Why Don't Our Kids Come to Church?

Sorry, I don't have the answer to that. At least not the answer, because there isn't one single, neat-and-tidy explanation.

I do know that it's a question usually asked by folks who are my age (60) and older. And I started to reply, "Why don't you ask them?"



Douglas Coupland

I'm not one who believes that there is a high and unbridgeable divide between generations. In fact, I don't think we human beings have changed all that much from biblical times. We still face the same delights and dilemmas as we always have. That's why Shakespeare still speaks to us.

But one of the reasons why our churches are so unappealing to young people is that the people who run those churches are so disinterested in what young people care about.

On The Current on CBC radio the other day, I listened to an interview with the novelist and artist
Douglas Coupland. (Here's the link: 
http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/episode/2014/10/08/douglas-coupland-and-the-internet/ )

Coupland was talking about "the internet brain" -- how the internet has started to rewire the way we think. If you're over 40, you can remember what it was like before the internet. If you're under 30, you've never known anything different. And the internet, according to Coupland, is profoundly reshaping the way we think and relate to one another.

He described being in a hotel lobby where all these 20-somethings were sitting with their laptops on their laps and their earbuds in their ears, doing their own thing -- but with a sense of doing it together. "Maybe this is a new kind of socialization," Coupland said, "where you're in your own bubble, but it's
important to be with other people who are in their own bubbles."

The internet is "fantastically solitary," but it has an amazing capacity to create groups. We're in a time when it's unclear whether which of these will win out -- the individualism or the group-creating capacity of the internet -- but it is certainly changing us.

One of the most fascinating parts of the interview was when Anna Maria Tremonti asked Coupland what worried him most. He talked about how the future of the internet will be "machines talking to machines." The history of telecommunications so far has been people talking to machines, but more and more it will be machines talking to machines -- about us -- what we buy, where we go, what we do.

And this "calls into question the nature of why we are even here in the first place. Why do we even exist?"

We can't ask "Why don't our kids and grandkids come to church?" without understanding that this is the world they live in. It may be a world that is so foreign that we can't even imagine ourselves into it, but we have to try. Because the main reason, as far as I can tell, that younger people are indifferent to the church -- and I think that's key, they're not hostile, they just don't care -- is that their parents and grandparents churches just have nothing to say to them.

Note -- the solution to this is not to simply update the content -- to tell them the Bible is a myth you don't really need to believe -- or the style -- bring guitars and drums into worship. The task we're faced with is deeper than that. It's finding a way to listen, really listen, to what life is like for teens and young adults with tut-tutting, what makes them tick; to appreciate the different ways they form communities and how they process the Big Questions. I happen to think their Big Questions aren't really that different from their elders'. It's all about how to find beauty and meaning in a world that might seem cruel and indifferent, where they have come from and where they're going. They just deal with these in a different way than Grandma and Grandpa.  

If we would realize it, the church just might have more to offer than it realizes. Douglas Coupland said that by far the most prevalent question younger people ask him is, "How do I inoculate myself against change? How do I protect myself from the internet?" He didn't use the words, but I think he was saying, "In a world where machines talk to machines, how do I maintain my soul?"

His reply is, "What do you love to do?" Do you love to cook, or make something? Find what that is, and do it. That is what will connect you with your basic humanity that will endure regardless of what technology may bring.

This may seem trivial or unsatisfying to those of us who believe that there is a God unimaginably more complex and mysterious than any of us will ever understand, who is the beginning and end of all things. But a basic theological truth is that we can only connect with that God as human beings. We do not have direct knowledge of the divine, but only knowledge mediated by the limits and possibilities of what is human. Doing things that keep us grounded in our essential humanity, and connect us to others, is a prerequisite for the knowledge of God. And it's something that our churches, for all their faults, do intuitively. We need to be more reflective, more intentional about that.

Long ago, St. Irenaeus said, "The glory of God is man [sic] fully alive." If we want our young people to care about the church, the church needs to stop caring so much about things young people couldn't care less about; to make the effort to understand what being fully alive means for them, and find non-manipulative, non-self-serving ways to help them understand it too.