In this moment of Daniel Yang leadership, 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, contributing to a broader missional narrative for generations as congregations adapt to new cultural realities.
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, including approaches to mobilizing next-gen evangelism.
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