Panel description:
How does the Episcopal Church attract a new generation of serious seekers into its pews? Many parish profiles and strategic plans foreground the desire for greater numbers of “young families” or “young people” as parishes grapple with aging memberships and donor bases. At the same time, many congregations feel structurally and conceptually ill-equipped to meet the needs and interests of millennials.

This panel developed out of a conversation I had with Joe Swimmer (executive director of CEEP) over lunch, but also out of conversations I’ve been having for the better part of the last decade, particularly as the generational crisis in the Episcopal Church has become acute. The informal metric I use to assess the crisis is the frequency with which I hear the words “millennial” or “young people” in a conversation about the church. This happens in my experience at almost every level of engagement, and it happens all the time: in the parish, the diocese, and at the national level. And the data do indicate a dramatic variance between national population statistics and the demographics of the Episcopal Church. I presume that if you’re watching this panel, you agree that that variance provides cause for concern.

I should say that I have used the term “millennial” in the title of this panel only as a shorthand for younger adults, but we should still be clear about what it means; according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, millennials are those born between about 1980 and 1996; in other words, we’re talking people now in their late 20s, 30s, and 40s. These are not your zoomers with their TikTok and their mom jeans. These are people in the workforce, people with careers and families. They are people whose cultural touchstones are Clinton/Lewinsky and 9/11, Iraq and Afghanistan, the 2008 financial crisis and Spotlight. 

This panel discussed the challenges facing our parishes in achieving legibility and appeal to those in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, as well as the concurrent opportunities for evangelism and engagement. Topics under consideration included churchgoing after Christendom, Christian formation for the largely unchurched, and the structural limitations of conventional Episcopal wisdom.

Our goal was to offer some helpful comments about the challenges and opportunities of ministry with this group, and to provide tools and encouragement to parish leaders in a wide variety of contexts and geographies as they strive to raise up the next generation into the full stature of Christ in the Episcopal Church.