The generation missing from church
Published: Mon, 07/14/25
Updated: Mon, 07/14/25
Sessions Include:The Good and Beautiful Community, Lesson #1 Why Study Books?My church recently transitioned to using books as curriculum in our Sunday School. The reason is simple. My life has been profoundly influenced by the reading of books. I don’t think my life has ever been changed by any curriculum piece I have ever read. Ever. I have actually surveyed a number of groups I have taught over the years, asking: Has your life ever been changed by any curriculum? The most common response is for people to laugh out loud. Our first study was the Bless book by Dave and Jon Ferguson. It is a great study on relational lifestyle evangelism. About half-way through the the study, we did a survey to help determine what we would study next. No one wanted to go back to the curriculum. Not. One. Person. The #1 choice for what to study next was a tie:
We will be studying these two books over the next year and a half or so. Here is what Amazon says about Ortberg’s book: The Me I Want to Be will help you discover spiritual vitality like never before as you learn to "live in the flow of the spirit." Why does spiritual growth seem so difficult? God's vision for your life is not just that you are saved by grace, but that you also learn to live by grace, flourishing with the Spirit flowing through you. And this book will show how God's perfect vision for you starts with a powerful promise: All those who trust in God "will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit" (Jeremiah 17:7-8). Pastor and best-selling author John Ortberg first helps gauge your spiritual health and measure the gap between where you are now and where God intends you to be. Then he provides detailed tasks and exercises to help you live in the flow of the Spirit, circumventing real-world barriers - pain and sorrow, temptations, self-doubt, sin - to flourish even in a dark and broken world. As you start living in the flow, you will feel:
God invites you to join him in crafting an abundant and joy-filled life. The Me I Want to Be shows you how to graciously accept his invitation. I have just completed a new, 22-week study of John Ortberg’s book, The Me I Want to Be that we will be using in my church. (I had previously done a 7-week study.) I have always thought that using books as a curriculum would be a good idea, and I have written a lot of book studies over the years. One of the things that actually using books as curriculum caused me to realize has to do with cost. By writing a study on every chapter of this book, instead of my previous study that had a lesson for every section, the cost drops to below what we were paying for curriculum. Better curriculum. Cheaper cost. Win. Win.
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A people group is missing in our churches. They are a very specific group, at least in terms of age. They are the eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds. Some church experts call these “the missing years.” Once young people turn eighteen, they typically stop going to church. We see them return, like the swallows of Capistrano, twelve years later, often because they are married and have had their first child, and church seems like the right thing to do. But why do they leave at eighteen? As the parent of a seventeen-year-old who has grown up in the church, I thought it would be good for me to find out what he thinks about church worship. We sat down one Saturday afternoon and had a discussion about his likes and dislikes of Sunday worship. “What do you like about church, Jake?” I asked. “The sermons sometimes are my favorite part,” he answered. “Not all of them, just the ones I can relate to, the encouraging ones.” “What is your least favorite part?” I followed up by asking. “I don’t like singing. Well, I like listening to people sing, but not singing out loud with others. It doesn’t seem important.” “All singing?” “No, I do like hymns. I just have a hard time relating God to a rock band—I can’t see Jesus playing lead guitar. I liked those times we went to the Orthodox service—the chanting sounded cool. But the service was too long, and I didn’t like standing the whole time. I’m not a big stander,” he answered. “What other parts of worship do you enjoy, or get something out of?” I asked. “I like praying. But sometimes the pastors pray too long. I also like hearing the Bible read, or reading it out loud together. I also like when we say the Apostles’ Creed, because we learned it together,” he said. “What about the things we do as a group, like baptizing people or taking Communion?”
Reflectively journal on what you like about worshiping in your community. What draws you closer? What would you prefer to change? What can you learn from those things you’d change?
“Seeing someone get baptized is fine. I like that. I also like Communion a lot—but I wish we had real bread rather than wafers. They taste kind of bad.” “You yourself were baptized in the same church we still attend. You have grown up with this community. What do you think of when you think about the people?” I asked. “Our church has grown a lot, so I don’t know everyone, but seeing people who know me, who say, ‘Jacob, I remember you when you were five years old running down the aisle’ is kind of nice. I like the older people; they are the nicest.” I learned a lot in this short conversation. I was surprised to hear Jake likes hymns, and even more surprised he does not like the band. In my generation we rejected the hymns and loved having electric guitars in worship. Perhaps something is shifting, or maybe it is just him. I found it interesting that Jake enjoys the parts that are the least like the world he normally lives in. No one says the creeds, preaches about Jesus or partakes of Communion in day-to-day life outside of the church. I will hang on to this should he, like so many, take a twelve-year sabbatical from corporate worship. I can hear some people saying, “You should make him go to church, even when he is eighteen.” That goes against my entire understanding of the nature of the kingdom of God and of the human heart. I will trust in the goodness of God, who has made himself known to Jake through the years. Those sermons did not fall on bad soil. Those times of taking Communion, of listening to the Bible, of praying with people will not go to waste. Instead of making him stay connected to church, I might try to get him to read the following section of this chapter. Instead of making people feel guilty about not going to church, I would rather try to make people excited about the opportunity, which can only happen when we really understand what worship is all about. James Bryan Smith, The Good and Beautiful Community: Following the Spirit, Extending Grace, Demonstrating Love (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Formatio, 2010), 53–55. If you would like to explore this new study, it is available on Amazon, as well as part of Good Questions Have Groups Talking |
