VISION, STRATEGY & TACTICS
It's tempting to say about our ministries that, at the end of the day, if we could just start drawing some bigger crowds, everything would be better. We work hard to design events and programs around the goal of drawing a bigger crowd than we had last time. When we go around the country and look for churches that are succeeding with Millennials, we look for the biggest crowds of young adults and ask how they got them there in the first place and try to develop a vision to do the same.
But drawing a big crowd isn’t a vision; it’s a tactic. It’s the way we want to accomplish something. It’s an answer to “how are we going to get this done.” Unfortunately, when it comes to working with Millennials, most churches are focused on their tactics without thinking at all about their vision for young adults.
In fact, not many churches have thought through a vision for helping 18-30 year olds engage with the leadership and creation of the church for the long-term future. If we start with that as our vision, it helps us define our strategy and then our tactics.
Let’s look at some foundational strategies that can become the building blocks for effective ministry with Millennials. You can deploy them in college programs, you can deploy them singles small groups, and you can deploy them in Millennial worship settings. If our goal is to engage this group in the life of the church, these building blocks will give us a way forward into this unique generation, no matter what tactics we use.
BUILDING BLOCK #1: LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
Okay, so here’s the deal about Jesus. He chose twelve. Twelve people to start, to focus, to finish his ministry with. God himself clothed himself in flesh, came to the human race and affected fundamental change in the universe for thousands of years and he did it by choosing twelve people.
Of course there’s more to the ministry of Christ and the work of the Cross. He taught thousands, he performed miracles, he drew crowds, he created a subversive movement of love in the time of the Roman Empire – but every step of the way, he walked with the twelve people he chose.
One small group of young men was his massive piece strategy to change the world. Whenever he performed a miracle, they were there and they were expected to learn how to do it themselves. Whenever he taught a sermon on a hillside, they were there and expected to teach it themselves someday. Whenever he loved someone on the fringes, they were there, being prepared to speak up to the church in Jerusalem and make a way for the outsiders to come into the faith. Jesus put all his chips on twelve. But it wasn’t a gamble, it was leadership development. It was discipleship.
If we are unwilling or somehow unable to make this strategy the center point not only of our ministry with young adults but with the church as a whole, we might as well pack up and wait for this generation to close all its churches.
This must be a foundational strategy in our work with millennials, in particular. This isn’t 18-30 year olds from generation X – young adults who didn’t trust anyone over thirty or who rebelled against authority and sought to take over the world by sheer force of will. This generation of young adults is very interested in engaging the wisdom and guidance of the generations that came before them. They are looking for mentors, for guides and for people who can help them get farther, faster in life.
In a recent survey of college students, they were asked to name the most important factor in choosing a church during their college years. While they talked about finding a place that was relevant to younger people or was close to campus, they also talked about the desire for relationships with older generations. One sophomore said, “I’m looking for a place that has people I can learn from. I don’t want to spend my college years hanging out only with college students. I’m looking for men and woman who can share wisdom with me.”
This strategy is slower and more difficult than creating a crowd-drawing event. Certainly Christ drew crowds, but first he chose twelve. If your church is interested in developing a ministry to the Millennial generation, perhaps the best decision they can make is to not develop a program, a pizza party, or a concert but, instead, develop a small group of people.
Find 5 or 6 college students or 20-somethings that your church can pour into over the next few years. Teach them how to feed themselves in their spiritual growth. Teach them how to deal with conflict and set healthy boundaries in relationships. Teach them how to handle their finances in a godly way. Teach them how to give. Teach them how to talk with their friends about Christ. Teach them how to invite people to church. Teach them how to go and make disciples of all nations. Teach them how to multiply their group into 5 new groups. Teach them to obey everything He has commanded.
If you want to know how to start a ministry with Millennials, start with developing leaders and with discipleship.
He picked twelve. No matter what was going to happen in His ministry, big or small, He picked twelve to experience it all together. People were his method. When He left the earth He had to leave the ministry in the hands of someone. He had to build INTO people his methods, his tactics, his value and his power. The way he chose to do that needs to be a key strategy in how we build our ministry with young adults
BUILDING BLOCK #2: RELATIONSHIPS
It’s something that gets talked about in churches all the time. “We choose people over programs” is an axiom I’ve heard a lot. I suspect we often use it as a platitude to make ourselves feel good about the ministry programs we are running.
