Why Your Church Needs to Listen to Young Adults
By Kara Powell, Jake Mulder, and Raymond Chang
Churches will face extinction if they continue to age without engaging new generations—but knowing that is not enough. How can your church let young adults lead you into a more multigenerational ministry?
“If our church doesn’t get more young people soon, we are going to die.”
This was the warning one of the leaders at Port Orchard Seventh-day Adventist Church in Washington State shared with Dustin during his 2017 interview to become the senior pastor. They wanted him to know right away just how badly their church was shrinking and aging. Of the ninety congregants, only a few were between eighteen and thirty-five. In that season, the church’s future didn’t seem too bright.
Inviting and Empowering Young Adults
After Dustin accepted the pastorate, the leader’s warning continued to reverberate in his mind and soul. So, he vowed that every time a young adult joined their worship service, he would personally meet them, get their contact information, and try to connect afterward.
After a year of connecting with every young adult who visited their church, Dustin had a list of over forty names. He and his wife had already been meeting with a handful of young adults, but in 2018, they felt God calling them to expand their group and invite the entire list to a midweek young adult Bible study in their home. While Dustin’s leadership was a needed catalyst, he knew this couldn’t simply be a ministry for young adults; it needed to be a ministry with young adults.
As the Bible study grew, Dustin regularly asked participants, “What would you love to see God do through you?” Eventually a collective answer bubbled to the surface: given the preponderance of young health professionals in the group, they wanted to organize a free health clinic to benefit the surrounding community.
The growing crop of young adults presented a health clinic proposal to the church board. While its members were pleased that the young people were taking such initiative, they still saw more problems than potential. How will we pay for this? Why would we want to invest so much energy in something with unknown impact? Can these young adults really pull this off?
While it looked like the proposal might get stalled by these questions, a respected board member suggested the board vote to decide whether the young adults could keep working out the details. The vote passed, and God guided the young adults’ subsequent planning. Within a few months, they identified a partner organization, secured a public school location, raised over $20,000, and recruited more than 150 volunteers. The day of the free clinic, the church offered 350 free dental, vision, medical, and physical therapy services. They also offered prayer to every patient they served. Given how many church members had been involved and how the neighborhood appreciated that Port Orchard Seventh-day Adventist Church was so tangibly there for them, the church hosted a second clinic the next year too.
How to Engage the Next Generation in the Church
During those initial years, the church realized how thrilling it could be to work together intergenerationally. “How can we involve young adults in this?” became a common question brought up in church decision-making. Young people were empowered to serve in church leadership roles, facilitate worship teams and small groups, and develop other churchwide ministries. There was a new aura of respect and appreciation for people from different generations that opened doors for greater impact in the community.
Dustin began talking with the young adults about planting a new church in Tacoma, thirty minutes south of Port Orchard. During the pandemic in 2020, the vision for LifeBridge Church was birthed. Since many of the young adults who had led the health clinics lived in Tacoma, they became key leaders on the church plant’s core team. Over the last four years, LifeBridge has hosted twelve free health clinics, mobilized one thousand volunteers, served two thousand patients, and provided over a million dollars’ worth of free dental, vision, and medical care to the community. Thanks to this work and LifeBridge’s intentional relationships with their diverse neighbors, the church came to be even more ethnically and racially diverse than its surrounding community and more engaged with missional outreach.
Both at Port Orchard and at LifeBridge, God used these young adult–led experiments. They were led by young people, they were used by God to develop leadership gifts across the diverse generations of the church, and they impacted the local community. As Dustin summarizes, “We were amazed at the miracles God did when we rallied behind a handful of emerging, passionate young leaders.”
Are you listening to what he might want to do through you?
This story is just one case study found in Future-Focused Church: Leading through Change, Engaging the Next Generation, and Building a More Diverse Tomorrow by Kara Powell, Jake Mulder, and Raymond Chang, published by Baker Books, from which this article has been adapted. In it the teams from Fuller Youth Institute and TENx10 Collaboration share extensive research, interviews, and case studies to help you effectively navigate change so you can revitalize your church.
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Kara Powell, PhD, is chief of leadership formation and executive director of the Fuller Youth Institute at Fuller Theological Seminary and coauthor of several books, including Growing Young.
Jake Mulder, PhD, is assistant chief of leadership formation and executive director of FULLER Equip at Fuller Theological Seminary and coauthor of Growing Young.
Raymond Chang is executive director of TENx10, a collaborative youth discipleship initiative out of Fuller Seminary, as well as president of the Asian American Christian Collaborative.
