Wake Up! The Clock Is Ticking for Churches

Looking into the near future, Tom Sine predicts many Christian churches will have to close their doors because they have an aging membership that is not being replaced by younger people.

Following the course they are on, said Sine, many churches in North America will continue to dwindle in resources and membership and become increasingly irrelevant because their priorities don’t mesh well with millennials, who are coming of age after the dawn of the 21st century and who could help make needed changes in a world dominated by social media and political disruption.

“The clock is ticking. I am urging churches to wake up to the ways millennials are both a good news and a bad news generation,” said Sine, author of the new book Live Like You Give a Damn!: Join the Changemaking Celebration.

The bad news, he said, comes from recent Pew Research Center data that shows churches are losing millennials at an alarming rate. According to Pew, some millennials say they are too busy with work, school, and daily responsibilities to go to church. Others say they grew up in homes in which the parents were busy and attending church wasn’t particularly important.

“Some church leaders are hoping when the 80 million millennials start having families they will come back to church,” said Sine. “However, I haven't found reports from any denominational leaders that the recently married millennials are coming back.”

Then there is the good news: “A huge number of millennials want to . . . invest their lives in making a real difference in the lives of people in their neighborhood and their world.”

While he realizes younger people aren’t the only answer to the survival of the church, they can bring to it such qualities as “a love for mission and new stuff, especially the edges of what younger leaders are creating,” said Sine, “powerful critique of the Western dream of the good life,” and “a stunning ability to think out of an alternative imagination as to how Christians might dream and live out a dream of a different kind of good life shaped by the kingdom of God.”

At the request of Christian Reformed Church leaders, Sine, who lives in Seattle, Wash., will be in West Michigan in mid-March to speak about his new book and the future of the church.

Steve Timmermans, executive director of the Christian Reformed Church and a member of First Christian Reformed Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., said he has read Sine’s new book as part of a weekly gathering at which he and others discuss what they’ve read and then pray together and encourage one another.

“This book was really helpful is trying to discern what it means to be an engaged member not just of my church but also of the neighborhood/parish of the church and, in this present moment of great and rapid change, what it means to be open to and focused on the coming generations who will lead the church,” said Timmermans.

“This book is a reminder of the need to keep praying that the church will not be an institution that people, especially young people, are ready to walk away from, but a living body of Christ that needs them — their energy, their vision, their commitments, their full gifts,” he added.

Sine’s book is a mixture of personal testimony (for example, a conversion on the first Earth Day in Hawaii), profiles of people and places that exemplify creative attempts to address large problems, and lively, easy-to-follow writing.

After reading the book, Timmermans joined Andrew Ryskamp, former director of World Renew, and others to invite Sine to speak to two groups in West Michigan.

Sine will address a group of business and civic leaders at First CRC on March 15 and guide them through exercises on how to put into action some of his suggestions on meeting the challenges of the future. He will do the same on the next day for ministry leaders at the Grand Rapids office of the CRC.

As he prepares for the presentations, Sine is doing a lot of homework on the economy, the housing market, and other issues facing West Michigan businesses and churches so he can help pinpoint ways in which area leaders can face the future.

“So here is my pitch,” said Sine. “I simply advocate something both very simple and very radical. I am trying to persuade church leaders over 40 to invite the change-making ideas of people under 40.”

How often, he asks, do older church leaders and members invite the younger people to join them to get to know the people living in the area where the church is located? How often do they walk the neighborhood together? How often are millennials asked for their thoughts on how to improve the church? How often are millennials asked to be a key part of worship or sermon planning?

“Each generation has its own gifts, and millennials are a godsend. Why not invite them in right now to the conversation of how to best anticipate some of the changes that are coming?” Sine asks.

Besides speaking about the need to be more inclusive of younger people, Sine will be talking to ministry leaders in West Michigan about changes coming as a result of cutbacks in U.S. spending on social programs.

“Congress is shifting the focus, and increasingly it will be up to churches and others to up their investments in the community,” said Sine.

This will likely mean that churches will be asked to join with others in their community to respond to needs — and not just with money. In fact, imagination and not necessarily money is what Sine is talking about.

His new book is filled with examples of churches starting farmer’s markets, gathering with others in neighborhoods to paint homes, and launching innovative projects such as one he came across in the Twin Cities area:

Colonial Congregational Church in Edina, Minn., had sold a parcel for land, and the pastor decided to use a generous portion of the money to start a social enterprise competition.

“All you have to be is under 35 and have a good idea,” said Sine. “They have helped 11 millennials and their teams launch social enterprises since then.”

One young millennial at the last competition was Mike Glover, who won first prize and used it to help Somali women in his neighborhood build a business.

“Mike and the Somali women came up with the idea of producing for sale Sambusa, a very spicy meat-filled pastry that is popular in Somalia.”

Now this new social enterprise is paying a number of refugees a good living wage to make food with which they are very familiar.

“Wouldn't it be a good idea for all of us to join this new change-making generation as followers of the servant Jesus?” Sine asked.

Overall, he said, he is calling for churches and church members to open themselves to a wider and richer vision of Jesus and to live in ways that can make a difference in people’s lives and in the world.

In his book, Sine writes, “I’m asking you to consider that the possibility of following Jesus is much more than a spiritual ‘add on’ to your real life. I believe it is a call to a radical, more whole-life faith, a wonderful opportunity to reimagine and reinvent our entire lives so that we more authentically reflect something of the aspirations and values of Jesus and that first community [of disciples].”