There comes a point—I mean I'm 42—I should be investing in 20-year-olds. I think people our age need to be asking the question, "How can I build those cross-generational relationships? Those are more important than getting yourself a soul patch and one of those cool T-shirts.
Preaching: Specifically from the preaching side, what are some things that pastors and church leaders should be aware of as they seek to preach to and reach younger adults?
Stetzer: One of the things we found is the desire for depth—many pastors are finding this.
Of course, there's always the desire for depth. There's sometimes this passion for minutiae in many Christians, and I often think that's a healthy and an unhealthy thing. They love knowledge but not transformation, and we see those kinds of knowledge junkies in the church. I'm not talking about that kind of thing. Because you can fill up their minds with everything—every obscure reference of Scripture—and they won't be changed by the gospel.
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I think for young, un-churched and younger churched, they want something more than the sitcom-like approach to preaching and Christianity. It's all this, "Five Ways to Have a Happy Life" and "Three Ways to Raise Obedient Pets" —there's no mystery, there's no depth to it. One of the things we found, among the younger un-churched and churched, is a desire for something deeper. That's a good thing from my perspective.
I was talking to Craig Groeschel (pastor of
LifeChurch.tv) about this for a podcast I did with him. I said, "What do you see? What's the shift?" A lot of people would say that's a church reaching a lot of seekers, a term a lot of churches have used; they probably don't define themselves as seeker-this or seeker-that. One of the things he said is that in reaching the younger un-churched—and their church does a great job with it—that they've gone deeper, so we see that theme.
There are two movements that have kind of captured the attention of a lot of younger adults in the church: the new reformed movement and the emerging church. Regardless of what you thing about either, both are movements that have a desire to go deeper into theological principals. Some of us might say some of the paths that one of those groups has gone—or maybe you think both those groups have gone—are problematic for some people theologically. I get that, and I share those concerns; but what I would say is that it shows the yearning for more than the light teaching of the modern evangelical machine.
Now there are some exceptions. We all can think of the exceptions—we see them on TV all the time—but for churched and un-churched, they want to know something more, that God is about more than we can understand in that one simple message, "Five Ways to Have a Happy Life."
Preaching: That's the caricature that some older, traditional evangelical pastors have of the young pastors: that what they're doing is Christianity-lite, topical preaching and so on. Yet what I'm finding as I talk to many of these younger pastors is the opposite. They are intensely biblical; whereas many traditional churches are doing a 20- or 25-minute expository sermon, these guys are doing 40, 45 minutes and more in intensive exposition of Scripture. So, it seems to me the trend seems to be moving not toward exposition in the traditional, classic sense that we have thought about it in recent years, but very much in terms of taking the Word of God, opening it up and applying it to people's lives.
