The Young Families Church Conundrum
by Rev. Mark E. Tidsworth, Founder and Team Leader
Hey senior church folks, I know you are frustrated that young families don't participate in church the same way you did when you were a young family. If you will spend a little time with them, you will discover being a family in this 2025 context is an apples to oranges comparison with your experience. Recognizing the differences, accepting them where they are, dropping the excessive criticism, while forming community together… these are ways you and your churches can love young families, if that's your calling and aspiration rather than using them to secure your church's future.
Spending time with our young adult kids and their families over the holidays was a treat. Who knew a grand baby could light up the world so? I am extremely grateful, with a heart-full on this side of being with them as family.
During the week, through the course of our interactions and activities, an epiphany came my way. This is an awareness that’s been growing from interacting with churches and their leaders as well, finally growing clear. Being a young family in 2025 is radically different than when we were a young family. Trying to compare my experience to their experiences is an apples to oranges endeavor, only yielding erroneous and ill-fitting conclusions.
So, I’ve had to check myself; reconsidering several assumptions along with their subsequent unhelpful criticisms. From these experiences, here are five suggestions we might consider as church leaders.
Using comparison as a reference point is fruitless, leading to frustration and toxic culture-shaping.
“Well, when we were a young family… ” Everyone recognizes this comparison by now. Confessionally, I’ve said it more than once, though I hope less than a handful of times. Yet that was before my more recent awareness-raising experiences, discovering that being a young family in 2025 is substantively different. Social media did not exist when our children were very young, travel sports were not invented, and the cost of living did not require multiple incomes to be above the poverty line. We could also describe the Modern to Post-Modern paradigmatic shift, along with the deconstruction of Christendom. Or might we note that community happens in very different ways, along with the way we do most everything, including education and vocational rhythms.
So, if conditions were the same, we might have some legitimate justification for criticizing (as though that’s ever helpful in reality?), but that train has long left the station with no turning back. I am hopeful that updated and current understandings of our life circumstances will decrease our toxic criticisms and open us to new pathways for spiritual and church engagement.
Established church activities and rhythms are largely designed for a way of life (culture) that only exists in memory.
Churches are not the poster-organizations for swift adjustments. Everybody knows that. Therefore, the way many established churches do church reflects a bygone day wherein the pace of life was slower and living was less complex. Churches developed their activities during those times, finding them fruitful and life-giving.
Here in 2025, how many time slots, blocks of time so to speak, will people give to church engagement in a given week? In the early 2000s, Larry Osborne who pastored in Southern California, observed that church participants would typically give two time slots a week, with an occasional third thrown in (Sticky Church). So, Sunday worship might be one, and participation in a small group that meets another time during the week is the other. In some churches, involvement in nearly any kind of leadership is like a small part time job, eliminating most younger persons.
In-person worship is no longer the front door to church participation.
Everyone reading this article is likely immersed enough in Christian culture to know that when exploring church participation, the first thing we do is attend worship, online and then in-person. For way too many, this still occurs at 11AM on Sunday mornings, the most inconvenient time we could choose on a weekend. So many young families are stretched so far that they are unlikely to establish this rhythm without having grown up with this rhythm. Even many who did, won’t do it anymore.
Alongside the convenience factor, is the recognition that many who are not from church backgrounds enter church life through different doors. They may be more likely to join your church in a missional project than attend worship. They may be more likely to come with you to a small group gathering than to a formal worship service. In fact, young families may become involved in churches without even first participating with an in-person worship service. What’s your church going to do with that? Do we consider them “legitimate” participants when they engage so differently?
Churches must clarify their motivation before engaging young families.
Why the great interest in young families anyway? Practically speaking, older persons might view young families as institutional advancement. Young families become part of the strategic plan, assets to gain so that we can staff church programs sufficiently, continuing church in ways to which we are accustomed. We need warm bodies to do that.
Question – Is this what it means to love people in the name and power of Jesus?
When we seek young families for what they can do for us (build the institution and programs we like), they pick up on our motivation, running for the hills to escape. No one wants to be used. Everyone wants to be loved.
If God is calling us to invest in the lives of young families….to love their children as our own, to go to their events outside church, to invest in them as people and disciples of Jesus, then maybe pursuing young families is spiritually aligned with our calling as a church. When we are not interested in loving young families, extending ourselves out of our comfort zones to love them, then we may be using them for our own ends.
Aligning church activities with the mission is necessary, not optional, in the current context of 2025.
Most established churches I know have work to do in order to be viable, faithful, and relevant organizations this year and beyond. This straightforward approach may help:
Identify what is essential to being church. There are functions of church that are essential… not a long list, but a real list. What are they?
Align your church’s rhythms and activities therewith, eliminating the superfluous.
Do these core functions and activities really well, while releasing worry over anything else, freeing your energy for what’s most significant.
This last move is not directly about young families, yet will help open the doors to church engagement with them.
So, courage O church, courage. May we be faithful to the good news of the gospel, while open and relevant in this swiftly changing context wherein young families live.