Ministry After the Boomer Apocalypse

Each year at the Presbyterian Church in America's (PCA) General Assembly a group of younger pastors gather for the annual Next Generation Forum, which creates a space for rising leaders in the church to talk about the issues facing the PCA and the church more broadly. We are honored to publish the talks presented each year. Today we are running Derek Rishmawy's remarks. We will publish those of Robert Hasler tomorrow.

To begin, I want to set the stage to frame up the “advice” I am going to give.

Boomer Apocalypse

First, we need to begin by acknowledging the demographic challenges facing the PCA, which we might refer to as “the boomer apocalypse.” (This term originated with the Australian pastor and podcaster Mark Sayers.)

Essentially, in about 15-20 years or so, when the Boomer generation is set to recede from the scene, we are going to see a massive demographic shift that will impact (a) raw numbers, (b) culture and institutional knowledge, forms, and leadership, and (c) pure dollars coming into fund the ministry of the church. 

The shape of the PCA is set to change radically no matter what we do.

Obsolescence and De-Churching

Connected to this, I want to add a related phenomena: the massive dechurching of America and the obsolescence of American religion. I won’t rehash this at length, but most of you have heard the stats from Ryan Burge, Michael Graham, and Jim Davis, or heard a podcast about Christian Smith’s work on the obsolescence of religion. In the last 25 years, 40 million people stopped going to church—and actually, Graham and Burge’s new book argues that it’s closer to 60 million. Beyond that, traditional religion has continually lost market share, not to atheism, but general non-traditional spiritualism, or nothing in particular. While the Boomers were actually key to this movement, their loss from the scene can only seem to accelerate and amplify that dynamic across the landscape.

Never-Churched? 

Third, while we all know about the de-churched, we must recognize that an increasingly large segment of youngsters that campus ministers are meeting are the “never churched.”

Anecdotally, at UC Irvine if I run into a student who is not currently attending a church and doesn't identify themselves as religious explicitly, I am less likely to find somebody who is formerly religious than in past years. This means they’re not Christian and they don’t typically have religious baggage. But it also means they have no context for Christian doctrine, truth, or practice.

Vibe Shift and Quiet Revival? 

Finally, some of you have heard about the Vibe Shift and the alleged “Quiet Revival.” I’ll say that, briefly, the Vibe Shift is very real, but the Quiet Revival basically has no data for it. On the ground, things have shifted politically, and I think even created an openness to spiritual conversations broadly among the younger generation and, yes especially among young men. That said, statistically speaking, there is no data telling us that we should be banking on any kind of quiet revival to come save us.

I mention these realities, not because they change our call as ministers of the gospel to reach and shepherd the coming generations—the call is the same. Nevertheless, we answer the call under the conditions of history and to my mind it does two things: the boomer apocalypse and dechurching of America lends urgency to the task and perhaps gives shape to some of how we go about it. 

Thankfully, the PCA is not doing bad comparatively. We are one of the only denominations to see any growth in the last few years and anywhere from 25-30 percent of our denomination is under 30. I attribute that last fact largely to two things. First, thank God my church has lots and lots of babies. Second, to the work of RUF. 

Admittedly, I am biased, but given that RUF reaches about 20,000 students across 160 or so campuses right now, it’s not crazy to think that starting RUF was one of the most forward-thinking things our founding fathers did when starting the PCA 50 years ago. When it comes to reaching the next generation, I am sure Andrew Rein would want me to say: Keep partnering with RUF, keep funding it, keep encouraging it, and keep making your churches welcome to RUF students. And I am saying that.

But I'll say more than that. On the practical side I want to make three suggestions that I will categorize in two boxes. RUF’s tagline is “reaching students for Christ and equipping them to serve the church,” and so those will be my boxes: Reaching Students and Equipping Them to Serve the Church. 

Then, I will end with one meta-comment on how this relates to some of our vibe-related denominational tensions. 

Reaching 

Preaching has to be Exegetical, Catechetical, and Apologetic. 

This is another way of saying that when it comes to reaching Gen Z, both in college and post-college, much of the post-Christian, un-churched, religiously pluralistic, spiritual-not-religious landscape needs to be consciously borne in mind in our preaching. 

To break that down, preaching needs to be exegetical–a clear exposition of the text we have in front of us, because what else are we doing when giving people God's Word? One of the most important things I've learned over the years in working with college students is that while there is absolutely a place for understanding and humility and giving space for differing views as people come into your ministry, sheer confidence in the Word of God and an unflappable drive to apply it and expound it directly and unashamedly is essential for actually reaching them. And you just need to believe that. You need to believe that Gen Z is not the unique species of human upon whom the Spirit of God cannot work.

