Ep. 236: The Millennial Church Exodus

Speaker:

Welcome to the indoubt podcast, where we explore the challenging topics that young adults often face. Each week we talk with guests who help answer questions of faith, life and culture, connecting them to our daily experiences and God’s word. For more info on indoubt, visit indoubt.ca or indoubt.com.

Daniel Markin

Hey, this is Daniel and welcome back to another episode of indoubt. Today we are going to re-visit an interview that Isaac did with Rick Hiemstra, who is the director of research and media relations at the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. Rick is here to discuss with us the issue that seems to be plaguing young adults around our nation and our world. Why are young people leaving the church in record numbers? We’re glad that you’re here to listen, as we find out why young people are leaving and what we can do to prevent it.

Isaac Dagneau:

Hey welcome to indoubt, my name is Isaac. I’m one of the hosts of indoubt, as well as the pastor at North Valley Baptist Church in Mission BC. With me on the show today is Rick Hiemstra. Rick is director of research and media relations at the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. He speaks on I’m sure many things, but primarily on just Canadian church, cultural trends, things like that. It’s always good to have a fellow Canadian on the show as well, so thanks for being with us today Rick.

Rick Hiemstra:

Thank you for having me on.

Isaac Dagneau:

You were recently part, I guess it was two years ago, but I mean some of the stuff that you found is obviously still in play today. But you were recently part of putting together this thick study that you and your team called Renegotiating Faith, with the subtitle of the delay in young adult identity formation, and what it means for the church in Canada. Just for listeners, that’s what we’re going to be digging into today so I hope that’s already caught your interest. But before we do that Rick, just so people know that you’re an actual person, that you have a personality that you are real, could you just share with us a bit more of who you are? Maybe beginning with how you met Jesus and where you’re at today?

Rick Hiemstra:

Sure. Well, I grew up in Stratford, Ontario. I met Jesus at a crusade actually that was at Northwestern high school in Stratford. I can’t remember why I went, but I do remember that when the altar call was given at the crusade that I went up, and I just felt the Holy Spirit and God’s love flood my heart. That was a real turning point for me. Subsequently, my faith developed slowly during high school, just because not in the situation where there was good discipleship, but really connected with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship in university. That became very transformational for me in terms of thinking about our faith and our culture and what that means. Out of that, I decided that I wanted to go to seminary. I went to seminary and subsequently pastored a church, a Wesleyan Church for six years. But through a number of life circumstances, I came to the end of that time and had a lot of questions about why is it so hard for Canadians to receive the gospel? About that time this role at EFC opened up, and it was on research on the church in Canada, and I thought, this is an outlet where I could bring my giftings in mathematics that was my undergraduate degree. I had taught, and to bring this all together and to think about what’s going on in our culture. I’ve been doing that now for about 12 years.

Isaac Dagneau:

Thank you for sharing some of your story there Rick that’s awesome. Perhaps maybe to jump us in or step us into this conversation, there’s so much to discuss here and we’ll just probably get through some of it, but could you just give us maybe a general working knowledge of what you and your other researchers were looking at in this study? Why you guys were looking at what you were looking at? Basically, I guess what is your report about in a more synthesized way?

Rick Hiemstra:

In many ways this is a follow-up study to another study called Hemorrhaging Faith. This study looked at why young adults are leaving the church. This study we had a group of our affiliates, and in this case the affiliates for this became part of the partnership where Truth Matters Ministries, Youth for Christ, Power to Change and InterVarsity and the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. We had another funding partner who just wanted to be a silent partner. But their question was, how do we help more young adults to stay in their faith and to grow in their faith across the transition from high school to the next phase in life? Because one of the things that the Hemorrhaging Faith report told us was that major life transitions are often exit points for young adults. You can see that there are a couple of campus ministries involved here, so they’re interested in how do you help more young adults end up in a Christian campus ministry, but this is a wider kingdom question too, right? How do we help those? We were specifically looking at those that had some kind of connection to the church. How do we help them to maintain their faith and to flourish in it?

