Why Young People Aren’t “Committed” to Church (And Why That Might Be Our Fault)
I’ve heard this complaint so many times I could recite it in my sleep: “Young people just aren’t committed to the church anymore. They don’t show up. They don’t serve.”
And if I’m honest, I get why people say it, because sometimes it really does feel like there’s a gap between generations, and that gap shows up most clearly when you’re trying to run a church with too few hands and too many needs.
But I want to slow that reaction down a little, because the moment we go straight into frustration, we usually miss the lesson that’s right in front of us. We turn it into a moral problem, when often it’s a meaning problem, or a systems problem, or even just a reality problem. We start talking about “kids these days” instead of stepping back and asking what has actually changed, what has not changed, and what we might learn if we stop trying to win the blame game and start trying to understand.
Because here’s the thing. When you look at the data, it’s not as simple as “young people are lazy.” Religious young people still volunteer at church a lot. Not perfectly, not universally, but at a rate that should challenge the whole narrative that they don’t care. The bigger issue is that young people in general are less religious than previous generations, which means there are simply fewer young people in church in the first place. So even if the young people who are still connected to faith communities are serving, the overall picture looks like decline because the pool has shrunk.
But let’s set that aside for a moment, because I already know what some of you are thinking. Our church has young people. We’ve got a decent youth group. We’ve got young adults who come most weeks. But they’re just not engaged the way older generations were. They show up, they hang out, they might even be involved socially, but when it comes to taking ownership and volunteering and carrying responsibility, they feel distant. So what’s going on there, and what do we do about it?
Before we talk about solutions, I think we have to widen the frame. If we only look at church culture, we’ll assume the problem is spiritual commitment. But if we zoom out and look at the world young people are living in, we might realize the problem is something else entirely.
The Bigger Picture Young People Are Carrying
If we zoom out from church for a moment, you start to see why this question is so slippery. A lot of what we interpret as a commitment problem is actually a capacity problem, and capacity is shaped by the world people are trying to survive in Monday to Saturday. When life is heavy, church volunteering does not land as a simple invitation to serve. It lands as one more demand in a world that already feels like it never stops asking.
Let’s start with housing. For a lot of young adults, buying a home is no longer a milestone they are working toward. It is something they quietly grieve and then try not to think about too much. So they rent, and they keep renting, and rent does not just take money, it takes stability. It means moving when the owner decides to sell. It means inspections. It means rent increases every 6-12 months until you can no longer afford to stay there. But you can’t afford to leave either. So you are stuck in a life is built on someone else’s permission, and that low-grade insecurity drains emotional energy in ways you only understand once you have lived with it for years.
Then there is the cost of living more broadly. Wages have not kept pace with inflation in the way everyday people feel it, and you do not need to be an economist to notice it. Groceries cost more. Bills cost more. Transport costs more. Health costs more. The same paycheck that felt decent a few years ago now feels thin, and when your budget is thin your mind becomes noisy. You start doing constant mental calculations. What can we delay. What can we cut. What do we do if the car breaks down. What do we do if the kids get sick. What do we do if another unexpected bill hits. Even when you are technically fine, you are not fine inside, because living close to the edge makes everything feel urgent.
And that urgency does something to a human being. It shrinks the imagination. It reduces your world to survival math.
My Own Experience
I felt this when I was a pastor. It was not that we were paid badly. We were paid well enough. But the cost of living crisis meant even a decent income could still leave you feeling like you were always one step behind. Kids need medicine and there is no money. Your wife needs emergency dental work and there is no money. You have an event and you need clothes and there is no money. It is not just the inconvenience of saying no. It is the psychological weight of living in a constant state of no.
Myron Golden says poverty always says “no,” and I think he is getting at something important, because when your life is shaped by no, you start losing motivation. Your drive fades. Your passion becomes survival. You feel trapped. You feel like you are trying not to drown, and the only thing you can keep above water is your nose, and barely at that, and all it takes is a little extra weight to push you under for good.
Back then, I still had something going for me that most church members do not. Even with all the stress, I was in full-time ministry. I was literally paid to do church work. Planning, meetings, pastoral care, discipleship, sermons, vision, all of that was my job. When I left full-time ministry, I started to feel what it is like for the average church member trying to stay afloat in the modern machine. The matrix of production and consumption squeezes the life out of you. It dehumanizes you. You give your best hours to systems that do not love you back, then you come home depleted, and your mind is consumed with survival, and you are trying to hold your relationships together, and you are trying to sleep enough to do it all again tomorrow.