Here’s the thing, Gen Z is burned out on cynicism. Some have heard about the metamodern moment—that after cynical postmodernity, we have a longing for a post-ironic turn to belief, to earnest faith, to the embrace of identities more solid than deconstruction alone can offer.

As Paul Anleiter has noted, Creed made a comeback, Top Gun: Maverick and even the recent Superman moved past grimdark cynicism. Why? Everybody is being constantly bombarded by this take, and that YouTube video and that TED talk and that influencer TikTok and it is tiring to be constantly being sold and then seeing through grift after grift. And the most important thing you can do for an 18 to 30 year old is to declare to them clearly and directly what God's Word has said for thousands of years, unchanged because that's where the Spirit works. The Spirit and the Word are not a gimmick.

Second, preaching needs to be catechetical. Younger folks—both Christian and non-Christian—increasingly have no prior Christian architecture of belief metaphysically, ethically, or narratively. Reaching them requires a lot of Paul’s Acts 17 mindset of being willing to clearly teach in a way that is aimed at regularly instructing outsiders and beginners in the faith from the text at the same time. It means coming to the text not with advanced dogmatics questions or advanced biblical theology questions at the forefront, but often Nicene Creed and Apostles’ Creed and basic Ten Commandments questions as part of how you frame your preaching and teaching. In other words, the Confessions and Catechisms are evangelism tools, not roadblocks!

Third, it actually just does need to be apologetic. Not in a scared, embarrassed, fearful way or even in a needlessly offensive and aggressive way. But you should be attuned to showing how God’s Word and the Good News of Jesus can answer the defeaters, objections, and assumptions of the pagan hearts of our Christians and our non-Christians. This is Charles Taylor, right? Everybody is “cross pressured”, meaning your Christians have pagan objections, and your pagans have some Christian longings and so speaking to one audience is speaking to both. And this isn’t selling out the text because these texts were written to a people in missional contexts! This is Acts 17 stuff.

This year, I walked through the Apostles’ Creed, the 10 Commandments, and the Lord’s Prayer. I used the Confessions at key points, answered questions, gave out books, pointed to good podcasts and did not shy away from having a Protestantism book club that was one of the most successful things we did. It feels basic to say this, but if we are going to be aggressively reaching and evangelizing the next generation, our regular Sunday preaching and small groups needs to be consciously and consistently pitched at them in that way. 

As a side note, all of this applies in similar measure to younger ages like high school and junior high. The best way to reach the next generation is to produce them, baptize them, and keep them.

Hospitality

The second point here is also a very basic one. Hospitality needs to be core to your church or local ministry’s philosophy of outreach. One of the most important things I do as a campus minister is buy kids Chick-fil-a and Chipotle and get them into random families’ homes at church. 

Obviously, the church is a hospitable place and in liquid modernity, we should do this for everyone. 

But this is especially the case for Gen Z, whom Jonathan Haidt calls “The Anxious Generation.” They are most on their phones, most online, most unchurched,  and the absolute loneliest and disconnected generation in America. They are struggling with severe mental health issues, anxiety, struggling with agency, and hopelessness. They also have lower social skills across the board, they are failing to launch, and by several measures are just behind. So while they are safer (ie. less drinking, more exercise, less sex), they are less social, less able to date, and make connections. They are also more divided politically by gender (young men leaning to the right and young women leaning strongly to the left), and more suspicious of each other.

But this is part of why providing regular avenues of embodied engagement, in homes, at church, over coffee, over service projects, or other ways is not just being an event coordinator, but doing real outreach.

We are Presbyterians so one of the easiest ways is actually to go all out Sabbath-maxxing. Our church doesn't own its own building, so we can't do an evening service but there are frequently small groups that meet at those times. And the family from church that opens its home on Sunday afternoon that has over my interns and staff and several of my students has been a core avenue of welcome to this deeply disconnected generation.

Incarnational ministry was a buzzword about 10 years ago, and I have criticisms of it theologically. But the basic point about breaking bread and sharing community together on a Sunday afternoon where you get a student to log off,  and maybe touch some grass, or providing avenues for families with kids to do so is going to be so important and so countercultural in the coming decade or more. The churches that have elders, deacons, and families who are aggressive about inviting them into their lives and into their homes along with the preaching and the programming and the worship are going to be the ones that are doing the work here. 

