Drew Dickens says church isn’t about the building but about community.
Time once was, in the not too distant past, that you would be shunned for appearing in public on Sunday morning in anything less than your best “go to meeting” clothes and seen anyplace other than your neighborhood church at the end of a tree lined street. But in less than a generation, churches, synagogues, and mosques have seen a twenty percent decline in attendance.
Growing up I may not have been happy about going to church, but I certainly wasn’t going to bring it up. It just wasn’t an option on Sunday morning. But now nearly 30% of Americans say they seldom or never attend worship services. That percentage is over 35% for those young adults born after 1980.
Todd Pickett, dean of Spiritual Development and professor of spiritual formation at Biola University, says “Millennials have more life disruptions than people of other stages of life. They are moving around a lot, they are changing relational networks. The highly mobile nature of the Millennial makes it hard for them to settle down into churches, it makes it hard to settle into patterns of life anyway.” But there are other aspects of a Millennial’s life that have not been negatively affected. Why church?
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