Isaac Dagneau:

In terms of that, you guys kind of I don’t know if you coined it, but you guys found this new identity time called emerging adulthood. What exactly is that? What does that entail? What are its marks of this thing called emerging adulthood?

Rick Hiemstra:

Okay, so we didn’t coin this. This goes actually back to a psychologist who was writing in the early 60s. I should just back up a little bit about the way that our time and culture has changed. Pre-industrial revolution, a lot of people lived right with their families and their families had trades and they worked in the home and education was done in the home. The industrial revolution comes along. Parents are moved out of the home into the factories, and also schooling and education moves out into the schools. But still you’re in a society where you don’t need a lot of education in order to participate in the adult world. After the Second World War, this starts to change really quickly. In 1950 in Canada, only about 50% of adults had a high school education. That rapidly changes in 1951/52 you have the Massey Commission, which recommended investments in education. This is where all the funding for public universities, colleges starts really to ramp up. By this point in time, you’ve got over 70% of young adults will go on to get some kind of education. Now, this need to prolong the time that it takes to have the skills to participate in the adult world started to open up this window of time in people’s lives that we call emerging adulthood. Now it is characterized by searching, by questioning, Erickson talked about it as being a moratorium, a place where everything just kind of stops and hangs there. But often what it also is accompanied by as people move away from home to a university town, they move out of their home churches, they move out of their communities and they’re exploring their identity. But it’s a place where you haven’t yet made any life commitments, not any big ones. This lack of having made commitments is important, and significantly for the church it also is a time where we encourage people to question the commitments they may have already made. If they’re coming from a church situation where they’ve made a commitment to Christ, all of a sudden in this time period they’re being told to question that.

Isaac Dagneau:

That’s fascinating. In your study it talks about this idea that to recognize oneself, define their identity as an adult, it’s having a role or settled role in a community. This emerging adulthood is a time when you’ve left your pre-existed community, you’ve left your home, you’ve left your church, you’re in a new place, and you haven’t yet established a role in that community that you are newly formed in. It’s that space in between of these two kinds of identities, that’s this emerging adult. Is that right?

Rick Hiemstra:

Think of it this way. When you’re in high school, you’re part of your parents’ family. Then in high school everybody starts to do what psychologists call they start to differentiate from the family of origin. I want my own identity, right? You push away from that a little bit. But in terms of establishing a new identity, there’s all this kind of exploration, but you need certain things to be able to do that, and you kind of put everything on hold. This is one of the characteristics of emerging adulthood. All those decisions are put on hold until you get one anchor spot. Once you make one decision, you start to make the others. Usually for most young adults that’s a career choice. We actually hold on to all of those things, but what’s happening is that career choice is delayed for a lot of us. Even when people choose to go to school, they’re not choosing a career. A lot of people when they choose a program, they choose the program that will let them pivot in the most directions, because they really haven’t got it figured out. But they’re not actually figuring out what that career is going to be until kind of the last minute. A lot of people that’s even driven off closer to age 30. That’s very different than even a short amount of time ago. In 1981 when the census, the typical thing was for young adults in that time to leave high school and to just start working. Now, the typical thing is to leave high school and go into school, and this opens up that space. But what we need people to understand about emerging adulthood is that in many cases they don’t make those commitments because they don’t have the capacity to make those commitments. Think about this, a lot of us who have homes are really glad that we have homes whose value has just gone through the roof, right? It’s hundreds of thousands of dollars more than when we started. In my parents’ generation, a house was three times in annual income on average now it’s six. We’re really pleased about that. But what this means for young adults is, that they can’t buy a home. If they can’t buy a home, one of the ways that you set out your identity is I get my own place, I get married, I have kids, I get a job. All of those things are really hard to do. What we have to realize as the church is, is that while they’re waiting on all of those other things, they’re also waiting to say am I going to follow Jesus or not? That’s the crucial thing where economics intersects with faith, and we don’t realize how these things have an influence on each other. Now there are ways and we’ll talk about that later on in our conversation, but there are ways that you can address some of that, but this is kind of the landscape that is put out. It’s one of delay it’s one of exploration, but it’s not just that, it’s also I don’t have the capacity to set out these identity markers that would let me move on.

