Lately it seems like we’re reading
more and more about millennials, and with good reason. As least if you’re a
pastor, or in some sort of leadership role at a local church. In older, established churches, we often have
to ask where the millennials are, or at least why they’re not filling the pews
in our church on Sunday morning. And everybody has answers, one of them being
that this generation doesn’t like pews. Really good news for the people who
sell chairs especially designed for use in churches. Except, that even after
chairs replace the pews, the millennials are often still missing.
And so, we look at other reasons.
And one of them tends to be that an entire generation is abandoning their faith
in favor of a new belief system. The tenets of our faith seem to be lost on a
group of people. Researchers have identified the problem, but is there a
solution?
According to authors Alex McFarland
and Jason Jimenez there is. In their book Abandoned
Faith: Why Millennials Are Walking away and How You Can Lead Them Home (Tyndale
House, 2017)
Too adequately address any major
problem, it’s first necessary to determine what the problem is, and the first
few chapters of this book take a look at what went wrong. Although this book is
written for many different subsets of our society, as the pastor of an aging
church, which isn’t doing a good job of attracting and keeping millennials, one
chapter especially stands out: “How the Church is Failing Millennials”. The answers are fairly simple. Churches tend
to value things like tradition, safety and comfort. There’s nothing wrong with
those things until they get in the way of valuing people, service and
community.
Part 2 helps those of us who aren’t
part of the millennial generation understand what is shaping the worldview of
this age group. And unfortunately, it’s not always Sunday mornings spent in
church. We need to understand what drives them and what their struggles are.
And once we’ve learned what’s going on, we move on to Part 3, where we learn
that it is possible to address how to deal with the problem. Sometimes we need to learn how to love our
prodigals. Often that requires tough love, but there has to be a bit of
tenderness also.
The authors conclude with some
practical suggestions for drawing your wayward son, or daughter, back into the
fold. Not surprisingly since this book deals with a generation that seems to
have lost its faith, the suggestions include prayer. But beyond that, parents
and other adults who want to engage in the conversation need to do some work
themselves. They need to know what they believe, and why; and then they need to
be able to voice the biblical truths that are necessary for a firm faith
foundation
Great book for anyone dealing with
those questioning if their childhood faith is still relevant and pertinent to
their life. 5/5
I received a copy of this book from
the publisher in exchange for a review.
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