“You give us hope for the future.”
The first time I heard those words, I was 23 years old and in seminary. A group of us had travelled 7 hours, from the prairies to the mountains, to attend a study conference for pastors and other church professionals. We were a group of 20 and 30 somethings, all Masters of Divinity students already having bachelor’s degrees and work experience, but compared to the average age of pastors in the mainline, we may as well have been teenagers. So we probably seemed like a group of disruptive students crashing a conference for older folks.
But instead of being grumpy with us or giving us glares (as church folk can sometimes be guilty of doing with young noise makers), we were heartily welcomed by our future colleagues. Our relative energy and enthusiasm seemed to bring them some life and excitement.
And that is when it started happening. Sometimes one or more elder colleagues would sidle up to us and say things like, “You all give me hope for the church’s future” or “You make me feel better about the future.”
“Millennials” weren’t a thing back then, but our age cohort was perhaps the first to be obviously missing from the church. We weren’t the first generation to stop attending, that was the Boomers, our parents, who led the mass exodus. But rather, we were the first to be noticeably absent. The first generation to have mostly never been there at all. And so when a bunch of Gen Xers and Millennials showed up at seminary together around the same time, it was out of the ordinary. We were a cohort of young leaders who had been the kids in our home churches who were leading youth groups, playing in worship bands, serving on church councils, attending campus ministry while at school, working as bible camp counsellors and even camp directors. Our parents had bucked the trend of the Boomer exodus, and brought us to church where we had been encouraged to lead. We had to lead because we were all there was of our age cohort.
The “You give us hope” comment became a pretty regular occurrence in seminary and after… but I always had the sinking suspicion that the church wasn’t quite ready to hand over the reigns to the next generation.
Whether it was the resistance of boomers to converting the seminary newspaper from a paper publication to an online blog format, or later on to a hesitation let young pastors serve in positions of leadership in the church, a constant comment I heard from seminary classmates in their first few years of ministry was,
“We were trained and prepared to serve in this church, but no one got this church ready for us.”
After ordination, when I began serving in my first call, I couldn’t help but notice something that seemed to be below the surface of wherever I went in the church. Not just my congregation, but the ones of neighbouring colleagues, and larger church ministries, and coming from church leadership. It took me a while to put my finger on it.
And then as I had yet another conversation with colleagues or parishioners or other church folk lamenting the absence of young people, the decline of attendance and giving, and the general sad state of the present church… it dawned on me.
These people are grieving.
As soon as I could see it, it was like puling back the veil and seeing the weight being carried by nearly everyone around me. Everyone of a certain age that is.
The glory days were gone. The days when pews were full, Sunday Schools bursting at the seams, programs well attended, giving was enough to pay the bills and increasing, when every family had 4.2 kids and a housewife who would devote volunteer time to the church, or keep the house in check while her husband did. Those days were over.
But it wasn’t just that those days were over, it was the intense desire to bring them back. Churches, pastors, leaders who could remember those days seemed to be universally bound and determined to somehow bring that glory back. Get the young people back, get the families back, fill the pews, resurrect the Sunday Schools, meet and exceed the budgets.
My problem, as a young pastor was, I wasn’t grieving the glory days with most people around me. I wasn’t grieving them because I don’t remember them.
Even though now I have almost a decade of experience under my belt, I am still a young pastor by mainline standards.
And it has always been tension the church that most people around me are grieving, and the one that I have always known and loved. The church that God called me to seminary and to be a pastor to serve.
The church has always been filled with grey hair in my memory. Sunday School has always been pretty sparsely attended, youth groups have never been more than a handful of kids, budgets have always been hard to meet, and there are rarely times when it is hard to find an entire pew to yourself in worship.
This is only version of the church I know… and it is the one I am called to serve.
I also suspect it is the church God is calling us to be.
While it is has been difficult for the congregations I serve to have a leader who isn’t longing for the glory days as they are, it has also been good for me and them. It has been hard and taken time, but eventually we have started looking forward rather than looking back. We have begun to listen to where God is calling us now and where God is calling us to go.
God’s mission hasn’t changed, just the vehicle isn’t as fancy as it once was. The Gospel is is still preached, sacraments still administered, the Body of Christ is still present… even in churches whose glory days are over.
