Why the Church Keeps Losing Young People—and Why Our Hardest Efforts Aren’t Stopping It (p3)
We have spent the last two articles peeling back the layers of the youth disengagement crisis—a problem we usually try to solve with another program, a more "relevant" sermon series, or an extra event in the church calendar.
I have argued that this approach is doomed to keep failing because there is a variable to young people disengaging from church that we keep overlooking - the massive structural change in western economics as a whole.
Here’s a quick recap:
In Part 1, we explored the reality that the "Golden Era of Church Engagement" (the 1950s) wasn't fueled by a sudden surge in human spirituality. Instead, it was subsidized by a Fordist economy that provided the very stability the church now lacks. In that world of stable, localized jobs and a manageable cost of living, families could afford to live and worship in the same neighborhood for decades.
With balanced finances, single-income households, and a housing market that prioritized “placeness”, the economy effectively did the church's "anchoring" for us. It underwrote high levels of engagement by leaving people with an abundance of emotional and temporal bandwidth. The church didn't have to fight for a place in their lives; the economy had already cleared the ground and built the foundation.
In Part 2, we looked at the collapse of that world with the rise of the post-Fordist Rentier Economy. This is the economic world we live in today where housing became an asset to extract wealth from rather than a home or source of “placeness”. This has left an entire generation "Non-Placed," caught in a relocation loop and cost of living crisis that drains their mental and emotional bandwidth. They aren't unfaithful to the church and its mission. They are exhausted, living like guests in an "Airport Lounge" existence that leaves very little to nothing left to give a volunteer organization like the church.
This is the cold, hard reality that young people wake up to every single morning. And while this isn’t the only reason why youth disengage from the church (there are certainly other layers to this) it is an increasingly massive factor that we can no longer afford to ignore. We have reached a point where we can't "program" our way out of a structural death trap. You cannot fix a systemic lack of placeness with another church concert. You cannot fix a bandwidth crisis with another Bible study. And you certainly cannot solve the instability of a Rentier Economy by upgrading the stage, the lighting, or the sound system. If the foundation is being sold out from under a generation, a coffee machine in the foyer won't keep them engaged.
So naturally, the question arises: What can we do?
Obviously, the church can’t fix the global economy. We can’t lower interest rates, and we can’t stop the housing market from being increasingly out of reach. That would be a ridiculous expectation. But we also can’t sit around and wait for the economy to "get better."
The hard truth is that the Fordist era is not coming back. Historians recognize that brief window of stability as an economic outlier; a "lightning strike" that created a sense of "stability" in the Western household that simply isn't normal. Prior to that window, the world was almost always economically rough on people. So what we are seeing today isn’t a collapse of the good old days; it is a return to the status quo, to the way it has almost always been and almost always will be.
So, if the economy won't change, and the "Golden Era" isn't coming back, what options does the church actually have to recover youth engagement and disciple the next generation?
The Tragedy We Must Own
Before we get to the "how," we need to eat some humble pie.
Young people feel non-placed in a world of hyper-capitalism and individualism. The tragedy is that the Western church is not a respite from that world. In most cases, it is a mirror of that very world.
In other words, rather than being an alternative community where young people experience "placeness," the church is often just another source of non-placeness.
How so? By increasingly being a space where their choices are scrutinized and their motives are questioned. Where they are viewed with suspicion and not taken seriously. Where they are preached to but not walked with.
The SDA church of today has forgotten how to be counter-cultural. It has forgotten how to be "peculiar." And it has forgotten because it is focused on being the wrong kind of different.
Many SDA churches, particularly of the conservative ilk, pride themselves on being "not like the world." But the differences they emphasize are often banal and unbiblical. They obsess over dress codes, music styles, or Bible versions. They claim to be set apart because they don't have drums, don't allow jeans, or refuse anything modern. Yet, these same churches often exhibit the same controlling moods, the same judgmentalism, and the same corporate abuse of power found in the world's imperial structures.
