Why the Church Keeps Losing Young People—and Why Our Hardest Efforts Aren’t Stopping It

In the decade I spent as a pastor, there was one conversation that sat at the center of everything: church growth.

Pastors want their churches to grow. Conferences want their churches to grow. We want to see new faces and young families; we want stories of redemption and baptisms. We want, quite simply, for the church to be a tangible, living part of the neighborhood. I’ve spent years in that headspace, geeking out over leadership strategies, engagement metrics, and how to navigate secularism. I still care about those things. I still want the church to grow.

But a couple of years ago I transitioned out of full-time ministry. For the first time in a long time, I started living like an everyday church member. And from this new vantage point, I noticed something I had completely missed from the pulpit. It’s a reality that has changed the way I think about mission, church growth, and youth engagement entirely.

The World We Inherited

Before we can understand why churches are struggling, I want to introduce you to a term you may not have heard before: "Placeness."

Placeness is going to be the heart-beat of this 3 part blog series. This present one is the introduction. In part two we will dive deeper. And in part three we will look at solutions. And it's all going to revolve around the same core idea of placeness.

But what exactly does it mean? And what does it have to do with the church’s present struggles?

Allow me to explain.

What on earth is Placeness?

Before I define placeness I need to introduce you to another term entirely. I know, I know - big words are annoying. But hang with me here. It will all make sense in a moment.

For most of the twentieth century—specifically the era from 1945 through the 70s—the Western world operated under a specific social contract that economists call Fordism. Fordism is the term you need to understand before you understand placeness. Fordism wasn’t a belief system or worldview. It was an economic model that helped shape what life looked like for many of our grandparents.

Think of Fordism like a pocket-world you live inside of. It wasn’t just “jobs,” but a whole ecosystem: mass employment, rising wages, strong labor institutions, and postwar policies that made ordinary life more stable and predictable. A company would set up a massive factory, and then—to make sure their workers were reliable—they’d often help build the neighborhood right around it. In some cases, the company literally built the houses and the local hall themselves (company towns); in others, the government and banks made sure that if you had a steady job, you could afford a home just a few streets away.

Either way, the result was the same: your life had a permanent anchor. Your coworkers were the same people you saw at the grocery store and the same people you sat next to in church every weekend. You didn’t have to "try" to build community; you were practically immersed in it.

The Pocket World

In that pocket world, a single income could actually buy a home. Not for everyone, and not equally—but for a large slice of ordinary households, stability was structurally easier to access than it is today. You didn’t need two incomes just to stay afloat. A day’s honest work was all it took to live a relatively comfortable life. And all your neighbors existed in the same conditions. The economics were stable. For many people, the nervous system was not in constant survival mode. Life wasn’t perfect. But it did feel relatively balanced and calm.

These conditions created what I refer to as the experience of “placeness”. Placeness literally means to “be placed” — like a tree planted in a backyard rather than a potted plant sitting on a porch. The Fordian era provided the stable soil that allowed those roots to go deep.

And here is where it counts: When you are "placed," you have the luxury of thinking long-term. You can join the local choir, volunteer for the youth group, or invest in your neighbors because you’re reasonably sure you’ll still be there in twenty years. Placeness gives life a rhythm, a sense of identity and belonging. When you are placed, you can hope for the future. When you are placed, you have surplus to invest. When you are placed, you belong.

Place is more than Location

To really understand why this matters for the church, we have to realize that "place" is not just a GPS coordinate. It’s not just the dirt your house is built on.

Jeff Malpas, a philosopher who has spent his life thinking about this, argues that place is "constitutive." That’s a fancy way of saying that place actually makes us who we are. We don't just live in a place; the place gets inside us.

This is something many Australian Indigenous communities have understood for thousands of years. They use the word Country. For an Indigenous person, Country isn't "real estate." It isn't a commodity to be bought, sold, or flipped for a profit. Country is a kinsman. It’s a relative that holds your stories, your ancestors, and your identity. When you are connected to Country, you aren't just "located"—you are placed. And that placeness gives you a sense of identity, of belonging, and of hope for the future.

