VISION, STRATEGY & TACTICS
It was almost midnight in New
York City, and the clock was about to tick us into 2011 for the very first
time. It was 25 degrees outside and crowds of people were huddled expectantly
together creating warmth. But I wasn’t
in Time’s Square watching the ball drop, I was in Central Park, and I was in
shorts and a t-shirt.
I had flown out to the Big
Apple to visit a friend and heard about this big 4-mile race they run every
year in Central Park on New Years Eve.
The clock strikes 12, and the gun goes off. There were bands playing, crowds cheering,
and champagne at the mile markers. I
know it’s the city that never sleeps, but no one living on the Upper West Side
was even given a chance that night.
The most fascinating thing
about the whole experience was the sheer volume of people there. There were 5,000 people in this race and 5,000
more in the park just for the party. Not
to mention those who were cheering us on.
On New Years Eve. In New York
City. I just wanted to ask everyone, “you
know there’s this really big party right next-door, right?” My thought was, “apparently everything that
happens in New York just draws a big crowd.”
That’s a tempting thing to
want to say about our churches and our ministries as well. 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 in this chapter 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.
Luke 8
Now when Jesus returned, a crowd welcomed him,
for they were all expecting him. Then a man named Jairus, a synagogue leader,
came and fell at Jesus’ feet, pleading with him to come to his house because
his only daughter, a girl of about twelve, was dying.
As Jesus was on his way, the crowds almost
crushed him. And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve
years, but no one could heal her. She came up behind him and touched the edge
of his cloak, and immediately her bleeding stopped.
“Who touched me?” Jesus asked.
When they all denied it, Peter said, “Master,
the people are crowding and pressing against you.”
But Jesus said, “Someone touched me; I know
that power has gone out from me.”
Then the woman, seeing that she could not go
unnoticed, came trembling and fell at his feet. In the presence of all the
people, she told why she had touched him and how she had been instantly healed.
Then he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace.”
As he was on his way – while
he was already engaged in a task – Jesus stopped and made a relational
connection with someone who needed help.
Jesus knew that his ministry was not just about the miracles he could
perform, but about the people he could impact.
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.
Back in the early days of
social networking, just as Facebook was taking shape and Twitter was just a
gleam in MySpace’s eye, parents were strongly cautioned against allowing their
teenagers develop an “online persona” that was a mask for who they really
were.
What’s interesting about that
warning is that the real-life experience of social networking can have the opposite
effect; young people can more true to themselves online than in front of
others. They can easily view it as a
place to be their real selves. The average 18-30 year old is exactly who they
are in all aspects of their life. They
are looking for a place in our churches where that standard holds true as
well. The standard of Authenticity is
something they filter all their experiences through and that is held up in
whatever they are involved in, for themselves and those who are running the
show.
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.
I preached a sermon recently
about calling ourselves to identify what really satisfies us in our culture –
rather than physical or financial satisfaction there is a deep need for
spiritual satisfaction in our lives. I
happen to use the example of my first years of marriage where my wife and I
were flush with cash from our full-time jobs, low rent and no children. During that message I began to add up all
that we had spent over those years on car payments, credit card payments and
other things that left us completely unaffected after the fact.
Upon doing the math, I had to
admit we spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $130,000 over five years on
nothing of lasting value. Ouch.
Afterwards I had someone come
up to me and talk about what an impact that example had on him. “For me and the middle class community I live
in, We never talk about finances with that level of transparency and challenge
– we’re afraid of being that honest.”
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.
I recently had a lunch meeting with a 23-year old named Gabe. Gabe grew up in the same suburb as I
did. He grew up in an upper middle class
family, went through Christian education and was deeply involved in his local
church. Gabe was a church kid. Gabe was a typical kid. There was nothing exceptionally unique about
him as a teenager. No great tragedies.
No great triumphs. He was tall. He was
well liked. He argued with his parents.
He had a path to a local private college lined up for him after graduation.
But a few years into that experience, Gabe made a unique decision to
leave college and go to film school. He
found his voice as an artist and a love for the film industry. This pathway has led Gabe to create his own
film company as a way to express art, to tell stories, but above all, to change
the world.
Here’s a guy that believes the world could be a better place, not if
we just made more Christian movies, but if we had more Christians making
movies.
As Gabe and I ate lunch together he said to me, “I’m at this point
in my life where I’m excited about the film company I run and the projects I
get to work on, but I really want to know how my business makes a real impact
in this world for good.”
It’s people like Gabe, it’s this
generation of young adults who should make the job of the church like tee
ball. Just swing away with these Millennials
and you’ll be crushing it out of the park.
It’s because of people like Gabe that our churches’ ministry with
the next generation simply cannot succeed unless we are finding ways to help
them put their faith into action in creative and impactful ways.
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.
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