Isaac Dagneau:

Right. What is it about particularly someone’s faith? Let’s say they have a strong faith family growing up, and then they come into this emerging adulthood. They’ve moved out of their home, they’re in a university setting. They’re struggling with some of these issues. Why would faith be one of the things that they put up in the air with everything else? It just seems why would that be one of the many other aspects of identity that they have to think through?

Rick Hiemstra:

Because faith is something that we do with the church. Faith is something that we do with people. Now, it is certainly possible for you to make a commitment to Christ and to hold on to that, and to work really hard at it and flourish. But actually statistically speaking that’s not the way things work. People’s faith is strongest when they’re embedded in and participate in a church community in a local church. Some of that is that our faith there’s this dual dimension to the Christian faith. We are God’s children, but we’re also part of his body. There’s that vertical horizontal that we talk about. A lot of the decision isn’t just a decision for Jesus that they’re going to make, because they’re going to make a decision is the church my people? In 1st Peter chapter two talks about how once you were not a people, but now you are a people. We have to take that seriously because it is the people that are around you that come alongside you and say, “Is it well with your soul?” It is the people that come along and encourage you to give, to volunteer, to do all of those kinds of things. The community that you are a part of shapes you, but that community also has to come alongside you and give you a role in that community. You have to choose it, but it has to create a space inside the community for you to have that role, and that is how a Christian identity is formed.

Isaac Dagneau:

That’s so good. Hearing you say that Rick as someone who’s in church leadership, so often it can be so easy to make the church this consumeristic thing. People can come in, we don’t ask too much because we want to keep them there and all these realities, but what you’re saying too, it just shows how important it is that we need to come alongside those that are part of our local church. Not just in a formalized way, but in a real brother/sister kind of way, because that’s the reality of who we are. We are a family, and to embrace them. Because it’s true, I think you’re completely right that the community of the local church will help shape the hearts of those that are there. With young adults, exact same thing, I think that’s so important.

Rick Hiemstra:

Can I just add this about these roles in churches. Often we’ll talk about leadership roles and then everybody needs the leadership role. Well, leadership roles are good, but it’s not exactly necessarily like that. I had some friends from university and we used to go up to a cottage together. When we got there, after we hadn’t seen each other for a while, what we would do is we would start lapsing into these conversations that we had in university. Everybody would relive the roles, but we all had a role in it. The role had nothing to do with anything I was doing, but it was my place in that group. My place in the group had those shared experiences. There may not be a formal position that everybody votes on at the annual meeting that you can give everybody. But that isn’t the most important thing. They may not even be things that people want, but they have to feel like when they come in here that I belong here, and that this group is diminished if I’m not here.

Isaac Dagneau:

That’s a really good distinction, I’m glad you said that. Because it can be easy for us to think of only formalized roles, you have a title or something like that. But you’re saying there’s a more informal, organic role that people just know, and you know it too, and it’s just sort of risen. I think that’s a good point Rick. I want to just quickly talk about this idea of Universal Gnostic Religious Ethic, or UGRE. I don’t know how you guys call it, UGRE or whatever. Firstly, you can explain what it is, and then also how that is one of the drawbacks, or I don’t know what word you’d say, but one of the hindrances that can come about in a young adult’s life as they are in this emerging adulthood time.

Rick Hiemstra:

