Written by: CampUs4
5/19/2011 9:32 AM

Kill Your Church in 10 Easy Steps:
A Concerned Member’s Guide to Handling Those Pesky Twenty-Somethings

By Mark Parker

(This article earlier appeared on Mark's Blog.)

1. Don’t allow young adults to serve in a mission-critical capacity. We want them in church because they improve the singing, not because we want them to tamper with things.

2. Never try to meet informally with young adults. They are so undisciplined that they probably won’t show up anyway. Exception: if a young adult does something you don’t like, hold an intervention, but “invite” them to Starbucks for the meeting.

3. If you are forced to include young adults in your organizational structure, put them on committees. Nomenclature is important here. “Committee” is the word. Beware other terms such as “team,” “group,” or (gasp!) “huddle,” which imply equity among members. As if!

4. Your role is to keep young adults from making themselves look foolish. That’s why you have to tell them everything they need to know. They’ll thank you someday for keeping them from active engagement in congregational life until they are mature like you.

5. These rascals will always find ways to connect and will likely want audacious things like their own Bible classes and life groups. Allowing them to have these things is fine, as long as you realize the risk you run of encouraging them to stay.

6. If the young people do form a group or class, make sure older members start attending to “help and encourage.” Once enough “mature” members join the group, you can gain control of the situation.

7. Whatever you do, don’t allow young people to voice their thoughts in any forum where leaders might hear them and validate their opinions. If this does happen, ignore them with one of those really loud silences. (If you wear glasses, look over the top so that your disdain is visual as well as auditory.)

8. Because young people lack experience, their ideas can easily be ridiculed. After all, if their ideas were any good, the established, older members of the congregation would have already thought of it and acted upon it. You can always rely on “we tried that once, and it failed.” Works every time.

9. Most young adults are still exploring, trying to develop their own identities. You cannot let this happen in church. It challenges the status quo (which is Latin for “the way God wants it to be”).

10. Stifling the future is quite easy, but can take time. Remember, “patience is a virtue!” 

Mark Parker is Assistant Vice President of Harding University Graduate School of Religion (soon to be Harding School of Theology) in Memphis, TN. Check out his Real Spirituality Blog.

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