And I think that this is the cross roads that many churches and denominations find themselves at these days. Will the memory of the glory days keep us looking backwards? Will we admit that our desire to bring the young people back, might actually be us saying that we want to be young again?
The synod (read: diocese/jurisdiction/area) in which I serve is about to elect a new Bishop. For the past few months we have been asked to discern what kind of Bishop the synod needs, and to do that discernment in congregations and other synod ministries. This discernment process here has got me thinking about leadership, and about what kind of leaders the church will need going forward. What will a declining Christianity need in order to begin moving faithfully into the future?
And the answer I keep coming back to is that the church in North America will need leaders who can let go of the glory days. Maybe even leaders who don’t remember the glory days. Leaders who can see the church as it is now, rather than what it used to be.
As my generation, Gen X and Millennial pastors and clergy, steps into more and more leadership positions in the church, letting go of the glory days becomes inevitable. We simply don’t remember them.
Because we are the ones who showed up to seminary full of energy, called to serve a church in decline.
The church for us has always been full of grey haired faithful and committed people.
The church has always been small close-knit Sunday Schools and youth groups.
The church has always been struggling to meet budgets by searching for creative solutions.
And the church has always had room in the pews for more people to come.
It will not be easy to get over the grief that is lingering below the surface, and it will be easy to see the solutions to what the church is currently lacking by going back to a time when we remember abundance.
But the church cannot go backwards. And God doesn’t call us into the past, God calls us into the future.
So perhaps it is time for the church to let leaders who cannot remember the glory days, but who only know the present, guide the way into the future.
Perhaps “You give us hope for the future” needs to become:
“You give us hope now.”
The Millennial Pastor 
Looking back to the glory days can be like a magnet that creates the illusion, “If we could just be like we were then…..” And it is an illusion. If 1960 ever comes back, I know a lot of congregations that are ready….but God is leading us forward, never backwards….
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Indeed! Amen.
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Loved your reflection- as a 62 year old with almost 30 years in ministry in one form or another – I never served the church in the glory days – always saw us as the remnant church- but I remember them as a child- I know they are past but your article helped me to see the difference for folks who don’t have those memories- also I am from the flip chart generation- I now live on my phone but don’t really understand its full potential for ministry- you’ve helped me to see the need for more of an on- line presence- and I grieve the loss of the flip chart!! 🙃
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Thank you for your thoughts. Helpful to hear how this fits your experience!
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Beautiful! I’m now an official fan of your blog. I’m 51, a pastor for 7 years, and this really resonated with me.
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Thank you!
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I think some of the grief is for their own children. Grief mixed with guilt that they were not able to pass this treasure to their beloved children. And some bewilderment about why and how this came to be
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Absolutely.
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Yes! I am a Baby Boomer pastor who raised 3 daughters in the church. They loved church. My daily prayer was that God would teach them to love God and other people. After they graduated college, 2 out of 3 have consciously left church, 1 no longer believing in God. They all love their neighbor, so that part stuck! I also know God has not given up on them. I found the realization that for Millennials, church always has been struggling to be a new awareness. Good, thoughtful article.
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Thanks for sharing this. I am among the oldest Millenials (1982). I grew up in a healthy medium-size church that is now facing non-existence. It will merge into another congregation by the end of the year. The two congregations where I served in associate roles are smaller now than when I was there. Now I am a new lead pastor at a church where most attenders are twice my age. We are having conversations similar to this most months on most committees. I pray God will keep leading us into engaging the present wholeheartedly and with faith and hope for the new thing, not to get the old thing back again.
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Yeah, I hear you. I am in the midst of joining the congregation I now serve (which was medium to large sized during the years of my child hood) to a 5 point shared ministry.
And it isn’t a failure, but the most life-giving thing they have done in a few decades!
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I would like to reprint this for our synodical news. How do I get permission?
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Consider it given!
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may I use it too?
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Please do
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Pastor Erik, thanks for such clarity of the past, the present, and the future. As a retired pastor of 44 years in parish ministry, and grew up in a culture where secularization was much more advanced, Australia, you have the compassion to recognize the deep grieving of the earlier generations. Moreover, I believe that people like you will be part of creative, new styles of ministry. Actually, the loss of the state power is also the best thing for the future church to be itself in exciting new forms.
