How to Reach Young Adults

How to Reach Your Young Adults

Written by Dan Garland

Churches of all sizes and locations are dealing with the challenge of reaching and keeping young adults. What can your church do to attract, engage and keep young adults? The following are excerpts from Tools for an Essential Church by Dr. Thom S. Rainer, Sam S. Rainer III, and Dan Garland.

Reaching Young Adults

Tools for an Essential Church - Church Manual

To gain insight into ways to reach and keep young adults, LifeWay Research undertook a study of young adults. They used polling and one-on-one surveys to talk to over 500 (churched and unchurched combined, from interviews and polling data) young adults across the country in order to better understand their mindsets and value systems.

The research discovered this about reaching young adults:

Almost ninety percent of the unchurched 20 to 29 year olds said they would be willing to listen if someone wanted to tell them about Christianity.
Three of 5 younger unchurched respondents agreed they would be willing to study the Bible if a friend asked them to do so.
Over 60 percent said they would attend a church if it presented truth in an understandable and relevant way.

The Bad News: The younger unchurched believe the church is too critical about lifestyle issues, full of hypocrites, and not necessary for spiritual development.

The Good News: The younger unchurched clearly indicate they are willing to dialogue about Christianity and Jesus. (from Lost and Found)

These findings reinforce the truth that effective evangelism is done through building relationships.

Reach Young Adults by Getting Relational

What can your church do to help heighten the need for building intentional relationships with the unchurched and the dechurched?

Preach/teach on the power of relationships and invitations. Nine out of ten of unchurched or dechurched young adults who come to church and get connected to Christ do so because a friend, co-worker, relative, neighbor invited them.
Teach and model developing relationships with the dechurched and the unchurched. Use the testimonies of those who came to Christ as a result of someone developing a relationship with them. Powerful testimonies energize and encourage others to get involved in building authentic relationships with those who need Christ and His church.
Find new ways, creative ways to connect believers with the dechurched and the unchurched. This will not happen by doing the same thing the same way.

Getting outside the walls of the church buildings and engaging people with the gospel is absolutely essential to reaching the unchurched and the dechurched. A novel approach is to get to know some people who are unchurched and ask them what it would take for them to come to church. This is always insightful. You might then actually begin to do some of the things the unchurched suggest.

If the unchurched come because of relationships, they stay because of new relationships. The questions the unchurched are asking is:

Can I fit in here?
Can I make friends?
Will I be accepted?

Those in the church must be taught to build relationships with those who are new to the church. To get a feel for this, send some of your church leaders out to visit other churches in the area and report how they were greeted. Or, ask for the honest feedback of those who visit your church. Learn from the responses and use these as teaching tools for your congregation.

Believers must be taught to develop relationships in their everyday paths of life and in their areas of passion and interests. The unchurched and dechurched are all around us and often invisible to us. Teach your people to open their eyes and begin to look for opportunities to talk about your church and what you are doing to make a difference in the community.

One key strategy of reaching young adults is the effort on reclaiming those who have dropped out of church – the dechurched.

The Key to reclaiming dechurched young adults: Friends and Family

“We interviewed 394 rechurched young adults to find out why they returned to church. One myth that could be easily dismissed is that they were too angry at the church to return. To the contrary, the rechurched told us in overwhelming numbers that anger at the church was not a factor in their departures. Apathy tended to always be the trump card over anger."

“So the dechurched often just needed a gentle nod to become the rechurched. And that gentle nod came most often from friends and family. Nearly four out ten (39%) rechurched told us that parents or other family members were instrumental in their return to church. Another two out of ten (21%) said that they returned church after friends or acquaintances encouraged them to attend.” (Pg 224, Essential Church? Reclaiming a Generation of Dropouts by Thom Rainer and Sam Rainer)

The bottom line is that family and friends must be encouraged to continue to invite, pray for and lift up the dechurched young adults because there is power in the invitation.

Dan Garland is the Director of LifeWay's Pastoral Ministries and Church Consulting. Dan came to this position in August 2007. Dan has twenty-two years of pastoral experience in various size churches, mainly in Kentucky. He was also the Team Leader for Church Development and Evangelism for the Kentucky Baptist Convention for over seven years. In that capacity Dan worked with bivocational pastors and smaller membership churches.

You may contact Dan Garland at 615-251-3893 or email him at dan.garland@lifeway.com.

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The original article can be found at:

http://www.lifeway.com/lwc/article_main_page/0%2C1703%2CA%25253D168726%252526M%25253D200826%2C00.html?emid=22