Speaking Our Faith: Equipping the Next Generations to Tell the Old, Old Story

By Kit Carlson

Ways to help Episcopalians articulate and feel comfortable about speaking of their faith with others.

Today, in a rapidly changing religious landscape, the structures of Christendom—which once almost automatically instilled faith in generation after generation of believers—are gone. For faithful Episcopalians, it has become essential to learn how to “tell the old, old story of Jesus and his love.” This is especially important for those generations born after the Baby Boom, which are experiencing the rapid rise of the “nones”—people who have lost their faith, or who have no faith at all. The time to speak, to share our faith, is now. Kit Carlson offers a road map for those who want to learn to speak about the faith that lives within them. Speaking Our Faith will help them put words to their own experiences of God, create their own statements of belief, and to begin to have compassionate, caring conversations with other people about spirituality, belief, and Jesus Christ.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Church Publishing
• Release date: Mar 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781640650282

Kit Carlson

KIT CARLSON is rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in East Lansing, Michigan. A passionate commitment to the future of the Church and the future of the faith in the changing landscape of 21st century Christianity led her to research how post- Boomers speak about their faith, as part of her doctor of ministry degree. She is author of The Leopard Son, Bringing Up Baby: Wild Animal Families, and Working Dogs: Tales from the K9-5 World. She is a graduate of Virginia Theological Seminary and writes at Pastor in the Pasture of Life.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

A Whole New World—The Rising of the Nones

Not long ago, at a party in my neighborhood, I fell into conversation with a couple in their late sixties, members of a large, historic, mainline denomination church in the heart of the city. They have loved their church for more than forty years, been faithful contributors, and have grown in their own faith and commitment to Christ. And yet, Our church is struggling, they told me. We don’t know if we can stay open. Our membership is shrinking, and our utilities alone are $80,000 a year. We don’t want to close, but we don’t know what is going to happen next.

What they are experiencing in their own unique church setting is a phenomenon going on across America; as church attendance declines, church membership drops, and many churches struggle to remain open or even eventually close. The Rise of the Nones, Time magazine named it in 2012, as data poured in from Pew Research, Barna Group, the Public Religion Research Institute, and others. Religious affiliation among Americans is declining rapidly. And that decline is particularly pronounced in the post-Baby Boom generations, those adults under fifty years old from Generation X and the Millennial generation.

Anxiety about these trends abounds in every denomination and in most congregations. Whether that anxiety is fueled by tense congregational meetings, as once-prosperous churches struggle with insufficient budgets, or whether that anxiety is ramped up by bitter blog posts and self-replicating angst across social media, American Christians are wondering what to do about the nones and also the dones (those once-faithful church members who have simply walked away), and what the future holds for their congregations in particular, and American Christianity in general.

I, too, have watched these trends, and wondered how they would play out in my own context. As the rector of a midsize church in a university community in the Midwest, my long-stated goal had always been to help this congregation proclaim the gospel with its life and witness in such a way that it would be able to hand on this parish—its work, worship, witness, and ministry—to the next generation of leaders. But when I shared my goal with a colleague one day, she turned to me and asked boldly, What if they don’t want it? Seriously. What if this parish, as wonderful as it may be, is not what they want? What will you do then?

I took her question seriously. Would they want it, those upcoming generations? Did they want it, even now? So I began to study this phenomenon, starting with my own congregation. I began by taking a close read through our membership database. As I counted each family—adults and children—I began to notice how many of the young adult members were absent. Most of the young adult children of the congregation’s active members no longer attend my parish or any other church.

Then I looked back through the parochial reports for the whole life of my more-than-sixty-year-old parish. Parochial reports record congregational membership, baptisms, monetary giving and the like, and provide the data used by the Episcopal Church as a whole to chart its membership and giving trends. As I looked at the decades from 1956 forward to today, I did see an uptick of growth late in the twentieth century. My parish’s highest peak of membership since the early 1960s was during the baby boomlet of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the years when these now-young-adults were in Sunday school. That boomlet ended in the mid-1990s, which means that the last children of that cohort have moved beyond even college age. They are now officially adults.

