Drawing young people to church

Those items on the list look accurate to me. I think those are the things the church should be or is trying to focus on.

I think one problem is a generational approach to it. Older leaders trying to take a vague statement like “help my spiritual growth” won’t mean the same thing to a younger person. Do the younger people filling out surveys even know what they want or need?

I think if they loosen the reins on content and teachings (less correlation) they can more likely find good people able to bring relevant topics to the lives of younger people.

I think correlation weakens to message, and younger generations don’t have patience for it. They want what is relevant to them. And they are not wrong. They deserve more from a church.

Exactly, LH. That sounds to me like a problem with the items listed from surveys DJ listed.

It is an article about a survey commissioned by the United Methodist Church. The gist is how to draw Millennials and Gen X’ers back to church. The 5 things they came up with as needs/desires of young people are:

Church helps my spiritual development (39 percent)

Opportunity to find out more about God (38 percent)

Opportunity to make friends and nurture friendships (38 percent)

Knowing that anyone will be welcomed into the church community (38 percent)

Opportunity for support during difficult times (37 percent)

Maybe it’s implied or assumed to be woven in to this list, but I think if you asked my kids right now what is keeping them in the church it would be the experiences they’re having serving and being served. They don’t think the church has the corner on ANYTHING because for every grand, overarching truth taught in the LDS church, there is a compensating negative teaching or cultural stance that feels wrong to them. The tie that binds them is the way we serve. That has clicked well often enough and led to experiences with the Spirit that make this particular church home for them.

For now. I hope forever, but it’s a fragile thing.

Early adulthood is a rough time religiously across the world. We certainly are not immune to that.

I think the Church provides most of those thigns – for the people for whom the way they do it works. It doesn’t provide most of them for the people who want a different approach. In early adulthood, those who are not satisfied outnumbered those who are by a large margin – but, again, that is true in all religions (especially when you remove the most radically conservative groups who appeal directly to the young, disfranchised and angry).

The inclusion aspect is a glaring exception, particularly with the younger generations who value it more highly than their parents and grandparents.

We’ve got to stop boring people. Especially the youth. The last several times that we had the YM and YW combined with the adults for a 5th Sunday lesson (including today), the lesson made no attempt to include them, validate their experiences, or seek out their voices. I was looking around at all these totally checked out youth and it struck me that we had totally just wasted the last 50 minutes of their time. That is NOT the way to retain the young people.

I have to say the same was true in our ward today. Our YMP &YWP often can come up with some reason why the youth don’t need to be in the combined fifth Sunday thing, but they apparently failed at it today and we were all there and all bored. It was straight lecture by two “presenters.” The only “participation” was that they handed out quotes to be read ahead of time, but there were only 3 or 4 of those and that’s all the participants did – read the quotes. I was on my tablet the majority of the time.

It is an article about a survey commissioned by the United Methodist Church. The gist is how to draw Millennials and Gen X’ers back to church. The 5 things they came up with as needs/desires of young people are:

Church helps my spiritual development (39 percent)

Opportunity to find out more about God (38 percent)

Opportunity to make friends and nurture friendships (38 percent)

Knowing that anyone will be welcomed into the church community (38 percent)

Opportunity for support during difficult times (37 percent)

It makes me wonder how we are doing at the same things because we have the same problem. Just anecdotally from comments posted here, I don’t think all wards do a great job at helping spiritual development of individuals, and this might especially be true of individuals who have grown up in the church and heard all three hours hundreds of times before…I think the church fails miserable at knowing anyone is welcome…In reality I’m not sure the young people with purple hair, tattoos, and piercings feel as though they are welcome or that they fit in, and depending on where one lives I’m not sure people of a different socioeconomic class always feel they fit.

To me it looks like Church leaders haven’t focused more on what practical value the Church provides for its followers and what they could do better so far mostly because the Church has largely depended on a sense of obligation and social pressure to get members to stick around and conform to the Church’s expectations. So they haven’t really worried that much about giving Church members reasons to go along with all this beyond that because the general mindset has always been that this is simply what members are supposed to do because the Church is supposedly “true” and has exclusive authority, divine approval, ordinances like temple marriage, etc.

However, what has already changed from the time when this approach worked much better than it does now is that the internet has undermined the level of faith in the Church and its leaders compared to what they were used to seeing in the past and as a result many members no longer feel the same obligation to believe and do what they are told the way they used to. Another significant impact the internet has had that seems like it doesn’t get quite as much attention as exposing some of the embarrassing history and contradictions in the Church’s story is simply that it gives doubters/unbelievers some validation that they aren’t the only one that thinks this way and that it is alright to reject the Church’s teachings (social proof).

On top of that, so far the Church has depended heavily on having Church members get married fairly quickly to another active member as a way to help retain them over the long term but now many Church members are waiting longer to get married on average than in the past which is especially problematic for the LDS Church compared to some other churches because of the especially strict and intolerant hard-line expectations regarding chastity, the WoW, etc. and worthiness. It is definitely not an easy set of problems to try solve given the current level of deference to tradition, revelation, etc. even if Church leaders wanted to and felt like they should do something differently but it will be interesting to watch how things play out and how the Church reacts over the next few decades.

So they haven’t really worried that much about giving Church members reasons to go along with all this beyond that because the general mindset has always been that this is simply what members are supposed to do because the Church is supposedly “true” and has exclusive authority, divine approval, ordinances like temple marriage, etc.

I would agree with you on that…I also wonder though, if the older generation found practical value in having faith in that authority and divine power, even if it doesn’t manifest itself in this life, but hopes for eternities. That could very well have been what people were looking for before…It just may be that generations change in what is practical value. And the ship turns so slowly, that there is a gap…What do you think are practical values for today’s generation? What would they want in a church?

Personally I think the practical value and/or most common reasons religion appeals to people are generally the same for younger people as for older people such as providing a sense of belonging and community, meaning and purpose, hope for the future, answers to questions, etc. but some of these will be harder to get out of the Church if you don’t believe in it (whether young or old) especially when it currently puts so much stock on how important it supposedly is for all these claims to be true and relies on these claims to justify heavy costs that offset possible real life benefits of Church membership. I think the main reasons younger members tend to be more vulnerable to fall away from the Church are mostly because they don’t have the same family ties to the Church if they are not married yet or the same level of investment in it especially if they never served a mission or at least haven’t been paying tithing and doing callings year after year so both these reasons would typically make it much easier for them to just walk away from the Church if it doesn’t suit their taste for whatever reasons than for many long-time active members.

Also I think it has been a gradual process of decreasing influence where in the past many Church members would be surrounded by other faithful Mormons which would make it more likely for them to simply go along with what others they know believe and do but now more of them will go to school with more non-Mormons or less faithful members even in Utah than in the past so it’s just not as popular, expected, etc. as it used to be and they will often be less likely to be as judgmental toward anyone that doesn’t live by LDS standards so in many cases the Church’s teachings aren’t seen as something positive or easy to accept compared to older generations that grew up in an environment where that was the norm. That’s why I think it will be so hard to try to solve some of these problems because Church leaders apparently think this is the way God wanted it and it can’t be changed but at the very least it seems like they could be a little more forgiving and understanding toward supposed sinners and focus more on teachings that appeal to a wider range of people instead of so many polarizing ideas that literally drive many away and aggravate many that remain and try to make it work as long as they can.