In short: They are different in all the ways that don’t matter, and in all the ways that do matter, they are just as worldly—and often worse—than the world itself.
And this in turn, translates into church communities that are mere echoes of the non-placement young people are already experiencing in the world. When they come to church, it's just more of the same transactionalism, extractionalism, and consumerism they are already battling. In a context like this, it's no wonder younger generations would rather limit their engagement or not attend at all.
The Missing Anchor
Ok, so you are probably ready for the solutions now... but there is one more thing we have to look at first.
If the Fordist economy was an outlier—a brief, lucky window of stability—and the reality we experience today is more akin to what people have always endured, then we have to ask a massive question: How have believers throughout history anchored their faith when the world has always been economically unstable?
How did the early church keep their young people engaged when they didn’t have "jobs for life" or the promise of a white-picket-fence mortgage?
We looked at a bit of this in Part 2. We saw that what people have often lacked in economic placement, they made up for in relational placement. Relational placement is the "social net." It’s the deep, unshakeable knowledge of who you are and where you belong, regardless of what is happening with your bank account or your landlord.
Even today, in many cultures, your "place" isn’t defined by the deed to a house, but by the strength of your village. You might be poor, and you might be stressed, but you are never "non-placed" because you are anchored in a web of people who know you, carry you, and claim you.
However, the Western world is currently in a "perfect storm." We are experiencing a brutal era of economic non-placement, but it’s multiplied by a pre-existing individualistic culture that has near-zero relational placement built into it. So young people are being hit from both sides: they can’t find a home, and they can’t find a tribe.
This isn't just a personal observation. A recent (as in 2 days ago at the time of this writing) BBC report titled 'I spoke to ChatGPT 8 times a day' - Gen Z's loneliness 'crisis' paints a haunting picture of the current landscape. According to The Office for National Statistics, “Gen Z were the loneliest age group across Britain with a study showing 33% of those aged between 16 and 29 felt lonely ‘often, always or some of the time’.”*
Think about that for a second. We have young people—many of them sitting in our pews or missing from them—who are chatting with AI bots just to feel a sense of companionship.
What this tells us is that the "relational net" in the western world is nearly non-existent. We are not simply economically non-placed. We are relationally non-placed too.
The Church's Golden Hour
But what if this epidemic of non-placement isn’t just a problem but also an opportunity? What if it’s our church’s “golden hour”? What if the church could become a source of relational placeness again—an anchored community in an unanchored world?
And what if being “counter-cultural” today doesn’t mean hymns-only or a stricter dress code, but becoming the relational net that holds our young people without controlling them, placing them in love, presence, and shared life when everything else is training them to drift?
In other words, what if the church was the source of relational placeness for a generation floating in non-placeness?
I believe this is our opportunity. But in order to seize it and make the most of it, there are three structural shifts we must consider.
1. Re-Author the Church as a "Social Location"
As we’ve seen, the Rentier Economy treats people as transient units of labor. The church’s great counter-cultural opportunity is to treat them as placed. In many developing countries, people endure the same economic hardships we face, but their "relational placeness" is reliable. They have a village. They have a kinship web that "catches" them. In our Western world, individualism has stripped that away, leaving young people hit with a double-whammy: they are both economically and relationally non-placed.
The church must become the primary social location for young people. This means moving away from the church as a "courtroom" where their choices are scrutinized, and re-authoring it as the "family table." When a young person is being evicted or forced to move suburbs, the church shouldn't just be a place they attend on Saturday; it should be the relational net that holds their identity together when everything else is shifting. We must stop being another space that demands, judges, and coerces, and start being the one place that offers placement without fine print.
2. Shift from "Religious Products" to "Relational Life"
We also have to be honest. The modern church we love so much is less a community of believers and more a service-based business. We deliver "religious products" (the sermon, the music, the Sabbath School program) for people to consume. And we do them well! But the problem is, in a non-placed world people don’t need programs. They need community.
