nurturing or recruiting young leaders?

The following is a post that will be replicated in a young clergy blog for the North Alabama Conference.

Any effective conversation about young church leaders has to be about more than saving the traditional structure of the church. We might find a few people willing to do CPR on our church, but those few will only be those who are already deeply embedded in the church, and the parts of the church that will be able to survive in that kind of situation will be a far cry from the biblical model of Christian community. Rather than focusing on how the church looks, we need to focus on how the church is and what the church does.

We as a church have always been about the outwardly transformational work of the gospel, thus outreach and mission are a part of who we are. We are also, however, about the inwardly transformational work of Christ, which is something experienced only as we are drawn into Christian community. People will be drawn to outwardly transformational ministry, but they can also be drawn into the church by transparent ministry that is inwardly transformative.

Part of the absence of younger people in the church is an unavoidable demographic shift - people are getting married later, moving more, and having kids later, all of which decrease likelihood of church attendance. There is also financially little incentive for church to invest in young adults - they rarely have money to give, and even if they do they will probably move in a few years anyway. So those churches who do have young people around them would rather focus on other investments with a more predictable return on investment.

When it comes to young Christian leaders, both clergy and lay, our primary failure as a church lies more in nurturing than in recruiting. Talking about recruitment is nice for young clergy and helps us feel a little more comfortable going into ordination interviews. But the fact is that young people who are engaged in the church, particularly young people who are unmarried without children, are hard to come by. Getting more of them is not a matter of having better ads in the classifieds - it is a process of discipleship that cannot happen overnight. Even when someone is called with little previous experience within the church, that person must then rely even more heavily on the church to help them learn those things that they never learned. So in many ways to talk about recruitment is more trying to treat the symptom than solving the problem.

It is curious that we talk so much about young adults, yet fail to focus on where a vast percentage of young adults are. We have an undersupported model for reaching people in this age bracket in campus ministry. What percentage of people under 35 go to college these days? And the reason we don't have a campus ministry at every college is . . . ? It is confounding that we can talk about how important young leaders are and young ministers are and yet not make more efforts to be present when people are deciding their careers. Few individual churches are equipped to engage college students, yet campus ministries are doing so despite meager support from the broader church.

The North Alabama Conference last year budgeted $37,000 to support campus ministry programming. You can almost buy every college student in North Alabama a Coke for that. Almost. Yet campus ministry is a situation in which the actual members of the community have extremely limited ability to provide financial resources. Advertising and outreach are even more vital than in the typical community, given a 4 year (or 5, or 6) turnover in the population. We have systemically forced our campus ministers into being primarily fundraisers rather than actually initiating some of the varied programs that can and should exist to reach people on a college campus and nurture young Christian leaders.

Campus ministry is unique because it has the opportunity to allow young people to become leaders, try various ministries, to become in many ways a test lab for future leaders as they investigate their future careers to also investigate their future involvement in the church. That, however, takes resources that the students themselves don't have, and that we currently force our campus ministers to spend most of their time raising. People are nurtured into the faith, nurtured into deeper faith, and many are nurtured into accepting a calling into vocations of ministry. So that is one example, although definitely not the only one, of a type of ministry that is effective with young people but could do much more if given broader support.

There's also the issue of how we attract people to our church. We as a church do attract some people by what we do and our ability to transform the world. But to be willing to be a part themselves, people need to experience Christian community in order to buy into the church. The United Way is working to transform the world as well - what separates the church is that it is also working to transform its members into Christ's likeness through community. As the underlying argument of much of Willimon and Hauerwas's works argue, we as a church simply need to be truly ourselves in order to transform the world. We draw some people in by what we do, but we also draw many in by who we are, with transformation of both ourselves and the world. As people become part of us and we become part of them, God will call nurture Christian leaders. The sooner we as a church are faithful to our calling to engage people, the sooner they will hear that call.

Above all, to recruit young Christian leaders we need to carry out the work of transforming the church and the world. Our conference priorities are currently directed internally at transforming ourselves into a better church, assuming that in doing so we will then be able to transform the world. Perhaps we should look outward to how we should transform the world, assuming that in doing so we will be transformed into the church. Or perhaps we should look toward Christ for our transformation and all work as hard as we can with what God has given us where God has put us. Isn't that why we're in the resurrection business in the first place?