The American church of 2024 is not the American church of 70 years ago. But it’s not necessarily a “church in decline,” either. It is undergoing a refining by God that is shaping his church for this new era.
That’s according to Daniel Yang, a missiologist, pastor, church planter and leader among church planters and church networks and movements. He currently serves as national director of Churches of Welcome for World Relief, and he formerly served as director of the Church Multiplication Institute at the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center.
Yang, along with religion journalist Adelle Banks and church researcher Warren Bird, is co-author of the recently released Becoming a Future Ready Church: 8 Shifts to Encourage and Empower the Next Generation of Leaders (Zondervan). Here, he talks with Outreach about leadership transition, how the church can handle important cultural issus going forward, and the new digital frontiers of ministry that will help us understand God’s relationship with us in new ways.
Why is motivating the next generation of church leaders so important to you?
Adelle, Warren and I feel like a lot of churches have been told the narrative the sky is falling, the church is in decline, and that we need to work harder. And while there is certainly some truth to that, we also want folks to understand the deeper issues that have led people to feel that way. We wanted to help frame the conversations for the future of the church in today’s time. We need younger emerging leaders to have those conversations for themselves, have them more accurately, and not have them based on a sociocultural time rooted in a version of America that no longer exists. We want to help existing church leaders tell a better story so that younger leaders will step into leadership.
Why do you think so many churches have been slow to update their methodologies to reflect the reality of today’s culture, and why have so many older leaders been reluctant to pass the baton to younger leaders?
This [reluctance to retire] is true about a particular era of American life. That reflects this idea that those who benefited from institutional power tend to hold onto it longer. It’s not the individual pastor who benefited from institutional power, but the idea of the function of church in American life that we take for granted. It’s a part of our narrative, of our American identity. And for those who went into vocational ministry as boomers or Gen Xers, there was a prestige and a faithfulness that came with that.
But the old church model depended on a society that valued church attendance and that understood some version of the biblical narrative. It depended on a society where being a white Anglo Protestant was a normative thing. That’s still a large part of our social imagination. That’s why when we use language like “church decline,” we’re still harkening back to a time when the church was prominent.
There is a leveling out going on, and it’s probably not something we’re doing; it’s something God is doing. There is an exilic version of the church that God is refining right now. It’s not a dark period. I actually think this is part of revitalization and revival. And the transition from older leaders to younger isn’t so much abdication, but more about inclusion and having conversations earlier.
What do we need to take into consideration about the differences between millennials and Gen Z, and what that means for church leadership and outreach?
This has probably always been true about leadership, but it’s undeniably true that most younger people are expecting institutional leadership right now to have an integral conversation. In other words, your public conversation matches your personal conversation matches your private conversation. And that’s true in general, but younger millennials and Gen Z have become exposed to the reality of unfaithful institutional leadership through podcasts, exposés, articles, blogs or TikTok videos. #MeToo and #ChurchToo really brought to light a very transparent conversation around abuse that older leaders can’t take for granted.
You have to constantly ask, Is our institution unintentionally setting somebody back? Is it unintentionally creating obstructions for classes of people? The ability of an organization to acknowledge its historical and organizational failures and to repent as an organization is going to be really important.
What role can the church play today around the issue of heightened racial tension, which is an issue many younger leaders today prioritize?
It’s not that we haven’t had racial tension in the church’s history before. It’s just that our generation’s version is uniquely our generation’s version, so you can’t wholesale apply tactics from previous generations
When it comes to issues like race, there is a way that we talked about race in the church in the ’60s and ’70s. We would say, Is your church integrated? When the ’80s brought about a mass influx of immigrants, we stopped using the term “integrated” and started using “multiethnic.” We were adapting to the changing times. As we get further along in the 21st century, it’s not that we won’t need terms like “multiethnic” as a prescribed solution. But the reality is that we’re actually trying to describe the global church that is now present here in the United States. Is “multiethnic” strong enough to describe that reality? Maybe, maybe not. But every generation warrants a new solution and a new way of talking, a new way of describing the problems and solutions.
Rather than sorting around geography and theology as in the past, churches now frequently sort around ideology.
We are seeing that the political sorting is often people wanting to avoid contentious conversations. Or they feel conflicted that their pastor isn’t saying enough about a particular issue. The reality is that it’s important to reflect in a local church the range of political ideas regardless of the basic theology of that church. Leaders need to model creating spaces for public discourse and dialogue, and a part of our witness in a nonbelieving world is the ability to have [different viewpoints] and still have a united front around the gospel.
To a large degree, we can trace [ideological sorting] to the development of suburban churches. When the affluent church followed the cultural trends away from the cities, it was making a decision that it was abandoning certain issues, or at least distancing itself from them. That is probably something we will have to address in many church networks. We’re always trying to reconcile how suburban churches partner with urban churches, and a large part of that is being able to rehash the history of why those divides even exist and how in some ways we rode the coattails of redlining—decisions that were made in the ’30s and ’40s that the church capitalized on in the ’70s and ’80s. It’s a very complex conversation.
As we think about younger leaders and the importance of how they have this conversation, we can’t forget that there is a theological foundation. If they talk about tolerance or acceptance or diversity or justice, but they don’t do it from a theological conviction, then I actually think they lose the resources that are necessary to have the conversation. You lose the power of Scripture. Christ brought together the diversity of people, the Jew and the gentile, the poor and the rich. Christ brought together political leaders along with slaves and servants. It’s really important to see this through a biblical lens.
Churches have come a long way in their digital outreach, but there are still huge gaps to bridge. Where do we start if we want to increase effective ministry in this area?
Some churches won’t embrace a full digital strategy. This is especially true of aging congregations, and I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. There is a simplicity and a beauty to it.
Some churches will see digital ministry as more of a tool for mass impact, communication and engagement. Most people think of digital media as broadcasting, but what we learned in the pandemic is that you can actually develop meaningful networks of training and engagement through digital means.
There will be a third category of churches that think of digital ministry as a frontier where we’re trying to understand where God is located in the digital sphere. What does AI mean? What does it mean to be human? Digital technology is going to allow the church to build our imagination for God. This is going to be really important, because the church will need to be conversant in digital ethics.
As the church shifts, the old metrics of budgets, buildings and butts aren’t always as helpful without also examining other factors. What are better indicators of a thriving church?
The old metrics have always been budgets, buildings and butts. The fourth B is beauty. Beauty seems very subjective, but it’s throughout Scripture: Care for one another, love one another, serve one another, bear one another’s burdens. It’s part of the reason why nonbelievers were attracted to the believing community in Acts 2. There was something objectively beautiful happening.
Beauty is also a place where people can see themselves as part of creating something. If the church is a place where you come to consume, there is a certain mentality that comes from somebody who is attending. But if a church is somewhere you come to create, like an art studio, you’re going to be participating in that, and you come with a different mindset. It’s less about how many people showed up and more about how many people were mobilized and meaningfully participated.
That’s not to downplay membership. Membership is still very important. But membership that functions more like a subscription model is probably going to be less the version of membership that we see for church. Membership that seems much more like a process of becoming something together with other people is going to be more like it.
Any parting thoughts?
These conversations can’t be had in a silo. You can’t have this conversation among just Gen X and boomer leaders. You have to pose the question to younger leaders and see if you can re-ask that question in a better way that makes the most sense to them. It’s okay to pose solutions, but those solutions should largely be informed by future generations of leaders.