Millennials And Religion: Will A Lost Generation Ever Be Found?

The Seeker-Sensitive Model – This is a widespread model of church implemented by Willow Creek and lead by Bill Hybels, and perpetuated by Saddleback’s purpose-driven form of it. In short, it was a 30-year failed experiment. Essentially, this was a business model implemented by Churches turning them into programmatically driven organizations. In these Churches, the pastor was more administrative and executively driven rather than pastorally caring. Crosses were removed, messages were watered down, stage crews were hired, and rock bands were brought in. Church turned from a sanctuary of healing and became a source of entertainment. Pastors became executives, Congregants became consumers, and worship leaders became rock stars. Research has shown, that this “Willow model” was more than a failure, but extremely damaging to the hundreds of thousands of other churches who implemented this in their context. Hybels simply responds to this shocking research stating, “We made a mistake.”

[Worth Mentioning] Marriage [or the lack thereof] – millennials are a generation traumatized by the 50% divorce rates. It’s not that we don’t want to marry, it’s just that we’re very cautious of who we choose to marry. So, as a result of this traumatization, we’re getting married way later than any other generation before us. Past studies and research have shown that younger adults are likely to return when children become part of their day-to-day reality. It is worth considering that because we’ve yet to get married and start a family, we’ve yet to return. I wrote more on this here. Relevant has an awesome article here.

All-in-all, we want something that’s real. Something that is unafraid of engaging in discussion on science, reason, and thought.

People of color (POC), females at large, and the LGBT community have put their foot down on a predominantly “eurocentric-patriarchal-authoritarianistic-gospel.” You see, to us, it’s not “gospel,” it’s a means of pathologically controlling us by heaping great amounts of shame, guilt, and trauma over us via a moralistic deism.

These lies, this false gospel, biblical inerrancy, whatever it might be, they have to stop.

Things like this are why your words have lost their power, your gospel has lost it’s meaning, and we’ve stopped attending. In consequence – your institution is bleeding out. We’ve come to find that it’s not Christianity that’s empty of meaning; it’s just your version of Christianity that’s empty of meaning. We don’t want to argue we simply want to converse and be taken seriously.

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