineering knowledge allows products such as the iPhone to be developed more quickly than ever before. With basic performance less and less of a concern, consumers will purchase on the basis of looks. Add in what he calls “the professionalization of hype,” and you have the life of a product burn hot – and fast.
Meaning you can buy into the “next” before you know whether it was ever worth buying into in the first place. With an iPhone, you’re only out a few hundred dollars. With a church, the stakes are much, much higher.
And even if not dangerous, it can be discouraging, particularly when the church you got the “next” from changes to the “next next” thing, and you are left high and dry trying to figure out what to do with the old “next.”
Here’s the critical question for the “next” – do you know why you are doing it?
This is a pressing question for every church leader as they grapple with mission, strategy, and method in light of reaching out to an increasingly post-Christian culture. There is a myth that churches are successful because they do certain things; in truth, churches are successful because they know why they do certain things. In other words, there is a clear missional target on the wall.
This is why the most effective churches lead the way for innovation, and those who borrow their innovations get frustrated when the church they copied drops what they copied for something even more innovative.
This is far from original with me.
In How the Mighty Fall, bestselling business author Jim Collins poses a simple but profound question: If you were in organizational decline, what would be the signs? What made the question more pressing was Collins’ early sense, later confirmed through his research, that decline is analogous to a disease, perhaps like a cancer, that can grow on the inside while you still look strong and healthy on the outside.
He calls it “the silent creep of impending doom.”