I’ll just back up and say that one of the reasons that people are in an emerging adulthood phase in life is because they don’t have the capacity to go on and be in adulthood. The other reason is, is that they don’t want to move on to be an adult. When we interviewed young adults we talked to them about adulthood, and they would almost to a person describe it as the real world. The real world is different than the emerging adulthood world because emerging adulthood you’re often in school and people are young, beautiful, healthy. Creating is easy. You’re in control. You’re in this socially rich environment with your friends, there’s a great variety of activity. Networking is easy and groups are customized to me, because if I have someone in say my social media group that I don’t like, I just click them away. They don’t even have to know that I did it. But in the real world people are older, less beautiful, less healthy, creating becomes hard. Others are in control like your boss. It’s in a socially isolating environment because you go to work and there’s the same four people there. Two of them you can’t stand. You’re doing dull, repetitive activities. Networking is hard. Then you have to fit in with groups as they present themselves. Church is like that. Everybody can think of someone they consider to be an unlovely person, but you can’t click them away. Why I talk about Gnosticism, and this is that the distinction between emerging adulthood, the thing that characterizes them is emerging adulthood is lived in a digital world. Whereas the real world is this hard, slow world. You have a digital easy, beautiful, new that’s emerging adulthood, compared to a physical slow, hard, real world old. Gnosticism has this idea along with a lot of heresies, that the physical world is somehow bad. It has this idea that if I have this special knowledge, what I can do is escape this physical world and get back to some state, the Greek word for it is pleroma. I can get back to the pleroma and escape this. In our world here, we have a situation well, let me back up and address your question a little bit more and then we’ll get to this. Where does this come from? This is a version of moralistic therapeutic deism. Christian Smith coined this in a book 2005, Soul Searching. He said that this is the dominant religion in America today. Now I say that it’s 2005 because I want you to see how it’s shifted since 2005. He had these five points. He said that a God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life. God wants people to be good, nice and fair to each other as taught in the Bible and by most world religions. The central goal in life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life, except when needed to solve a problem, and good people go to heaven when they die. That’s moralistic therapeutic deism. When we talk to young adults, they talked in a similar way, except God wasn’t necessary, nor is the notion of heaven or hell. What we distilled out of those interviews is this idea is that their five points are all religions are the same if you can get behind their external trappings. This realization is understood as a kind of special knowledge for the enlightened. Other people don’t understand that all religions are the same, but I know it so now I’m a part of the enlightened. Religion is functional. It fulfills a set of psychosocial functions. The psychosocial function that they’re looking most for is social harmony. The most important thing is to preserve social harmony. Good human beings preserve social harmony, and a higher power is not necessary nor is the notion of heaven or hell. Remember we were talking with people who grew up in the church and attended at least monthly at some point. These were people that weren’t completely nominal. When they talked about God, often they didn’t mention Jesus. They would talk about a higher power, and if you probed a little bit to ask them, “Well, tell me about the higher power.” Well, they really wouldn’t know. They really wouldn’t know if the higher power was for them, but they would ask the higher power for help if they needed it, but they weren’t sure if it would or why it would.

Isaac Dagneau:

That’s fascinating. Two things from that, one, it really does show that this Universal Gnostic Religious Ethic it’s stripped of supernatural power in a sense. If the main essence is social harmony, and there’s not really any characteristics to a God, it’s sort of naturalistic. Would that be right to say that?

Rick Hiemstra:

Well, this is why we described it as an ethic, a religious ethic, because it has the religious presentation, but it’s an ethic. You can actually hold to this if you are able to promote social harmony and recognize what they understand to be the sameness of all sort of creeds. You don’t need any kind of religion at all. This would be articulated fairly much like this in a lot of our interviews. One of the other things that I think people need to realize is that young people deal with far more religious difference. When they go to school, there are people in their class that are Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist, agnostic, spiritual non, and they really don’t know what to do with that difference. A lot of our kids if you ask them to give a defense of the Christian faith, why do you believe? They would have a really hard time doing it. Now what they have to do is go to school and say, I understand I can articulate what Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and whatever is, and I can compare and contrast those with Christianity. Now I can tell you why I’m a Christian. Sometimes it’s easier just to say that if we all just agree that none of that matters, then we can all just get along. What it does is it allows them to quickly come into community with everyone, because the things that might’ve been a potential barrier to them coming into the community are all just set aside by everybody. We have this common agreement that we’re going to do this, and that’s how we’re going to get along because it is actually too much work to work through our differences. We’ll just say that they aren’t there.