So when the church comes along and says volunteer for this, join that, give up your one free night, take on another responsibility, it does not land as a noble mission opportunity. It lands as another weight. And for a lot of young adults, the issue is not that they do not love God. It is that their tank is literally empty.
When Church Adds Weight Instead Of Relief
And here’s where it gets uncomfortable, because the economic pressure is only half the story. The other half is what happens when people finally crawl into church on Sabbath hoping to breathe, hoping to be reminded they are more than a worker, more than a bill payer, more than a tired body trying to keep up, and instead they find another system that treats them like a resource to be extracted. Not always intentionally. Not always maliciously. But functionally, that is what it becomes.
A lot of churches do not know how to relate to young people as people. They know how to recruit them. They know how to use them. They know how to put them on a roster. They know how to squeeze another role into their week and call it discipleship. And young adults can feel the difference immediately. They can tell when you want their heart and when you want their hands. They can tell when you are interested in who they are becoming and when you are mainly interested in whether they can run the AV, lead the music, teach the kids, and make the program happen with a smile.
Then there’s the fact that in many churches, young people are not actually listened to. They are talked at. They are told to be involved but not trusted with real influence. They are invited to contribute but not empowered to shape. They are allowed to help but not allowed to lead in any way that might require the church to change. So they learn quickly that “we want young people” often means “we want young people to keep doing things the way we have always done them.”
Add to that the way volunteer culture can become exploitative. Churches often have a strange double standard where the people with the least margin are expected to give the most. Young adults who are juggling work, study, rent, relationships, mental health, and a future that feels increasingly unstable are told that the solution is to do more. More meetings. More responsibilities. More roles. More serving. And if they hesitate, the hesitation is interpreted as spiritual laziness rather than emotional depletion. That misread alone pushes people away, because nobody wants to be shamed for not having what they do not have.
And sometimes it gets worse than misreading. Sometimes churches stretch their volunteers to near breaking point. They burn through young leaders until they collapse. Sometimes young people try to lead, and instead of being mentored they are corrected. Instead of being supported they are policed. Instead of being encouraged they are critiqued. And over time, the message becomes clear. Your passion is welcome as long as it does not disrupt anything. Your gifts are valued as long as they serve the existing machine.
So now take that reality and lay it over the economic pressure we just talked about. A generation already exhausted simply trying to survive now faces a church culture that often feels like another employer, another bureaucracy, another place where you must perform to belong. If your week is already a grind, and the little free time you have left is the only space you can catch your breath so you can keep going, sacrificing that time to prop up a system that does not feel alive, does not feel safe, and does not feel worth it starts to look like a hard pass.
And that is the part older generations often miss. Young people are not refusing sacrifice. They are refusing unnecessary sacrifice. They are refusing systems that do not give life back. They are refusing churches that take more than they give. They are refusing to hand over their last remaining emotional bandwidth to keep a machine running that doesn’t even see them.
What’s Different From Previous Generations
But I can already hear the objection, because it’s the same one that comes up every time this conversation gets honest: “None of this is an excuse because every generation has had it tough!”
Life was not magically easy for boomers. They lived through war, economic pressure, political chaos, family dysfunction, trauma, and uncertainty of their own. They worked hard. They sacrificed. They served their churches. They found a way. So why can’t young people today do the same, and why does this generation get spoken about as if it is uniquely overwhelmed?
It’s a fair question, and it deserves a real answer, not a defensive one. Because the goal here is not to romanticize Gen Z or demonize older generations. The goal is to understand what has shifted in the conditions of life, in the shape of stress, and in the way volunteering actually functions in society now, because those conditions directly affect whether church involvement feels like a life-giving invitation or one more demand.
One of the biggest differences is that young adults today are often navigating a kind of layered complexity that previous generations did not carry in the same way. Not because their lives were simple, but because the structures around them were different. The pathway into adulthood was clearer. The relationship between effort and outcome felt more predictable. If you worked hard, you had a reasonable shot at stability. You could imagine a future that made sense. That matters more than people realize, because hope is not just a feeling, it is fuel. When you have hope, sacrifice feels meaningful. When you don’t, sacrifice feels like being exploited.
