Empty Pews: Some Surprising Weaknesses of Cool Churches

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I am not personally concerned about this phenomenon, but some of you must be.  A little insight is emerging about it: at least one writer thinks he (or she) has a handle on what might be contributing to young people leaving the church.  Leaving the church is a manifestation of a number of different things, but a minister is looking at it from the point of view of “ministry”:  What are we doing that results in kids leaving the church?  That’s what they’re asking themselves.  For Ministers, of course, keeping people in church is the main business they’re interested in.  You can read the original article here, but I have de-churchfied the ideas for you, to make it less repugnant.

In the bad old days when I attended church, it was a community of people of all ages who participated in a variety of activities throughout the week, peaking on Sundays, for obvious reasons.  To my (admittedly peculiar) mind, looking back, the most valuable aspect of being a member of the Church culture was that you belonged to a community that shared certain values, and which enjoyed certain activities that might not make sense to the wider society, either because they didn’t subscribe to the bases of those activities (the Bible, etc), or because they felt they would not be welcome at those events unless they agreed to become members of the church, and pay their dues (which was largely true; money has always been a big deal in the church).

To a certain degree, activities were age-segregated.  Sunday School was for little kids.  When one was too bored by the structure of Sunday School, one graduated to Youth Fellowship, which met regularly once a week, but often at other times to play Ping Pong, or Bible Study, if the minister could talk you into it.  Often, the Youth Fellowship got persuaded to join the Choir, which, unfortunately, was considered the domain of some very old ladies, and some rather embarrassed older gentlemen.  Ladies in their thirties had the Women’s Fellowship, and were involved with flower arranging, and fixing food for church events, while adult men were pretty much in charge of everything else.

Presently, it became common for churches to deploy Youth Ministers to exclusively handle the ‘problem’ of Youth.  The Youth had to be put through the Confirmation procedure (a Protestant invention; for Catholics, I believe, the First Communion event is a lot more routine, and involves less serious indoctrination), and as times changed, the Youth had to be given special Events: Youth Services that were conducted exclusively by Youth, which were initially barely tolerated once in a while, but gradually became weekly events in every church.  It had finally come to the point where the Youth had their own services, while everyone else had their service at a different time.  This was the point at which, some observers believe, the whole thing went to hell in a hand-basket.

The actual fine mechanism is not clear; the statistics seem to show that the youth who have attended a church with a special youth program leave the church in greater numbers than the youth in churches that do not have a special youth program.

The article also deplores large Mega Churches.  In these churches, in which the weekly sermon becomes a major occasion for charisma and oratory, the Sunday services are more entertainment than humble worship.  It appears that most Christians are being told less and less about the true implications of the teachings of Jesus, the ways of the so-called Christian Life, and its roots in the sayings of Jesus and the disciples and the First Century Christian Community, and instead being coached to consider society as a hostile environment, and taught to consider the particular Church to which a person belongs as an endangered species that desperately needs total allegiance.

The author of the article concerned seems less interested in the psychological reasons (or even the so-called ‘spiritual reasons’ for the phenomenon), but rather looks at the statistics, and suggests that pandering to the kids’ preference for a ‘Cool’ church ultimately leads the kids to leave the church for whatever reason.  Note: the writer also seems to think that correlation is the same as causation.  It just may be that something about the nature of the communities in which special Youth programs are considered essential might also be conducive to loss of faith (or at least, loss of membership).

At least to me, the reason seems to be clear:  the Cool Church is no longer cool for adults; the concept of Cool is a tiresome thing for older people, and the rich interplay between intelligent adults and eager youth is entirely absent in Cool churches.  An age-stratified coolness is doomed to failure by its very nature.  To belong to a church means to belong to a community that requires a certain amount of toleration for the preferences of others.  There has to be give and take, and honestly, there is some satisfaction in a moderate degree of accommodation to the needs of others.  The only thing that has to be held in check is the tendency of the very, very old to hold the church in thrall to stale old principles and traditions that are not really related to the needs of the church or its so-called ‘mission’.  To the extent that the minister in charge could moderate the influence of the senior citizens, and their death-grip on all church institutions (such as choirs and bible studies and various subgroups), the church governance would be representative of the community at large, and the representation of various age groups would be proportional to their population.  But this extreme of slicing up the church into sectors of various age-groups that never meet all together except on special occasions appears to be a strategy that provides temporary comfort, but is ultimately doomed to reduce the numbers in the church.

Mega Churches

Meanwhile, we know that “ministry” has become a specialized occupation, and theological seminaries are approaching their work with the attitude of business schools.  They’re likely to counter the charges of over-accommodating Youth by saying that this is a very different World today than the World of the past, where youth would participate in the activities of either adults or kids.  In this brave new world, young people insist on their own areas, times and places not polluted by either the very old or the very young.  Youth Ministry is now a specialized area of work, just like malpractice law (they will claim).  Unfortunately it is impossible to counter any arguments that take that position, since by definition this world is different from the world of five minutes ago.  If a Youth Minister claims that the youth of the last five minutes need a different ministry than the youth of ten minutes ago we are helpless to refute his claim, but it is still open to question whether the particular approach he was trained with in seminary is one that will work.  The effectiveness of the approach must be justified both by its results and by the principles of Christianity and Christian morals and ethics, and educational principles too.  Heaven knows that educational principles have not held up very well;  schools of education have not done much better than seminaries in preparing teachers and administrators to deal with their work.  Unfortunately, of course, educationists are just as likely to reject any criticism from outside their discipline, while from within their discipline they can justify almost any course of action, since standards of demonstrating effectiveness in the discipline of education are notoriously dubious.

It seems to me, though I am a perfectly happy atheist, that the reason that actual believers leave the church is because it is, perhaps, no longer a place where the faithful can comfortably and rationally discuss the religious basis for their morality and their search for justice among like-minded people, without being bullied by sundry special-interest groups within the church.  There is still a need for a functioning church; young parents, anxious to bring up their children in a religious environment, still need a spiritual home.  But Cool Churches probably do not provide that.  I’m too uncomfortable inside a church to actually go and check it out.

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