Equipping

When it comes to “equipping” the next generation to serve the church, on campus I try to focus at least on having a decent ministry team with plenty of places to hand off responsibility to students, such as small groups, Bible studies, and event planning. But I don't really want to talk about that, beyond saying that our churches got the Boomers involved a couple of generations ago by risking and allowing them to make choices and handle important things in the church. We'll need to do the same in our ministries. 

Risk and Pastoral Pipeline.

This willingness to risk is not unrelated to the point I want to focus on, which is mainly the need to build up the pastoral recruitment and training pipeline. Over the last few years there's been a lot of discourse around the upcoming problem of empty pulpits, drop-offs in church plants, and declining enrollment at seminaries. The OPC just said they had 40 pulpits open—which is a lot for the OPC.

Now, some of this is due to basic demographic realities: there are just fewer members of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Beyond that, though, there is a general layer of anxiety and fear and an unwillingness to risk among young men that goes hand in hand with some of the broader cultural trends that we have already named.  

Again, I’ll say that one of the best pastoral pipelines we have in our youth in the PCA is just RUF. Just two years ago we sent four students to seminary to enter Presbyterian ministry and I don't think I'm remarkable as a CM. The RUF internship generally has something like 80 interns, half male, most of whom are thinking of seminary. Proportionally, that’s not bad.

But that said, I don’t think it should be the only, or even the main pipeline. I think the men in this room (Gen X pastors, millennial pastors, and even the Gen Z pastors) in our local churches need regularly keep their head on a swivel within your congregations for young men to disciple who you specifically think have talents, capacities, and the shapeable character of a future minister. Which is to say, we need to up our game at embodying the external call of God upon men for the ministry. 

To that end, I think as a cohort we must ditch the mindset that tells young men that if there's anything else they can do and be happy besides being a pastor, to go do it. I don’t believe that’s proper to our understanding of internal and external calling. Even if this is somebody who could plausibly go out into the field and do something else, if we see in young men the qualities, capacities, and gifts for the pastorate, we ought not be scared to say something to that effect. 

I have a firm grasp of the Reformed doctrine of vocation. It is right and good to teach our young men to glorify God in their callings in business, politics, law, the arts, construction, and so forth. These are not lesser jobs. All the same, there are young, capable, thoughtful men who the contemporary world is telling to focus on grinding, earning cash, securing their lives, while at the same time pouring fear into their heart about cancellation and misunderstandings, and cultural opposition. These men are being driven away from ministry. Yet some of these are young men upon whom God has placed a call. They need to hear from us that entering into pastoral ministry is one of the greatest jobs a man can have. 

Alongside that, we probably need to actually provide these young men what my friend Chris Colquitt has called a “pastoral theology of strength” or agency. I'm a millennial and we grew up on the brokenness and authenticity beat that set us up to hear the beautiful news of justification by faith beyond our works. What a lot of our students need is beyond a strong theology of justification, however, is a correspondingly strong theology of sanctification where the empowering Holy Spirit in union with Christ actually equips you to move beyond the sort of learned helplessness that is endemic to this generation.

And what they need is actually the voice, the belief, and the authoritative insight of godly older men who see something in them and call them into the field, and then are willing to dedicate the requisite time, energy and risk to allow them to succeed.  In other words, we need to be Fathers and Brothers. 

And this itself is risky, messy work that will possibly reshape and reform a young man's future. What’s more, it is risk to us. Some of us fear sinking time, energy, and focus into a “hunch” that might not pay off and maybe distracts from other important tasks within the church. Handing over responsibilities to an untested, unknown leader can go beautifully or terribly. All of this requires risk on our end. 

Relatedly, it will also mean risking a bit financially on internships, fellowships, two-year pastoral apprenticeships, and so on. This is especially the case at the larger churches who may be choosing how to allocate some funds.

But this is crucial if we are going to disciple and reach the next generation. The reality is the people who are most likely to reach the next generation are those that we call and equip among that coming generation. But this needs to be a priority for us because it is a priority in the New Testament. 

Remember, when Jesus was preaching and ministering, what did he do? As an RUF buddy of mine pointed out, he spent three years walking around with the equivalent of 12 teenage to young adult interns. And in Paul’s corpus, nearly 1/6 of his written material is directed to guiding the young pastors Timothy and Titus, whom he had trained. This has always been the way and it must be again.

Meta-Reflection on the Ecclesial Vibes

And with that, I want to make one, last, final meta-comment having to do with some of the broader ecclesiastical challenges we’ve had in the PCA having to do with culture: “Beware the temptation to ride the Vibe.”

