It’s no secret that churches in America are losing 18 to 30 year olds.
The teens our youth groups leave home for college and within a few years they are missing in action. Conventional wisdom has been ‘don’t worry about it; they’ll come back when they start having children’.
At least I think that’s the popular view; I’ve certainly had many older pastors tell me the church always benefits when children appear in a marriage and we suddenly discover our MIA’s.
I think conventional wisdom is wrong.
People are marrying later: the age for a first marriage is 27 for men and 24 for women. (Shouldn’t that tell us something that sociologists and demographers are writing about how old people are at their “first marriage”?)
A report from the Pew Research Center suggests the link between marriage and parenting isn’t present for many couples.
“…just four-in-ten (41%) say that children are very important to a successful marriage, compared with 65% of the public who felt this way as recently as 1990.”
Those older pastors were right twenty plus years ago. You got married, had children, and then became involved in church, PTA, and little league because that it was all a package deal. If marriage and children are no longer part of the same package, then isn’t it reasonable to assume the whole deal has fallen apart?
If we’re going to reach this age group, we have to see that they are staying single longer, cohabitating more frequently, and are less likely to view children and parenting as an important part of marriage. Ignoring them and waiting for a return to church when the kids come along is no longer a viable option.
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