It’s become so commonplace that the idea of choosing relationships over programs might have lost much of its actionable meaning in our ministry context. Sometimes it feels to me the same way it feels to walk into a suburban, middle-class home and see the stencil, the frame or the woodcutting hanging on the wall that says “Live. Laugh. Love.” I’m not sure what that really means, or what that family is doing about it, but it looks really pretty on their wall with photos of their children next to it. “People over programs” can easily feel like little more than decoration in our ministry homes.
But let’s take “people over programs” off the decorative shelf for a moment and really look at the idea of relationships as a key strategy to reaching the millennials.
Brad Holmes, the director of Union, the 18-29 ministry for Ada Bible Church in Grand Rapids, MI, knows why Millennials are coming to churches.
“They [millennials] have unprecedented access to fantastic biblical teaching and amazing worship music. That is not the reason they are coming to our churches anymore. They can get that anywhere they want. They are coming for community, they are coming for guidance. They are coming for something they can’t get as an app on their mobile device or on their laptop. They are coming for connection.”
Think about the implications of that truth for a moment. In some ways, the shift towards relationships as a strategy seems subtle but it’s really seismic. It’s the difference between creating a young adult program that has relational impact as an outcome, and a program that is specifically designed to build relationships throughout.
In Brad’s ministry at Ada Bible Church, they have made relationships a major reason why their program exists. As people come in to their Tuesday night meetings, they find themselves sitting around tables instead of rows. They don’t experience teaching as much as they experience conversation. A deal for half off appetizers at a local restaurant following the program is as much a part of the ministry as anything else.
When I asked Brad about the turnover ratio in his ministry, I assumed that there was probably a percentage of people who come and go and never really interact with anyone on a given night – typical of many church services or programs.
But when he paused and looked at me with puzzlement, I knew that he was operating with “relationships” as a key strategy. “I think it would be a complete failure if we designed a night where any one person didn’t talk to someone else at all” was his response.
The language of relationships was just second nature to him and his staff. It was unthinkable to create something that didn’t drive at that value throughout its execution.
Christ used this strategy as well. Relationships were not just a byproduct of the ministry he was doing with large crowds. He wasn’t hoping that while he was teaching the Sermon on the Mount, some people might become friends because he always started his message 15 minutes after the published start time or because he let them stay as long as they wanted after the loaves and fish were distributed.
He took time to laugh with people who wanted to party, to cry with those who were mourning. He took the time to lift up little children and talk with old ladies.
Greg Mutch, one of the staff members at Mars Hill Bible Church in Grandville, MI responsible for ministry with young adults talks about it this way, “One of the things that they are most craving is part of a person, not part of a program”
Millennials are looking for places that offer them meaningful connections. It’s high on their priority list. In fact, graduation from college can be the loneliest time in a person’s life, a time when all your built in social circles have been removed and you are stepping into the next stage of life in new and significant ways and often alone.
When Millennials are coming into our circles, into our ministries and into our churches, they aren’t looking for friendship. They are looking for friends. If we want to succeed in giving them greater connection to the local church, one of our primary strategies has to be about creating and sustaining a significant relational culture.
BUILDING BLOCK #3: AUTHENTICITY
Let’s give some language to a key value the Millennial generation has been struggling to find in churches over the last 10 years. It’s the value of authenticity.
Authenticity is not something we avoid in our churches on purpose, but it isn’t something we cultivate in many of our churches on purpose either. And the lack of authenticity is as close to a deal-breaker as you’ll find with the Millennial generation.
One of the reasons our churches struggle with this because we are trying very hard to give glory to God in as many ways as we can. But the struggle is that most of us don’t live glory-filled lives. Most of us live lives of everyday problems down here in the dirt and there is a long distance between the glory and the dirt.
In many of our churches, if you were to walk in to our main, identity-setting environment – our Sunday morning worship service – you’ll find a lot more of the glory than you will of the dirt. To the Millennial generation, this speaks to them that they don’t belong there.