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Thank you for your great reflections. I’ve used it for a starting point for my latest blog post:
Poverty, Charity, Exceptionalism, and America’s Glory Days
http://www.orient-lodge.com/node/6128
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Never mind that from a lot of places on the margins, the “glory days” were the glory days if you white and middle class…. just sayin’…..
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One of the best summaries of God’s call to us now (which I believe this is) that I’ve read. I am turning 60 in a week. I am an Episcopal priest, ordained in 1999 after a long career in hospitality management. The church I was ordained to serve is not the church I serve now. On any given day, I am both a hospice chaplain and a midwife. The issue of grief is exactly right, and for some, it’s still very present. I embrace your ministry and yes, you give me hope now, as do my younger colleagues. I don’t know where we are going, but I know who is leading us – the Holy Spirit and a sense of new purpose that is still the old purpose – but told with new words and in new ways. If this is indeed God’s church and not ours, then we must believe that. If we don’t, then it’s time to move out of the way for those who do.
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Adding thanks for finding words that express things. I grew up with the glory days long gone (only YP regular by mid teens with parents the next youngest in the congregation); so never really knew the glory days, and where I was they had long faded from memory and it was the faithful few. But the place I am now serving a lot of this is going on. Again thank you for the words, and will likely share some of this reflection
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Thank you for your well written, thoughtful post.
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Spot on! Well said.
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The glory days weren’t that great for anyone when they were actually occurring. People’s collective memory of the past seems to improve over time. Yes, the pews had more people in them, but that did not mean that they were better Christians when they walked out. Granted, ministers didn’t have to take as many questions about the faith which made them happier and had it easier as they visited the sick, said a prayer for them, and conducted a funeral periodically.
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I remember the glory days and spent years hoping and praying for them to return. I came to the conclusion that they will probably not come back, and if they do, they will be in such a different form, that I might not recognize them (although I hope I would). What’s more, I’ve realize glory and excitement isn’t what it is all about – it is about quiet patience and service. Would I like to see young people (and old) coming to know Christ in the same numbers they were when I was 18 during the Jesus Movement? Yes, of course. But I don’t know if America will see revival of that kind again. Turkey and Algeria were once great places of Christian activity. But at some point, they became less so and they were ripe for Arab conquest. Of course, there still are Christian minorities in those countries, faithfully and quietly serving, and perhaps that is the most glorious thing of all. There remains a remnant in a hard place. I hope America doesn’t become a field that hard but I’m glad there are thoughtful pastors to prepare them if it does.
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It’s easy to confuse nostalgia with commitment to the faith once delivered to the saints. I didn’t attend church until I was almost 50 so I am not pining for the halcyon days of yore. I do lament the erosion of orthodoxy in the churches of post-Christian America. Dwindling numbers is less a threat than diluted doctrine.
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Reblogged this on Rogue Millennials and commented:
Great thoughts from The Millennial Pastor – among them,
“As I had yet another conversation lamenting the absence of young people, the decline of attendance and giving, and the general sad state of the present church it dawned on me. These people are grieving.”
“God’s mission hasn’t changed, just the vehicle isn’t as fancy as it once was. The Gospel is still preached, sacraments still administered, the Body of Christ is still present… even in churches whose glory days are over.”
“Will the memory of the glory days keep us looking backwards? Will we admit that our desire to bring the young people back, might actually be us saying that we want to be young again?”
“The church has always been filled with grey hair in my memory… The church in North America will need leaders who can let go of the glory days. Maybe even leaders who don’t remember the glory days. Leaders who can see the church as it is now, rather than what it used to be… Because we are the ones who showed up to seminary full of energy, called to serve a church in decline.”
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I saw a lot of the grieving aspect in European churches. The problem is that grief isolates and grief blinds. I spoke with church leaders in Scotland and they bemoaned the loss of “all their young people.” In the service I saw young adults in the worship band, in the pews, serving the children’s ministry, greeting and manning the coffee bar after the service. I went back to the leaders and said, “You have young people – you just don’t see them, you just don’t appreciate them, and you just don’t empower them.” Their reply was that “This is just the way it is here, it’s God’s will.” It saddened me how blind they were, but also that they had given up any sense of responsibility over it: if something was bad, it must be because God wants it bad.
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