BY JULIE IRWIN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
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Matt and Amy Ely of Western Hills sign an information sheet after a service at Crossroads Community Church.
(Michael E. Keating photo)
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Crossroads Community Church began as a question among a group of young Christian professionals on Cincinnati's east side: Why don't any of our friends go to church?
"We asked them why and they described Christianity with four words: boring, irrelevant, cold and unfriendly," said co-founder Brian Wells, who left Procter & Gamble Co. to become a pastor at the Hyde Park church. "That really bummed us out to think that that's their perception of Christianity and that's why they're not going to church."
Crossroads isn't alone in wondering why people in their 20s and early 30s don't attend church. Increasing numbers of churches in the Tristate and across the country are targeting Generation Xers with special services and ministries, just as they did with baby boomers a decade or so ago.
But churches face a very different task with the generation born between the early 1960s and 1980. Unlike boomers, who mostly grew up in church-going families, many Gen Xers were raised with no religious background at all, meaning the Christianity presented needs to be entry-level.
When churches realized that baby boomers had left in large numbers, they replaced the organ-backed hymns with light-rock religious songs and encouraged a wear-your-jeans-and-bring-your-coffee informality. They also created small groups that helped members link biblical teachings with real-life problems such as debt and divorce.
So how do churches who want to attract Gen Xers do it? Many start with the music, edgier than in a boomer service. Others find a variety of musical tastes is crucial.
"We try not to stay with one kind of sound because we've found they have this eclectic kind of taste," said Joe Myers, associate pastor at Montgomery Church of Christ, which started a service this month for older Gen Xers and younger boomers. "They could listen to John Denver one minute and Smashing Pumpkins the next and enjoy them both."
Exploring other religiions
Gen Xers, also known as baby busters, are more likely to come from broken homes and live far from parents and grandparents, creating spiritual needs their older counterparts didn't have. And the monopoly that Christianity used to have in the United States has been gradually replaced in their lifetime by a marketplace of religious options, from Buddhism to New Age to combinations of traditions.
"With all the other options, religiously and spiritually -- the generation is not non-spiritual. They just don't think church is the place to find it. They're more likely to create their own -- "I'll take a little bit of this and a little bit of that,' " said the Rev. Dr. Stanley Menking, retired associate dean at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University, who now consults with churches that want to attract young adults.
Surveys attest to the difficulty churches have in attracting young adults. According to a June CNN - USA Today poll conducted by the Gallup Organization, only 21 percent of Americans between 18 and 29 attend church weekly, while 30 percent say they seldom go and 11 percent never go. That attendance compares with 31 percent of people 30 to 49, 34 percent of those 50 to 64, and 46 percent of those 65 and older who said they went to church weekly.
A 1996 Enquirer poll on religious practices found similar disparities in the Tristate. Fifty-three percent of residents ages 18 to 34 reported going to church weekly, as compared with 70 percent of people ages 35 to 54, 73 percent of people 55 to 64 and 80 percent of people 65 and older who said they attend weekly.
Until Crossroads opened in 1996, Laura and Neil Smith didn't attend church. Both were raised religiously -- she a Methodist, he a Catholic -- but they hadn't found a church where both felt comfortable since their wedding eight years ago. Then they received a mailed invitation to Crossroads' first service.
"We both said, "Wow, this sounds like exactly what we're looking for.' We went and we were totally blown away by the service. We were like, "This is it,' " said Mrs. Smith, 33, of Kennedy Heights. "It was so relevant. We'd just go home and discuss things and it'd last into the week. We went and we never stopped. It has totally changed our lives and reordered our priorities."
Pop culture is a hallmark of the emerging Gen X service, with everything from Winnie the Pooh to Jim Carrey employed to explain the Christian message. Technology is also important: The baby busters -- raised on MTV and the personal computer -- crave a multimedia experience and often are bored by more traditional services.
"What you have is a generation able to assimilate information rapidly in story form," said the Rev. Dr. Menking, who is leading a seminar here in January on how churches can reach young adults. "When you go to a worship service and you don't get visually stimulated and you're keyed for that, it seems slow, like nothing's happening."
Learning Bible terms
Churches are making an adjustment for the religious illiteracy that many young adults demonstrate. When the Rev. Dr. Menking talks to a group of Gen Xers, he can't assume they know who Moses was.
"The teaching isn't going to be watered-down, but we will cut out religious terms like "justified' or "reconciliation,' " said Russ Howard, youth minister at Mount Carmel Church of Christ, who is planning a busters service set to start early next year. "People don't use those words. But we'll still find a way to teach the message."
But some think churches make a mistake if they think new music and a video clip or two will lure an unreached generation. They argue that generational experience with divorce, religious pluralism, moral relativism, mistrust and a lack of community requires churches to change in fundamental ways if they want to reach baby busters.
"Everybody thinks you just throw together a service that has some edgy music and some relevant topics, and they will come, and that just doesn't happen," said Crossroads pastor Brian Tome. "They may come, but they want to go deeper beyond that surface, and then where do they go from that?"
The Rev. Mr. Tome finds the desire to go beyond the surface means challenging people to serve others, providing a sense of community and showing people how Christianity can affect their daily lives.
He and others also find a craving for biblical truths in a simple, straightforward way -- reminding people, for instance, in a series about the Ten Commandments that goofing off at work amounts to stealing from your employer.
"This generation is searching for the truth they never learned," said the Rev. James Sullivan, O.P., associate pastor at St. Gertrude Catholic Church in Madeira. Father Sullivan runs Generation Christ, a group for young Catholics and Protestants that meets Sunday nights at the Mater Ecclesia Institute in Hyde Park.
"We want to give substance to a generation that is only used to relativism, to talk about Scriptural truths and what it means to be a Christian and to profess Christ as Lord and not worry about the consequences of that."
And while generation-specific services are gaining popularity, even the pastors who create them express some discomfort with the idea. They worry that young Christians could miss out on the chance to meet and learn from older Christians, and vice versa.
Ginghamsburg United Methodist Church in Tipp City, Ohio, discontinued a Gen X service about a year ago.
The service, called Sojourn, emphasized an entire band over a keyboard-heavy sound. It also used comedy -- Top 10 lists, a television talk-show format.
Sojourn was popular, attracting not only its target audience but also baby boomers and their children. Gradually other services incorporated the elements that were working well for Sojourn, and after a year the staff decided there was no longer a need for a separate service.
"We don't separate people out. (At a service) You'll be sitting next to a teen on one side and a senior citizen on the other," said Mike Lyons, who is the church's minister of communications. "It's an aspiration here at Ginghamsburg to model after the Kingdom of God, and that's one of the ways we do it, by representing its diversity."
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