Chasing the Elusive Demographic — the Young
A New Ministry for a New Age
Church has long recognized that it has trouble connecting with the young. For several decades it was taken for granted that our youth would disappear in high school and return with their children in their twenties.
The benign neglect of this demographic is now haunting us.
Young people began putting off parenthood until their 30s or 40s. A two-decade absence was insurmountable. Add to that the demands of the modern family, including high divorce rates and intensive community commitments, and you have an entire population missing from church life.
Time has only widened the demographic.
Our Ambassador visits reveal that the problem demographic is now pre-school through 40.
This should alarm congregations.
We won’t pretend to have all the answers, but we had some of them. Redeemer’s membership, though small, had every age group represented with a good representation of families with young children and a small group of active youth. Our cradle roll was showing particular promise when SEPA Synod decided to vote us closed without our knowledge.
Whatever it was we were doing right, we have learned even more in the last few years.
We took our ministry online. 2x2virtualchurch.com is the voice of Redeemer, East Falls. We are about to celebrate the second anniversary of our launch.
We are pioneers in social media ministry and we have attracted attention from church leaders all over the world.
As of this month, we average more than 2000 readers per month. This doesn’t count readers who subscribe by email, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. This adds another 200 daily readers.
These social media channels are valuable in growing our ministry. They help us identify our readers.
Surprise! Most of our readers fit the very demographic missing in bricks and mortar churches. Our subscribers tend to be in their 20s and 30s. They are from any number of ethnic backgrounds. They tend to be adventurous in lifestyle and involved in making spiritual connections online. Many of them blog on spiritual subjects.
They are timid to comment online but tend to write to us by email.
Another demographic is beginning to emerge. From time to time (we wish more often) we publish resources we hope are helpful to other small congregations. Some of them are from our archives of things we used in our own worship.
Our church was unique in that most of our members spoke English as a third language and learned music by ear, not by reading from hymnals. Our early attempt to use published resources flopped. We started writing our own resources that could be performed simply and without expensive professional leadership.
Last year, we posted an Easter/Holy Week play that Redeemer produced and performed for the community in 2008. It sat there all year getting little attention.
At Christmastime 2012, readers started to find it. It has been downloaded 700 times in the last month.
Our Adult Object Lessons, based on the Common Lectionary and published weekly, are also attracting a following and are beginning to engage readers.
Will our ministry ever be seen as worthy to the Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod who claimed our assets with the unsupported rationale that we were incapable of fulfilling our “missional” purpose?
They are unlikely to budge.
Meanwhile, Redeemer will keep moving! We think the survival of the church in the next 100 years depends on learning the skills we are pioneering today. We’ll be glad to share our adventure.