Isaac Dagneau:

Obviously there’s the sense of they want this unity, there’s this natural sense of wanting harmony with everyone that has brought this, that has been a huge reason why they’ve decided to think that way. Okay that’s good. But let’s just shift the conversation a little bit more on what we can then do about this. Your study emphasizes this idea of the importance of mentorship. We see that just scattered across the Bible. We have Joshua/Moses, Elijah/Elisha, Jesus/disciples. It was just such a reality. Let’s maybe finish this conversation with the importance of mentorship, and how that can play a role in helping young adults make connections in churches and in their own faith.

Rick Hiemstra:

The title of our report is Renegotiating Faith, and what we’re really talking about here is that young adults have to renegotiate the roles that they have in churches. I’ll often say in my talks that if a young adult is 19 and they’re in our church and they still have the same roles that they did when they were 11 in our church, they’re probably gone.

Isaac Dagneau:

Overhead projector okay.

Rick Hiemstra:

What tends to happen in our churches is we have programs and programs are really good. But what happens is they’re age-specific, and they start and stop and they start and stop. What we do is we get them into the big youth program in high school years in youth group and we make it great. Youth group is awesome, and then what we do at the end is we kick them out. What they do in youth group is for the first time their parents really aren’t there in youth group probably. They negotiate their own roles and they find a place, and then we say, we just yank it right out from underneath them and we say they were gone. What I say to people is that your programs cannot be the relational glue into your church. If you’re going to have a role and you’re going to have a place there are going to have to be relationships in your church that survive the starting and stopping of your programs.

Isaac Dagneau:

That’s good.

Rick Hiemstra:

This is why mentors are important. Because mentors come along behind your programs and they’re the continuity in those relationships. Here’s another thing that’s really important, when they’re in high school and they’re pushing away from you, what we’ve found is that some people if they can’t find natural ways to define their own identity by finding a house, a job, a family or whatever. If it’s all delayed, they still want to distinguish themselves from their parents. Sometimes an easy way to do that is just to say, well, I’m going to do it with faith, and they’ll reject the Christian faith. It becomes this candidate for differentiation. If you have all kinds of relationships in the church, people who value and love you, then that’s off the table, because to differentiate by rejecting the faith puts a strain on all those relationships, that you’re actually not trying to push away from right now. I think that what we have to realize is that parents, when the kids are young, they are by far the most important in shaping the faith of their kids. Once they get to the place where they’re trying to differentiate, you need the church to step in and help, in a bigger way. The church always has to be in there helping. But the church is going to have a bigger role.

Isaac Dagneau:

That’s so good, Rick. One of the things I just hear from you when you’re saying all this is that, things like apologetics are so good. Things like programs at your church, discipleship programs they’re good, but in and through all of this, the relationships are just so key. These relationships where a godly man or godly woman comes alongside someone, and is transparent with their faith, transparent with their life and just is a friend, is a brother or sister in Christ and helps them through these things. That’s what I hear from you when you say that, and I just think that’s central.

Rick Hiemstra:

When we think about our churches, we tend to think about our programs. I think programs are fine, but what our first question should be is about our relationships. We have to think about the quality of our relationships. It’s like my friend Sid Coop says what he’s looking for with youth group is that the youth sponsors that are there, that they have good interaction with their kids and that’s a win. He doesn’t even let them plan the events. He plans the events so that they can just go and experience the events with their kids. He doesn’t want them doing the mechanics. He wants them talking with the kids, having fun with the kids and having those times when the kids say, “Hey, I’ve got this real question that I want to talk through,” because it creates that kind of opportunity.

Isaac Dagneau:

Amen. Thank you so much Rick, that’s so good. We’ve come to our end of our conversation obviously. If you’re listening and you’re just interested more in the work that Rick and others have done, Rick what’s the best way that they could get access to this?

Rick Hiemstra:

It is a free public download at renegotiatingfaith.ca. If you’re interested in other things that I do, it’s evangelicalfellowship.ca.

Isaac Dagneau:

Awesome. Anyways, thank you so much Rick for joining us and yeah we do hope to have you on again soon because we got through about this much of the topics that I wanted to get into. Thank you so much Rick.

Speaker:

Thanks so much for listening. If you want to hear more subscribe on iTunes or Spotify, or visit us online at indoubt.ca or indoubt.com. We’re also on social media, so make sure to follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.