In Part 1 of this discussion I asked the question of how a denomination with a large number of members and connectional but institutional structure can not just operate in a connectional manner, but feel connectional as well.  That was the big picture and my friend Karen in her comment pointing out the younger generations don’t care about the church as an institution she anticipated this Part 2 about our connectional nature on the local level.  Now this is not connectional in the polity sense, but connectional in the relational sense within the congregation.

So once again I want to ask an uncomfortable question about our connectedness.  While this one may not be heretical, it is a bit different than much of the “emergent” church discussion I have seen.

I have started asking myself this question because recently I have been playing back in my mind almost five decades, but I can probably only reliably speak for four, of involvement in the church.  And while this is highly unscientific, I think that I see a couple things in congregational dynamics related to this.

First, I appreciate the current emphasis on young adults, doing church differently, being interactive and relational, all the new technology, terminology and thinking.  I think this is important and critical for church growth.  But as I look at my friends going back several decades I have started asking the question whether those that we are trying to attract to the church are young adults that were involved in the church and have left, or whether they were never involved in the church because it was their parents that left the church.  In running through my list, unscientifically, it seem to be as much if not more the latter than the former.  Many of the “unchurched” peers that my children interact with are not unchurched because of a direct choice they made, but they have never attended church because their parents, who are my age, made the choice.  (You could probably extend this argument back even one more generation to when the decline in mainline membership began, but in the white, middle-class suburb I grew up in all of my close friends were in church-going families.)

Now, fast-forward to the present time and ask which churches have the strongest programs for the pre-college age crowd.  Across denomination, and non-denomination, boundaries in my corner of Los Angeles it is not churches that have good youth programs per se, but good family programs including all ages.  I am not aware of a local church that has success with their youth group while not bringing in the parents as well for more than Sunday morning.

A few qualifiers:  One is that my second comment does not necessarily pertain to the college age/young adult ministry.  They are on their own, may have rejected the church, and have no direct parental structure to add value to church participation.  Here is where the “emergent” church work probably applies most strongly.  A second condition is that for the present youth groups I can not make any claim or denial of retention into college or young adulthood.  There is probably a scientific study out there that does answer this, but I lose contact with many of my kids peers at this point so my unscientific observations break down here.

From these observations I see a couple of implications:
One is that if you want church growth going forward the focus of the church today should be on the family.  We need to think bigger than just the youth group.  And Carrol Howard Merritt’s “Quick Fix” post about there being no quick fix but the need to develop relationships applies here as well.

The other, and this I have seen discussed elsewhere, is that bringing young adults back to church can be different for those that have left and those that never attended.  While the relationship angle is important, the two groups can come with very different questions, fears, and expectations or lack there-of.

Finally, as I kept saying these are not scientific observations but what I see around me and my family and in my life history.  Seeing as how so much in church growth has been studied I am probably not breaking new ground here.  But for what it is worth these are trends and implications I have noticed and I welcome corresponding or conflicting observations from others.  But it seems to me that in the end connectionalism in the smallest sense depends on the place of the family in Covenant Community.