Be cautious about trying to leverage cultural vibes too much in our intramural debates about confessional identity and reaching the next generation. 

A couple of examples by way of memes I have seen: 

Crossing the Tiber or Bosphorus. 

Right now, in our rootless, liquid modernity, with the threat of creeping Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox apologetics coming for our young folks, there is a temptation to think “what these rootless, identity-less kids need is thicker, confessional, Presbymaxxing, not softening ‘missionalism.’” It’s basically confessionalism as pragmatism to reach the kids.

Reaching Based Young Men. 

Or again, post-vibe shift, as my friend James Wood has pointed out, there are a bunch of reality respecters, especially young men who are turned off by the excesses of critical gender and racial theories, who are interested in the sanity of a Christian moral view and not being unfairly demonized for being a white guy. What we need, then, some have thought, are bold churches that push back on wokeness, get more explicitly political, explicitly right-wing, etc., which then also get bundled with a certain vibe and ethos so as to not lose our based young men. 

What do we make of this? 

Elevation Still Sells. 

Well, to the first point about Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy, anecdotally and at the meme level, the conversion train might be a real thing. But the data just isn’t there to substantiate it in any kind of real or large-scale way. 

The only group consistently winning or growing are the non-denom charismatics, who are eating the Orthodox and Catholic numbers for lunch. So while you should definitely bone up on your Protestant apologetics, my gut currently tells me this is mostly about keeping your future pastoral pipeline strong by keeping your nerdy readers on the team.

On the West Coast, though, I’ll just say I don't have many Presbyterian students showing up at my ministry. I only have non-denom kids, non-Christians, and random Catholics. They know I am a Presbyterian because I teach Presbyterian things and baptize them into Presbyterian churches. But when they show up, they are not Presbyterian.

You know who is the hardest group to get to show up to our liturgical PCA church? It isn’t the non-Christians or the Catholics. It’s the majority of non-denominational Evangelical kids who are used to the big rock concert worship services and just do not get liturgy and have no concept of confessions.  

Reformed Catholicity or Presbyterian Marines 

Now, I want those students to join PCA churches. I want them to be Reformed. 

One way of inviting people into the PCA, and into our confessional heritage and Reformed worship is to draw them into a broad, reformed catholicity (to use a hot buzzword). An alternative approach comes off as a call to join the elite Presbyterian Marines (the Few, the Saved, the Chosen). In this case, you either get with the program or get out. 

I'm going to suggest a certain amount of flexibility of spirit, and even some practice, for the sake of on-ramping the non-denominational kids is likely going to be necessary in these times if we are going to continue to reach out and grow.

Reaching Young Men 

Next, speaking as a guy whose ministry for the last seven years has been anywhere between 60-80% male in a given year and who really cares about reaching young men: Yes, challenge them. Yes, be direct. Yes, push back on much of the ideology out there that is contrary to God’s Word and has beat these young men up before they’ve even gotten out the door. Pour in the time. Mentor, pursue. Speak to their needs. 

But if you are one of those who think that some over the last 10 years have made the mistake of feminizing and emotionalizing churches to keep the young women happy, or tried far too hard to equate the Larger Catechism to a more center-left, even progressive political order, it stands to reason that running the same operation of coddling unbiblical or ungodly attitudes or winds of social doctrine in the opposite direction for the sake of catching the current vibe could also conceivably go wrong, right? I think the last few weeks and months have shown us a few ways that project could go wrong, right? 

Let me put it this way. One of the young men I baptized this year was someone I met lifting weights, took through a book on masculinity, and have offered a distinctly male form of mentorship to. And yet, another was a young woman who found it refreshing that when she showed up at church on Sunday, it wasn’t about right-wing politics all the time. 

Now, does this mean I didn’t preach about abortion for 20 minutes in my sermon on the 6^th commandment? No. I did so clearly and directly. But I did it on the assumption that I actually had more people than just those disaffected young men in my room. I still had the young, increasingly progressive women, who need the gospel just as much, who still have their own questions, whom I want to persuade about the goodness of God’s Word.

What I'm saying is that when it comes to reaching the next generation, being highly online, letting your ministry be governed by the contemporary algorithm and the quick shifts of vibes and moods, could, in the long term, be very counterproductive for faithful ministry to the coming generation. 

What the next generation needs is not our ability to catch a vibe, a wave, a revival, a trend, etc. Vibes shift and shift again. What they need is our continued commitment to ministering, yes, in culturally wise ways, but more fundamentally out of a bedrock of biblical conviction.