Why the Church Keeps Losing Young People—and Why Our Hardest Efforts Aren’t Stopping It (p2)
In response to Part 1 of this series, I received a very intuitive critique. One that I think a lot of you will actually resonate with.
The argument goes something like this:
"The early Christian church grew in poverty. Many of them were economically insecure and lived in discomfort, yet the church grew because they 'sought first the kingdom.' So isn’t our current struggle just a lack of faith?"
It’s a fair question. It sounds spiritual. It sounds like the "biblical" answer.
But… it misses a massive structural reality that we can no longer afford to ignore.
The Difference Between Poverty and Non-Placement
We need to understand the difference between being poor and being non-placed. The early church lived in a far more communal social world than we do. This means that even when they were poor, many were still “placed” within thicker relational networks. Their support system was often far more embedded than what most people experience in the modern West. In short, what they lacked in economic placeness, they made up for in "relational placeness."
This is why many developing countries today still have high rates of church engagement and baptismal growth despite extreme poverty. In those cultures, a communal mindset often acts as a glue. It conditions people to depend on one another in the same village or neighborhood, for decades. So even when they lack economic placeness, relational placeness acts as a safety net that “catches” them and keeps them placed. (By the way, I am going to come back to this “safety net” in part 3. You’ll see why.)
However, in the secular West, we don't have strong relational safety nets. We live in an individualist culture, not a communal one. In our world, "placeness" is tethered to the economy. When the economy was Fordist, it created the pre-conditions that made strong social engagement, volunteering, and local church life easier to sustain for many communities. When the economy shifted away from stable, localized manufacturing, those pre-conditions weakened.
This isn’t a faith-in-God problem. This is a structural problem.
Let me give you a real example…
In case you still think “faith in God” is the only variable here, allow me to tell you a story. In my second year as a full time pastor, I was assigned to a university church plant. When I arrived, they were on the brink of closing. In fact, it was already too late and they ended up shutting down.
The problem wasn't a lack of faith. These were some of the most committed, God-fearing young people I’ve ever met. They prayed, they studied, and they trusted. But the church had a structural death-trap: student membership.
What's the problem? A university church plant only works if it has a strong, local, anchored core team. You cannot depend on the students being part of the core team or bringing your church to life. As students, their "shelf life" in the community is roughly 12 to 24 months. The moment a talented young person started to lead, their visa would expire or they would graduate, and they were gone. And because this church had a small core team, it needed student members to carry most of the load of growth and mission. But this would never work. Students are too transient. Too financially limited. And too unanchored to bring a church to life. So in the end, the church died.
And here’s the thing: No amount of "trusting God" could undo a structure that was bad from the start. The core team of this church was faithful. But faithful isn’t enough. You need smart structure too.
The Shift From Fordist to Rentier Economy
Let’s get back to the main point now.
The Fordist economy gave an individualistic western culture the necessary foundation to create highly engaged, socially connected pocket worlds.
Folk lived within driving distance of their church. They shared life with their neighbors regularly. It was still an individualist culture, but the Fordist economy egineered a collective rhythm. And that rhythm spilled into the local church resulting in high engagement, volunteering, and missional activity.
However, the world didn’t stop evolving just because the "Golden Era" was comfortable.
The market kept shifting. Companies had to stay competitive. Factories began moving overseas for cheaper labor, and as those local plants closed, the "pocket worlds" they sustained collapsed. People had to relocate for work. As these shifts continued, the physical and social preconditions that fueled high levels of local church engagement simply disappeared.
Now, this isn't an economics paper, and I’m not an economist. We are summarizing complex global shifts that are, in many ways, beyond the scope of a blog (and beyond the scope of my brain). But there are patterns here that matter for the point I am working toward.
The biggest pattern is this: In the Fordist economy, a house was a home. But fast-forward to our post-Fordist age of today and what you’ll find is that young people inhabit what’s known as a Rentier Economy.
In this context, a house is often no longer treated as a home. It is an investment asset used to extract wealth. This isn’t to say houses weren’t investments in the 1950s; it’s to say that today, city housing is less about creating community and more about investment portfolios. A house has become a financial instrument—an asset to be flipped, traded, and leveraged.
For today’s generation, this shift (among others) has resulted in a housing affordability crisis that is simply overwhelming. This has been driven in large part by the financialization of housing—its movement from a human necessity to a high-yield investment asset. In this Rentier Economy, the market increasingly prioritizes the extraction of wealth over the creation of community, and it operates within forms of structurally produced scarcity that keep prices high for portfolios while locking out many people who actually need a place to live.
Because of this, even professional young people in dual-income households—now a financial necessity rather than a choice—are increasingly outbid by institutional and investor capital, especially in major cities. Homeownership becomes unreachable without exceptional incomes, family assistance, or long delays. In many cases, it can take a decade or more just to save a deposit. So the default option is not ownership, but long-term renting.