The Bible also has its own language for placeness. In 2 Samuel 7:10 God says to Israel, “And I will provide a place for my people Israel and will plant them so that they can have a home of their own and no longer be disturbed.”

This language of placeness is repeated over and over again and becomes the underlying logic of both the “Holy Land” or “Beautiful Land” of Israel and the hope of a “New Jerusalem”. Jesus captured it best when he said, “I go and prepare a place for you…” (John 14:2)

And the beauty of “place” is that it is reciprocal. You hold place by caring for it, and place holds you by giving you a sense of who you are and where you belong. It holds your sense of self. Your sense of responsibility. You are not wandering and lost. Your kids are not stressed about their future. You are safe and rooted. And from there, the world seems simple.

The Vanishing Anchor

So, why am I talking about a philosophy of placeness and economic models in a blog series about church mission?

Because as a church we continue to come up with solutions to the youth and mission crisis that are doomed to fail. And they are doomed to fail because they assume the main problem with church is church. And if we just get church right, then the dramas over youth and mission will go away. And yes, there is a degree of truth to that. Many times the problem with church is church. Which means the solution is internal: fix church.

But what if this is not where all our problems lie? What happens when we invest in programs and resources and training and cohorts left, right and centre but nothing seems to change? Could it be that the problems with church are not merely church? Could it be that we need to look wider?

Let me put it this way. The "Golden Era" of church growth is often considered to be the 1950s and 60s—especially in the US, and in parts of the Anglosphere. Churches back then were full of life. People were engaged. Communities were served. Youth were involved. But may I suggest that this era didn't happen because pastors back then were better than pastors today. And it didn’t happen because older generations were more spiritual, more committed, or more serious than younger ones today. It happened because the Fordian economy created the necessary pre-conditions that fueled high engagement in the local church. That pre-condition is placeness.

In a world of placeness, people lived three blocks away from the church. They knew their neighbors. The cost of living did not drown them. A one income household could live in comfort. This meant they had surplus time and emotional bandwidth. Their world was stable. They were placed.

But what happens when the anchor of placeness is removed?

In this series, I argue that when placeness is gone, the preconditions for highly engaged church communities disappear. And that is exactly what has happened to the generation currently missing from our pews. They aren't just "unengaged"—they are unanchored. Non-placed. And the answer cannot be better programs, better preachers, or louder music because none of this is the real problem. Today’s church is not merely facing a church problem that can be fixed by doing church better. The problem is increasingly external.

The economic model is no longer Fordian. Companies moved their factories overseas in order to keep their prices competitive. Houses went from a place to belonging to an investment. The social contract evolved. The pocket-world collapsed.

Fast forward and today the housing affordability crisis is often described as a “humanitarian crisis”. And the cost of living has reached such astronomical levels that emerging generations live in a perpetual state of survival. The nervous system is on edge. The life force is drained. The emotional bandwidth is maxed out.

To a large degree, young people today are not placed nor do they know what placeness even feels like. They live at the mercy of landlords and rising rent costs. Hard work no longer guarantees stability. A degree no longer guarantees a future. According to data from the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI), the "Golden Era" of the 1950s saw house prices at roughly three times the average annual income, whereas today that ratio has exploded to over twelve times in our major cities. Hard work, discipline and good pay no longer guarantee a future like they once did.

All this robs emerging generations of the phenomenon of placeness. Without placeness, everything else (volunteering at church, missional passion, youth engagement) withers and fades. And the reason is simple: where there is no financial surplus there is no emotional surplus. Without that surplus people go into survival mode. And when you are in survival mode, you have nothing left to give.

In the next part of this series, we’re going to look at the "emotional purgatory" this experience creates. We’ll look at how the West abandoned the economy that made 1950s placeness possible, leaving Millennials and Gen Z in a state that of non-placement (neither placed nor displaced). And as we’ll see, this new state is central to understanding why local church mission and engagement keep declining despite our best efforts.