And there’s another difference that doesn’t get named enough: For many young people, the institutions they are being asked to serve do not feel trustworthy. Churches included. Trust is the invisible foundation that makes volunteering possible. When you trust an institution, you will give your time to it even when it’s inconvenient, because you believe it’s doing something good, something worth the cost. When trust erodes, volunteering becomes a negotiation. People start asking, what am I actually giving my life to here? Is this building something real, or is it just maintaining a tradition for tradition’s sake?
That’s why you can’t just compare generations and say, “well we had it hard too.” Hard is not the only variable. Meaning is a variable. Trust is a variable. The clarity of purpose is a variable. The experience of being valued is a variable. The sense that your contribution will actually matter is a variable. When those things are in place, people will take on extraordinary loads. When they are missing, even small asks feel unbearable.
And this is where the things get interesting, because when you look at why young people are less committed to church in general, the reasons are not what older generations often assume. It’s not that they don’t care about God. It’s not that they don’t want to contribute to the faith community. It’s that the way volunteering works now often clashes with the reality of their lives. Time scarcity is real. Money pressure is real. Study and work loads are real. The bureaucratic friction of control obsessed church boards is real. The feeling of not being taken seriously is real. The need for flexibility is real. All of that has been documented, and it should humble us, because it means the church can no longer rely on the old assumptions that people will just show up because it’s what good Christians do.
So maybe the better question isn’t why young people are different. Maybe the better question is whether the church has actually noticed how the world changed, and whether we are willing to adapt our expectations, our leadership culture, and the way we invite young people into meaningful ownership.
So, How Do We Get Them Involved?
Coming back to the original question, how do we get young people involved, I think the honest answer is that there is no universal trick, because the reasons they are disengaged are not universal. Every local church has its own culture, its own emotional climate, its own history, its own unspoken rules about who gets heard and who gets sidelined.
So the simplest formula really is this: A) Find out why they are not involved and, B) fix those issues with them (not merely for them).
But the “why” will look different depending on the church.
In some churches, young people are not listened to, and after enough eye rolls, enough polite dismissal, enough moments where they realize their ideas will never survive the committee machine, they learn to stop offering.
In some churches, they try to lead and get judged for not doing it the traditional way, so they quietly decide that it is safer to be invisible than to be criticized.
In some churches, they are not given real opportunities at all, and the only roles available are either tokenistic or exhausting, so they do not step up because there is nothing meaningful to step into.
In some churches, the barrier is red tape, the mountain of processes, approvals, and gatekeeping that makes every initiative feel like pushing a boulder uphill, so eventually they stop trying because they cannot keep spending emotional energy on a system that does not move.
Here’s the thing that has to be said plainly:
The world young people live in today is hard, more complex, more distracting, more overwhelming, and more emotionally demanding than most of us want to admit. But that is not the main reason they are less involved in some churches. The main reason is that those churches are not worth the extra stress.
Young people are willing to take on difficulty when they believe the sacrifice matters. They proved it with Occupy Wall Street. They proved it with Black Lives Matter. They proved it with the waves of activism around Palestine. Whether you agree with every cause or not is not the point. The point is that young people are not allergic to sacrifice. They are allergic to meaningless sacrifice.
So the real question is not, why won’t they serve. The real question is, what kind of church are we asking them to serve in? Is it alive? Is it safe? Is it humble enough to learn? Is it relationally healthy? Does it actually listen? Does it make space for new leadership without punishing it? Does it care about mission in the real world, or just about keeping the internal machine running?
Because if your church feels like one more dehumanizing system in a world already full of dehumanizing systems, then of course young adults will protect what little margin they have left. And honestly, who can blame them?
That is where the conversation needs to land. Not on the immature game of who had it harder. But on the sober reality that young people will give their lives to something they believe in, and if they are not giving their lives to the local church, then maybe the question isn’t what’s wrong with them.
Maybe the question is what’s wrong with us.
The Kind Of Mentorship The Next Generation Actually Needs
If we are serious about the future of the church, we have to stop turning this into a competition. The “we had it harder” game does not produce solutions. It perpetuates problems. It tells young people their pain is imaginary, their exhaustion is weakness, and their questions are not valid. Even when that is not what we mean, that is what it communicates, and once that message lands, we’ve lost them for good.
