Where do we go from here?
The research tells a story, and my experience as an itinerant worker mirrors it: young people are leaving the Church at an earlier age. This work goes some way to explaining what is happening and why.
The challenge is two-fold: the challenge of nurture, how we communicate the relevance of our faith to our own children; the other of outreach, especially when it seems we are reaching out to only a small number, most of whom are similar to us in background and class.
The most poignant table in the book for me is the graph looking at the age at which Tweenagers stopped attending church. The seeds that lead to a young person leaving the church are sown at an earlier age and they go as soon as they are free to make the choice not to be there. This means we have to look at the work we are doing with them before this age. The urgent crisis for the church is therefore one of relevant discipleship.
We have for too long been doing children's and youth ministry based on models that no longer work because they were designed for a generation that has moved on. There are some great models around that are connecting with the world of the Tweenagers, but we need more!
We hope that by the time you have got this far you have understood the challenge we have before us in passing on the baton of faith to the emerging generations, whatever they may be called! We must as churches not only understand this in an intellectual sense, but also allow it to affect our action: how we do church, how we spend our budget, the way we plan for the future, how we connect with local schools and non-churchgoing young people.
Our ambition as a steering group for this work is that it does not become a body of research to berate the church leadership. Rather that it informs our thinking and moves us to creative positive action to do what Jesus told the disciples to do, to let the children come to him. Not to get in the way.
Richard Bromley
