I want to talk about age.
First, let’s get the obvious out of the way. All ages are good. Children, young adults, older adults — we all matter in the sight of God.
The ideal situation for a faith community is a balance of ages. That’s true for reasons of sustainability: If a congregation gets too elderly, it ceases to attract young families and soon, thanks to basic mortality, will cease to exist.
Balance matters for wellness: a lively congregation needs the energy of young adults, the challenge of children, the willingness of age to work hard and to dream.
Balance matters for accountability. The world around us is constantly changing. So must our mission and ministries change to meet the new and emerging. Otherwise, we get stale and inward-focused. We need a constant flow of new and younger constituents to keep us connected with the world as it is becoming.
The multichannel church might feel like all loss and no gain to older constituents. If they have stayed around this long, they have come to value a Sunday-driven church that sees worship as most, if not all, of what it needs to do. Moving beyond Sunday and pushing the church out into the community hold no apparent promise for them.
Older constituents need to give up their comfortable settledness. That’s just the way it is. If they want to keep their faith community vital, they must let it change.
The beneficiaries of multichannel ministries are young adults who crave a relationship with God but want it to fit their lives, especially their time availability, their ways of communicating, and their ways of forming community.
This is true both for young singles and for young families. In ways that older adults don’t always recognize, the lives of younger cohorts are just different. Low on their list is sitting in a pew on Sunday morning — it’s too passive, too much of a burden on busy schedules. Also low is finding God through the music, prayers and experiences that might have fed their parents and grandparents, but mean little to them.
At the moment, young adults seem to be flocking to non-denominational congregations that appeal specifically to young adults. Every city has several, maybe many, Christian communities that are throbbing with life and have an average age of 25.
Mainline congregations need to offer their own versions of such ministries. Older constituents accustomed to one-on-one, face-to-face pastoral care will need to free their clergy to connect with young adults. Tools like digital communications, projection screens, off-site group life, and mission trips will need to enter church life.
Many elderly constituents will resent such intrusions. All I can say to them is, get over it — if they want their church to have a future.
How much will need to change and how quickly? Do the math. If a congregation’s average age is 70, it needs to adopt entirely new ways within three years. At an average age of 60, make it five years.
I have heard some elderly constituents say that they just want their church to stay alive long enough to bury them. Not only is that self-serving, it is delusional. Sunday-only, change-resistant churches won’t last long enough to perform their funerals.
TOM EHRICH is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is a founder of the Church Wellness Project churchwellness.com. His Web site is morningwalkmedia.com.
