Youth Are A Separate Society

In my years of producing youth outreach events, I learned a lot of things about what works and what doesn’t work. When I started doing events, working with the pastors in the area, we would do two events back to back. Sometimes the first night was an event for the adults, and the second night was a youth event. I began to notice some things about the crowd that attended. When we did an adult event, almost no youth were present.

Why is that? Why don’t youth attend adult events?

Ken Hamm’s research gives us the answer. In his book, Already Gone, he reports that a top reason youth leave the church, is that they say it is boring.

In our event we found that about ten percent or less of the audience for an adult event was youth. In one adult event, it was much less than that. However, if we produced a youth event, the audience was consistently about thirty percent adults. By producing only youth events we could reach both audiences, but mainly youth. So, early on we moved to producing exclusively youth events.

There is a very good reason why youth won’t attend adult events. They think it will be boring. Also when you look at the promotion for the adult event, you probably don’t see presenters that appeal to youth that much. Another factor is that a large percentage of the youth population does not want to be with adults, especially in public. When I was young and a non-Christian, doing things with your parents was considered sissy stuff, so you didn’t want to appear in front of your peers doing anything with your parents.

I once talked to a Campus Crusade worker who told me they had started a successful youth service in the inner city, using predominantly rap music. The service increased to around 200 young people. Then the adults, who liked what they saw, began attending. When the adults move in, the young people quit coming, and the service fell apart.

For about nine years, I mentored a young man who took his first youth pastorate in a city of about 10,000 in rural Texas. He was very successful, and told me his success was mainly due to what I taught him about marketing. He took his youth group from about 20 to over 100 in one year’s time. The church was in an old high school, not a building with a steeple on it, so youth weren’t scared away by the “steeple church” stigma. Many of his attendees were unchurched kids that he went out and recruited at sports events.

His senior pastor instructed him to “strongly encourage” the young people to attend church on Sunday. I visited my friend for several days and was in several services, speaking for two of them. In every service, he told the young people they should attend the Sunday service, but even after repeated invitations, only about thirty of them did. The rest didn’t attend because they said it was boring. The thirty who attended the adult service were almost exclusively “church kids.” They had grown up in the church, and their parents attended the Sunday service. This group, the church kids, will attend an adult service because they have grown up with it. Their parents probably made them go, so they are used to it. They may bail out of adult church, however, when they move away to college.

Trying to get unchurched kids to attend a traditional church service is like “beating a dead horse.” This is what we’ve been trying to do for decades. It doesn’t work. They need their own church with a service in step with their culture, especially when they get into their twenties.

In a large church in Minneapolis, the youth program was quite successful, numbering in the hundreds on Wednesday night. The sanctuary was given to the youth program on that night because it was the biggest group of attendees. A lot of work went into transforming the sanctuary into a cutting edge youth environment every Wednesday. The service drew quite well from the surrounding middle schools and high schools.

Come Sunday, however, well . . . that was a different story. For the Sunday adult service, the youth all sat in one section, and there were about seventy of them consistently. Seventy . . . not hundreds. The reason? Well, I think you know the reason by now.

The same dynamic we found to exist in our event production also exists in the church at large. Youth don’t like to attend an adult service.

There is a big culture gap between youth and adults . . . a very big gap. David Kinnaman of Barna Research says that, in recent history, the gap between the adult and the youth cultures has never been larger.

Young people today are on their smart phones constantly. They process information on their phones that would make most adults dizzy. Honestly, it’s frightening and I don’t know where it’s going. Just yesterday, I spoke with a friend who teaches media productions at a college. He says the media, particularly social media, is changing so fast, you can’t keep up with it!

Not long ago I went into a coffee shop to work on one of my books. As I was ordering, I laid my rough draft on the counter. The lady behind me picked it up, thinking it was house material. When she looked like she was going to carry it off, I said, “Uh . . . Ma’am. That’s mine.”

“Oh,” she said, embarrassed. “What is it?”

“It’s a book I’m working on.”

“Oh, what’s it about?”

“Reaching youth.”

In obvious frustration, she said, “Oh, my granddaughter . . . I can’t reach her,” and she turned to the granddaughter in the line behind her, a high school senior.

I grinned and began to talk to her. Here was a typical teen-ager, and I love teen-agers. We struck up a conversation, and she was very relaxed with me. It was obvious she was a very nice girl, and she was texting. I asked her if she liked to text and her answer I think would just floor most adults, myself included.

“Yes,” she said. “Yesterday I sent 400 texts . . . but I’m an A student,” she added quickly, as if that made the texting totally acceptable.

400 texts? Are you joking me?

Well, there you have it. Understanding the youth culture and ministering to them is a moving target. Can we keep up? Somehow, we have to!

We have already lost this youth generation. The question is, “Can we get them back again?”

Photo designed and taken by Lorraine