Real mentorship starts somewhere else. It starts with listening. Listening that is slow enough to actually hear what they are saying, and humble enough to let what you hear change you. It starts with older generations remembering what it felt like to be young, not in the details of the economy, but in the emotional experience of trying to find your place, trying to be taken seriously, trying to build a life while still wanting to do something meaningful.
Because here’s the strange thing, when churches complain that young people are not committed, what they are often describing is not a lack of commitment, but a lack of trust. Young people do not give themselves fully to spaces where they feel unseen. They do not pour their limited emotional energy into systems that do not seem safe. They do not volunteer for institutions that treat them as a cheap workforce or a future insurance policy. They commit where they are valued, where they can grow, where their voice matters, and where their sacrifice feels connected to a mission that is actually moving.
That is why the call of older generations is not to shame the young into service. It is to create conditions where service becomes a natural overflow of belonging. That is what the research is pointing toward, even when it is not talking about church at all. Young people want community. They want to feel connected. They want their contribution to matter. They want flexibility, clear purpose, and relational reward. When volunteering is lonely, bureaucratic, or manipulative, they disengage. When it is relational, meaningful, and empowering, they lean in.
So mentorship looks less like telling them to be faithful and more like building faithfulness with them. It looks like asking better questions than “why aren’t you helping.” Questions like, what do you care about? What makes you feel alive? What would it look like for your gifts to actually shape this church? What parts of our culture make it hard for you to belong? What do you need from us if you are going to risk leading here?
And then, the harder part: It looks like being willing to co-create a new future and a new church where all our voices matter. Because love always adapts. Love makes room. Love evolves. Love does not cling to tradition at the expense of people.
If we want young people to give themselves to the church, we have to stop asking them to carry a system that will not carry them. We have to become the kind of community that replenishes what the world depletes, that restores what modern life erodes, that feels like relief, not pressure.
That is not pandering. That is discipleship. And if we do not learn that, we will keep losing people, not because they stopped loving Jesus, but because we never taught them what it feels like to be loved by His people.
The Final Question We Keep Avoiding
At the end of all this, I think the question isn’t really, “how do we get young people to serve?” That question assumes the problem is motivation, as if the church is fine and the only missing ingredient is that young people need to try harder. But the story we’ve traced is pointing somewhere else. It’s pointing toward value. Toward trust. Toward whether the church feels like a place worth giving your life to when your life already feels squeezed.
Because young people are not refusing sacrifice. They are refusing pointless sacrifice. They are refusing to donate their nervous system to a machine that does not love them back. They are refusing to spend their last remaining margin propping up programs that have next to zero missional effectiveness in the world. They are refusing to volunteer for cultures where they are ignored when they speak, criticized when they lead, and used when they comply.
And if we are honest, that refusal makes sense.
So yes, the world is harder in certain ways. It’s more complex, more distracting, more overwhelming, and the economic pressure alone is enough to drain a person dry.
But that isn’t the real reason some churches can’t mobilize their young people.
Young people have shown again and again they will show up, organize, sacrifice, and endure discomfort when they believe the cause is worth it. They do it for movements, for justice, for activism, for community, for meaning. They will carry weight when the weight is connected to something alive.
Which means the real issue is not their willingness. It’s our worth.
Is your church worth the extra stress? Is it worth the extra time? Is it worth the extra emotional cost of giving up the one night you finally get to breathe?
And if the honest answer is no, then we don’t fix that by recruiting harder. We fix that by repenting. By listening. By building communities where service is not a transaction, but an overflow of belonging. Communities where people are known. Communities where mission is real. Communities where young adults don’t feel like a cog, but a co-laborer.
So if you’re a leader, a pastor, an elder, a ministry coordinator, or just someone who loves your local church and is worried about the future, here’s the invitation: Stop treating young adults like a workforce shortage to solve and start treating them like people to know. Ask them why they are not involved, and then have the courage to believe them. Audit the friction. Remove the red tape. Stop using guilt as a substitute for belonging. Create pathways that are flexible, relational, and genuinely meaningful. Build a culture where young people are not just welcomed, but trusted. Not just recruited, but mentored. Not just given tasks, but given ownership.
Because the real question is not whether young people are committed. The real question is whether your church is worth committing to.