This forced rental environment then creates a state of forced mobility. Even as a paid pastor, my family and I had to relocate to five different suburbs in less than seven years. Think about that for a second. If a regular church member lived like that, they would have to change their church membership so often that deep roots in a congregation—or the wider community—would be nearly impossible to form. They become stuck in a relocation loop, living at the mercy of rising costs, inflation, and the constant, low-grade stress of just trying to stay afloat.
The result is a structural erosion of the “local” church. And even when families manage to attend the same congregation consistently, they often no longer live nearby. Attendance requires long drives, turning church into a weekly commute rather than a shared local life. They become “commuter Christians” at a place they have neither the time nor the capacity to invest in during the rest of the week. In this sense, many local churches are no longer truly local.
And here is where the "individualist" part of our culture makes it worse. In a collectivist society, you’d have a village of aunts, uncles, and cousins ready to move in to help pay the rent or pull you into their home so you could save. But in our society, you face this economic hardship almost entirely on your own.
Even the "back-up plan" feels like a failure. If you move back in with mom and dad, it’s frowned upon. It’s seen as awkward. Even if you have a roof over your head, you live with the constant awareness that you are not where you belong.
In short, young people today don’t just rent a house. They live as if their whole life is on lease—borrowed, conditional, and always one notice away from being uprooted.
This is what it means to be Non-Placed.
The "Airport Lounge" Existence
Most of us understand what it means to be Displaced (like refugees or colonized communities who have had their land stolen from them). It is often a visible trauma. And the effects are tragic: Loss of identity. Rise in substance abuse, domestic violence, and suicide. And so on.
But "Non-Placement" is more subtle. You haven't been forcefully removed; you just haven't been allowed to land. You live in a house, but you don't belong. You can’t paint a room, you need permission to hang a picture frame, you can’t plant a fruit tree, and you certainly can’t guarantee you’ll be there for next year’s Christmas social.
I like to think of Non-Placement like living in an airport lounge. An airport lounge is a "non-place." It has chairs, food, and Wi-Fi. You can sit there for hours. But you are never a host; you are always a guest. You don't invest in the furniture. You don't get to know the person sitting next to you, because you know that in an hour, one of you will be gone.
And when a generation is non-placed, their emotional and cognitive bandwidth (the things you need to actively volunteer at church in a sustainable way) declines.
Understanding the “Bandwidth Decline”
I don’t know if this will make sense to the non-nerds reading this, but let me try.
Think of a computer. A computer has the ability to run multiple programs at once. Its central processing unit (CPU), RAM, graphics card—all of these are things that help a computer run more than one task at once.
But if you open up a high-demand program—for example, a video editor—and have it run a task that takes all of your processing power, your computer becomes sluggish. It struggles to do other tasks well because the one big task is using up almost all of its bandwidth. If you try and check your email, your computer will load the webpage super slow. And if you open up a video game while you wait, your computer might actually “freeze” entirely.
A computer freezes when the demand on its processing power exceeds the actual power it has. In that case, the system locks up because it has nothing left to give.
In the same way, living in a non-placed world is a "high-demand" program.
When you are Rent-Burdened, it feels like 90% of your mental "processing power" is taken up by the stress of instability: What if the landlord sells? What if the rent goes up another $100? How will we pay for our kid’s braces when we barely have enough to eat next week?
Programs like "Loving your neighbor," "Engaging in mission," or even just "Coming to church on time" are lower-priority tasks for a brain that is currently slugging under the weight of a high-demand affordability crisis.
And when the demand on a young family's processing power finally exceeds their actual capacity, they don't become "unfaithful." They freeze. They lock up. They have nothing left to give.
Conclusion (For Now…)
As a church, we have spent decades trying to fix this contemporary structural problem with cooler church programs, better guest speakers, and edgier cosmetic changes. Or, we’ve simply looked at young families struggling to stay afloat and told them to "have more faith," while ignoring the fact that the very ground they stand on is being traded like a stock option.
If we are going to make some progress here, we have got to face the facts:
Lack of church engagement does not automatically equate to lack of faith. It signals that something is wrong in the ecosystem that younger generations inhabit.
The golden era of 1950s church engagement does not automatically mean people were more faithful and committed back then. The Fordist economy helped create the foundation that fueled that engagement. And that economy is long gone.
Programs, events, retreats, and hype are not going to fix this. If we are going to have a generation of young people who are fully engaged with the work of the kingdom, we need to go deeper.
Over-inflating faith as though it is a magical solution that can make all of this somehow “not matter” is not faith, it is presumption. It overlooks the fact that God doesn’t work against reality; He works with it. And it overlooks the fact that we are responsible to properly steward the resources God has given us to meet the challenges of the present age.
In the final part of this series, we are going to look at some potential solutions. We’ll explore the kinds of questions we need to begin asking and the kinds of radical changes we need to be open to embracing if we wish to reverse the never ending youth-disengagement trend.