My church had a fantastic Easter Sunday service a few years ago. Thousands of people were in attendance. A stage packed full of string sections, horn sections, soaring stage décor, choir anthem music. It was the epitome of ascribing glory to a risen savior. It was, by design, awe-inspiring and pretty awesome.
I happened to bring a 24-year-old friend with me that day that was disillusioned by the whole experience. He said to me “I really wanted to interact with my savior today – not watch a show about him on stage.”
You see, for most of our churches, Sunday morning is a pretty big deal. It’s high impact. It’s high value. We spend our money to buy a building, pay a preacher and put on a worship service that will reach people. In most churches there is a lot time spent trying to figure out a way to do the best we possibly can with the worship service.
While many Millennials might throw around words like “polished,” or “traditional,” or “high production value” for a lot of worship experiences, what they really mean is that “when you are trying so hard to be at your best, it tells me it’s not okay for me to NOT be at my best.”
Hear me on this, it’s not just about creating some sort of “participatory worship experience” in your churches or catering services only for Millennials, it’s about using a strategy of authenticity throughout your ministry that allows the glory to mean something in the dirt and people can bring their whole selves into the door of your fellowship.
For Millennials, authenticy is an element that’s evident not just in what values your church holds but how they hold them. They are keen observers on wheather the church’s talk matches their walk. If your church holds a value for the unchurched, but nothing in the worship service feels accessible to an unchurched person, they will sense it as inauthentic.
Use whatever tactics you can to create that value. If that means you preach with jeans on, then do that. If that means telling real life stories of life change, then do that. If it means creating conversation groups, or potlucks after church, then do that.
There’s no wrong tactic for pursuing authenticity except not being intentional at all about it. Without it, you might find the millennial generation unreachable.
BUILDING BLOCK #4: DEPTH
Closely tied to the value of authenticity is another foundational building block to working with Millennials – creating space for depth. One of the unique effects our churches are experiencing with young adults is a reaction to the seeker sensitive and mega-church models of the past 20 years in the sense that one of the aspects that grew churches in the past are viewed negatively though the lens of Millenials.
Throughout the late ‘90s and early 2000s churches were jumping on mega church bandwagons left and right, and for good reason – it was working. Churches like Saddleback Valley Church and Willow Creek Community Church were forging a new way forward with “seeker sensitive” services aimed at reaching the outsider.
Following the success of these movements, a word that began to fly about, usually placed inside of a dismissive comment about the “success” of large churches. It was the word, “shallow.” It’s easy to call such crowd-drawing techniques “shallow,” especially when your church does not have the capacity to reach such large numbers, but seeker sensitive was by no means meant to create a shallow end of the pool – it was meant to draw people to God.
In years since, however, many young people have grown to look upon the spiritual depth, or relative lack thereof, in churches as a sticking point to their decision to connect. Millennials are seeking truth and they believe that the truth is deep and impactful. When Millennials walk into a worship service and they hear teaching that skates along the surface of impact and transformation, they will want to leave.
You see, Millennials operate in a cultural paradigm where everyone is searching for truth and meaning in life and while many aren’t finding it in religion, they are finding it in spirituality. They have no qualms about accepting whatever your particular version of truth is, so long as it’s real to you and in order to be real it needs to be deeply impactful.
This is one of the reasons why new churches are reaching Millennials in new ways. When it comes to church multiplication and church planting, peoples’ lives are being deeply transformed by the gospel in visible and obvious ways on a regular basis. When a Millennial sees such a new movement of depth and life change show up in their community, they are instinctively attracted to it.
Authenticity and depth go hand in hand with each other because, to a Millennial, if it’s real, it will deeply affect you. If you’re not deeply affected, it must not be real.
Our culture today is not shying away from depth or from spiritual truth. Most of the non-Christians I know are some of the most deeply spiritual people I’ve met. They are searching, they are confused and they are interested in having the conversation. It surprises them to find out many of our churches aren’t interested in the same level of dialogue about spiruality and the real world and they are given rhetoric or platitudes in response to their probing questions.