These boomlet children, also called Millennials, are more unaffiliated from religion than any generation before them—at the same age. The 2015 Pew Research Center demographic study, America’s Changing Religious Landscape, reported that 36 percent of young Millennials (born between 1991 and 1997) were unaffiliated, as were 34 percent of older Millennials (born between 1982 and 1990). And the number of nones among the older Millennials had grown by nine percentage points since 2007.¹ Those who had grown up with no religious upbringing were remaining unbelievers, and many who had been brought up in a religious tradition were abandoning it.

In 2010, The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reported that the large proportion of young adults who are unaffiliated with a religion is a result, in part, of the decision by many young people to leave the religion of their upbringing without becoming involved with a new faith.² And the rise of the unaffiliated will have a cumulative effect, because the more religiously unaffiliated people there are, the more religiously unaffiliated people there will be. In 2014, Pew Research Center noted that two-thirds of Millennials raised unaffiliated remain that way into adulthood. Unaffiliated has a better retention rate than any religion in America.³

But will the wandering younger adults who were raised in a religious tradition stay away for good? Won’t they come back when they begin to pair up, get married, and have children? This is a commonplace argument among church leaders and older Christians—the belief that if we just wait it out, the young families will return to church when they settle down, just as their parents and grandparents did. Unfortunately, the data does not support that hope. Sociologist Robert Wuthnow did a sweeping demographic review of the place of religion and faith among younger adults in his book After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion. And part of that demographic review outlines the role that marriage and childbearing play in religious participation. Wuthnow discovered that marriage is an especially strong corollary for church attendance—along with having children. And the likelihood of attending church does increase with each child added to a family. However, fewer people are marrying at all any more, and those who do, marry much later.

Life events and societal forces will tend to draw young people back to church as they settle into adult life. But, as Wuthnow points out, the forces in play for these young adults are much weaker than they were for their parents’ and grandparents’ generations. The current trend to postpone marriage and child rearing can delay church participation until these adults are at least in their early forties. By then, many of them have been out of church for twenty years or more, adding inertia as another hurdle to be overcome in the return to religious practice and church membership.⁴ For many, the proverbial lessons of faith learned at their mother’s knee may be powerful enough to sustain their interest in religion until the circumstances of their lives again make it convenient to participate, Wuthnow writes. But for those who have wandered from church and then go through decades of life outside a church community, finding it easy to live unconnected to faith, he warns that, religious organizations will simply be less relevant for many than was true in the past.⁵

Why do so many younger adults walk away from church in the first place? It may be born in the rebellious spirit of the years following high school, when students relish a chance to sleep late on Sunday mornings, even as they start to test the family values they learned at home. It may be exacerbated by a long emerging adulthood period, in which post-Boomers push-off marriage and parenthood until they are well into their thirties. But sociologist Michael Hout also believes something deeper is affecting the faith of the post-Boomers—the think for yourself attitude of their Baby Boomer parents. Many Millennials have parents who are Baby Boomers, and Boomers expressed to their children that it’s important to think for themselves—that they find their own moral compass, he told Pew Research Center. Also, they rejected the idea that a good kid is an obedient kid. That’s at odds with organizations, like churches, that have a long tradition of official teaching and obedience. And more than any other group, Millennials have been and are still being formed in this cultural context. As a result, they are more likely to have a ‘do-it-yourself’ attitude toward religion.⁶

I hear this commitment to independent choice and this hesitation about faith, even in the voices of the post-Boomer parents in my parish. I rarely hear—in fact, I may never have heard—a young parent say to me, I hope my child grows up to love Jesus and to love the Episcopal Church like I do. Across the board, the parents of children in my congregation say, I want my children to choose their faith for themselves. I don’t want to tell them what to believe. I just want them to have a grounding so that they can make up their own minds about religion.

Those now-grown children have done just what their parents intended. They made up their own minds about faith. And all the data surrounding those decisions supported what I was observing in my own parish. The Millennial children of still-active Baby Boom members were walking away from church. And few of them held out any hope to their questioning parents and clergy that they were planning to come