Now, there is nothing evil about a program and I’m not saying we should stop running them altogether. What I am pointing out is that we have made the program the main thing. Church has become consumer driven rather than communal driven. To reach this generation, I insist we must restructure away from "production" and toward a relational way of life. This means the success of a church shouldn't be measured by how many people were in the pews for the 11:00 AM service, but by how many people were in each other’s homes on Tuesday night. True counter-culturalism in a digital, lonely age means prioritizing the table over the pulpit.
3. Dismantle the "Volunteer Sabbath-Trap"
This is the one that most Adventist boards don't want to hear but I have to say it: we are asking for too much of the wrong things.
In a post-Fordist world, young people are working longer and harder just to stay afloat. This means they have a tiny, precious window of mental and emotional "bandwidth" left at the end of the week. When they show up to church and we immediately try to roster them into a role, we are effectively asking them to spend their last 5% of energy maintaining the church "machine."
We set them up to fail. We expect full participation in a weekly event, and then we wonder why they don't have the energy to run a small group or engage in local mission. Or worse, we judge them as “less committed”, “less spiritual”, or “less trusting” in God.
It’s not true.
If we want to stop moralizing and start solving the real problem here is a radical suggestion: we need less weekend programs. We need to stop pouring all our resources into high-volume events that require an army of exhausted volunteers to sustain. Instead, we must redirect that energy into small, missional groups that live relationally in their neighborhoods.
7 Questions Worth Asking
Now, these are broad stroke suggestions. I don’t claim to have the full answer, not even close. However, I have learned this: in situations where you don’t have the right answer, the best thing you can do is begin asking the right questions.
Here are 7 that I think every church board, every pastor, and every member needs to wrestle with:
What percentage of our members live within a 15-minute radius of the church building? If the majority are commuting from afar, how does our structure account for the "travel tax" we are placing on the limited bandwidth of young families?
Is our church building a "Central Hub" that equips and resources members to lead missional lives where they actually live, or is it a "Destination" that requires all spiritual energy to be exported from their neighborhoods and imported into our building?
If we calculated the total hours our volunteers spend on "program maintenance" (rehearsals, meetings, setup, rosters) versus "relational life" (hospitality, neighborly service), what does that ratio reveal about our priorities?
Instead of launching "Church Small Groups" (which often repeat the commuter problem and end up failing), are we willing to structurally support "Neighborhood Cells" where members who live near each other meet locally, even if this means they don’t attend our weekend program as often?
What percentage of our annual budget is spent on the "Sabbath Production" (A/V, stage, event aesthetics) versus direct structural support for missional members? (Ex. A hospitality budget to help financially stretched families host meals with neighbors at their home without overextending their financial capacity.)
Are we empowering our ministers to train and equip us for real, life-on-life mission? Or do we just want them to spoon feed us sermons every weekend?
Is our church another source of non-placement for young people? If so, what can we do to become a source of placeness for them?
Wrapping Up…
A lot more could be said. This is one of those topics that deserves the depth of a doctoral dissertation. But for the sake of this limited blog series, I want to bring everything back to the most important take away:
The youth exodus isn’t a crisis of belief; it’s a crisis of belonging. The scaffolding that once carried faith has collapsed, and it isn’t coming back. We are no longer living in a world that props up Christianity by default. That means the church must drop expectations that made sense in the old world but no longer make sense today. But more to the point, the church must once again become what it once was: a people, not a program; a place, not a product; the body of Christ to a hurting world.
If we want our young people to stay, the church must offer what the world cannot: placeness in an age of drift, withness in an age of isolation, and a life so shared, so embodied, so unshakably present that our young people don’t have to be pressured into staying because they’ve found where they belong.
***
This concludes our 3 part exploration of youth disengagement. However, I would love to hear from you as well. What did this blog series awaken in you? What questions, thoughts, opportunities?
Comment below and lets talk about it!