BUILDING BLOCK #5: CALL TO ACTION
As someone who consults with churches all over the country, I fly a lot. On a recent flight, I noticed the dropdown TVs were playing an extended commercial for the Hard Rock Café. The unique thing about this commercial was not that it was clearly targeted at a Millennial generation with not one person looking older than 25 in the 5-minute spot. But what really struck me was that the subject matter was “Hard Rock Cares” and the ONLY topic of this commercial was all the good the Hard Rock Café was doing in the world. This was not simply about reducing, reusing & recycling but about digging wells in Africa, adopting orphans from south America, rescuing polar bears in the Arctic – things like that.
Later that same week I sat in the movie theater well before the show started. I’m one of those movie-goers that HAS to see the previews, so I get to the theater as early as I can. So as I was eating my popcorn alone in the theater, a Pepsi commercial came on. It was showing about 30 different people and the positive impact they were making in the world. Again, not a single person over 25. The tagline: “every generation refreshes the world.”
The “it gets better” campaign is a viral video phenomenon targeted at young people struggling with homosexuality designed entirely around providing hope and change when things seem the hardest.
The message of the Millennial generation is loud and clear: We want to make a deep, long-lasting and positive impact in this world.
And they will. Whether or not the church helps them in the project.
In fact, for many of us, the “world” is outpacing the church in the good it does on this planet. Young people want meaningful change to take place, but the church is offering pizza and “the amazing race” style outing for young adults. Equipping Millennials to enact change in the world not just for good but for the gospel has got to be a key strategy we employ in reaching the next generation.
BUILDING BLOCK #6: MEANINGFUL CONTRIBUTIONS
I’m currently the pastor of a young church with a young congregation of about 120 on a good week. One of my favorite parts of leading this church is the privilege I have to lead our Leadership Team. There are 6 of us on this team right now and 5 of them are between the ages of 25 and 35. I love that! I love it not just because of what it says about church leadership but because of what it means for church leadership.
It means that my leadership team doesn’t have the slightest clue as to what we are doing.
They’ve never done this before. Some of them didn’t grow up in a church; the rest grew up in churches that look nothing like ours. Everything we do is about trial and error and trying hard to follow where God is leading us.
I wish I could draw you a picture of what this experience of leading a church together has done for these Millennials – it’s changed their lives. It’s given them a reason to care about the church and a reason to care about the church making an impact not only in their own lives or in the rest of the world, but in the lives of people just like them. This is a group of people who are intoxicated with the idea that the church might do for someone else what it’s done for them. Seriously, they won’t shut up about it.
I think the key strategy for me in this experience is that Millennials need meaningful contributions to make to the life and leadership of the church. While our first response to reaching this generation might be to create a program or a service or some sort of niche in the church’s ministry to reach them, we’ll never fully succeed unless we engage them at higher levels.
A friend of mine was recently talking about working in a large, multi-site church and sitting around in an elders meeting while the pastor asked each elder to describe when he was “sold out” to this church. To a man, each of them talked about an experience in their 20s that pulled them into a key ministry area of the church in a major way and they haven’t let go since.
A group of men in their 40s, 50s, and 60s leading a church because someone gave them a experience to lead in the church when they were in their 20s. Millennials today need that same opportunity.
We need to provide them places of community with people like themselves. We need to provide them opportunities to be mentored and coached. We need to provide them spaces to serve and impact the world for good and we need to create relational environments where they are allowed to be exactly who they are.
Above all, we need provide them with MEANINGFUL contributions to the church. If we put them in a ghetto we will never help them achieve maturity. Use this as a strategy to find tactical ways of engaging them at the highest levels of decision-making.
Maybe that doesn’t mean having a church council of 20-year olds. But it might mean that all of your elders should be discipling a 20-year old or that your pastor should be part of a small group with Millennials. There are a million different tactics you can use to engage Millennials at the highest levels of your church but it won’t happen at all unless it becomes a key strategy in reaching into the next generation.
There aren’t very many wrong ways to instill these six building blocks into your church. They are foundational principles that can take shape through hundreds of different strategies and tactics. Where we might end up going wrong is to simply fail to address them at all. Before you launch into your first “college and career” ministry, or before you hire your first Millennial pastor, be proactive in engaging the leadership of your church in conversation around these six building blocks.
