Why church marketing won’t work with Gen Z
Equity requires people with power giving some of it up. What if we applied this principle to young adult ministry?
Century illustration (Source image: Rawpixel / iStock / Getty)
Occasionally, a church will ask me to come help them with what I will call their youth problem: they are aging rapidly (or at the pace we all age, I guess), they struggle to attract young people, and they have a lot of passion for younger generations but not a lot of skill. To their credit, they want to do the right thing—and I believe for the right reason—but their sense of how to make this happen in a meaningful way remains underdeveloped. And so they call me—the “rapping pastor”—because I’m good at this sort of thing and because when we have a problem we don’t believe we can handle on our own, we call consultants and plumbers and electricians and people who understand the hippity hoppity generation. Smart!
I always ask one question as part of my preliminary discernment. It isn’t “Why aren’t they coming?” or “Where are they going instead?” I’ll tell you what it is in a moment (or go to the end to read it now), but as someone who’s studied youth ministry origins—from Don Bosco in 19th–century Italy to the “mall” models that many megachurches now employ and that smaller churches can’t afford to employ, making them feel like failures—I know that the fumbling around we are experiencing with the youth isn’t about a lack of fun stuff to do. It is more centrally about a lack of relationship, a lack of desire to be in relationship, and an inability to treat youth as our equals (or as better than us, as Jesus suggests in Mark 10:13–16).
In other words, it’s not a marketing problem—even though many ministries treat it as such and spend a lot of energy and resources on the fringes of “cool” and “relevant.” It’s an equity issue.
