I have mentioned in past podcast episodes and books that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is losing many of its young adult members to inactivity. Millennials, born between 1981 – 1995, were the first to start the exodus. But church members in the I-Generation, born between 1995 – 2012, are not far behind. It would be easiest to simply blame these generations for their lack of faith and accept their departures. However, what does that approach mean for the church in, say, 20 years as our faithful elderly members die and our younger adults leave? What kind of experiences are being had by wavering Millennial members who attend your ward? Can you as a ward member make those experiences better? The departure of young adults from the Church has made it clear that changes are now vitally necessary. This podcast episode is structured to address these issues.
Email: ScottRFrazer @gmail.com
Website: ScottRFrazer.com
S2E17 – Retaining Millennials – Improving our Sunday Worship
This is the podcast Science and Scriptures, Season 2, Episode 17, or “Retaining Millennials – Improving our Sunday Worship”
Hello everyone. This is Scott Frazer of the podcast Science and Scriptures. I am going to issue a challenge to my listeners today. My challenge can be justified by a great need we have in the church today. At the end, I will ask you to share this podcast with others, like I always do. But this time, I am going to ask that you share it broadly.
I have mentioned in past podcast episodes and books that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is losing many of its young adult members to inactivity. Millennials, born between 1981 – 1995, were the first to start the exodus. But church members in the I-Generation, born between 1995 – 2012, are not far behind. At first, this abandonment was considered to simply be a sign of our times. Other religions are also losing the younger adults of their congregations. But to have our young adults dismiss the teachings of their church and family is heartbreaking for those of us whose children have left. If you want more information on our membership losses, I recommend you read The Next Mormons by Jana Riess or Planted - Belief and Belonging in an Age of Doubt by Patrick Q. Mason or Bridges – Ministering to those who Question by David B. Ostler. If you wish, a visit to the PewResearch.org website will give you the exact percentages of generations leaving the church.
It would be easier to simply blame the Millennials for their lack of faith and accept their departures. What does that approach mean for the church in, say, 20 years as our faithful elderly members die and our younger adults leave? It means much smaller Sunday services. We won’t need to build more chapels; in fact we can probably sell off a few. This is not a temporary problem. The generation after Millennials, the I-Generation, is on the same track as they too are starting to leave the church for many of the same reasons.
Granted we can’t reach all of our disgruntled Millennials. But as church members, it is our responsibility to hold onto, and even reclaim, as many of them as we can.
President Russell M. Nelson and the Church organization in Salt Lake City has done much to change the Church to make it more engaging with our younger generations. This goal, it appears, is the reason behind many of the changes made in the church since the day that Elder Nelson became President of the church. The Church has addressed most of the events in Church history that have upset Millennials by writing the Gospel Topics Essays, which are readily available to read on the Church website. The Church has made efforts in dozens of other ways to modernize and improve its public relations with its Millennial members and the outside world.
Though our church organization has done much, the part of our church that members actually come in contact with is their ward’s Sunday services. So, as wards, we must ask the question, “What kind of experiences are being had by wavering Millennial members who attend our ward? It is from their weekly experiences at church each Sunday that eventually cause Millennials – and everyone else for that matter – to decide whether to continue to attend church or to go inactive. Please note - it is the responsibility of the ENTIRE ward to provide a good church experience each week. We tend to think that it’s the bishop and ward leadership’s responsibility to provide good meetings. Incorrect.We also tend to take it for granted that active church members will attend church no matter how uninspiring the services.While possibly true in the past, that assumption is incorrect today. That situation has changed, and I want to assure that ward memberships across the church have gotten the message.
For the first twenty years of a member’s life, church is great. Primary is a lot of fun, both on Sundays and at mid-week activities. The youth program is even more fun, with dedicated adult leaders, mid-week activities, dances, youth conferences, etc. For those who attend college, especially if it is BYU, social activities continue to abound. The institute program and academic environment are stimulating. But then, after college, young adults must attend their home wards, unless a single adult ward is available. However, after the intellectual and social opportunities of their first two decades… a home ward can appear tedious and dull. I have experienced this change myself a couple of times in my life. I doubt that this observation comes as a surprise to anyone.
In truth, church activity has gotten more difficult. The strength of a home ward has always come in the fellowship of friends and neighbors. COVID-19 shattered many of those interactions for over a year. We are reestablishing such fellowships, but who can tell what will happen in the future?
So, today, I wish to call upon home ward memberships to make changes to increase the engagement levels of their ward meetings and classes. We can no longer shirk this responsibility to the leaders of Sunday School, Priesthood, or Relief Society. I am going to call upon everyone to do things we all know should be done.
I don’t approach this subject lightly. If I offend anyone I apologize. However, I have two Millennial children who have left the church. I have little hope that either will return. I have wracked my brain to think of things I can do to make the church services a more attractive event for my children and other young adult members. Millennials are a highly educated generation who live in a troubled time. They are looking for answers. We tend to think that a highly spiritual church meeting is all that is needed to attract church members. But that formula is not working because the Spirit does not witness the same to everyone in the room. If no new understandings are presented in sacrament meeting or a class, Millennial members can walk away having learned and felt nothing. Millennials must feel that church attendance answers some of their questions about God and about how He interacts with earth yet also with each individual person. Millennials must find a reason to want to return to church each Sunday. We either give our young adults those reasons or we give up on them, which has dire consequences for the future of our religion.
Simply put, as home wards, we need to improve the engagement level of our church services. Here are some suggestions from a lifetime of church attendance I would ask you to consider.
If you are asked to give a sacrament talk, please realize that your listeners are sacrificing precious minutes of their lives to listen to you. Please recognize the honor you have been given to address them all. Write your talk early and edit it over the week as new ideas occur to you to improve it.Prayer and the Spirit can help you write a great talk – but not if you are praying for inspiration the night before your talk. Secondly, please don’t read your talk. If you are not making eye contact with your audience, then you deserve to lose their attention. To summarize, if you haven’t prepared your talk to be the best it can be – then why should the congregation listen to you? A boring, read talk discourages everyone in the chapel from wanting to attend church.
If you are asked to teach a class, then all the above comments still apply. After listening to thousands of lessons in our lives, you must realize that your audience can quickly tell how much time you have put into preparing your lesson. I have seen teachers read questions directly out of their teaching manuals before. Such teachers apparently don’t feel any responsibility to making their class engaging or instructive to their students. They have contributed to the eventual inactivity of those who have suffered through their class.
If you decide to make a comment in class, you also have responsibilities. The teacher is entrusting you with a minute or less to make a well thought-out comment directly applicable to the subject of the lesson. It may seem obvious that the comment should be for the benefit of the class – not for the commenter. Before you make it, please evaluate your comment – is it a vanity comment, told to feed your ego just a little bit? Are you going to mention your recent trip to Europe, or the achievements of your children, or a comment made by your grandfather, who was a stake president in Salt Lake City for 20 years? Please know that class members are experienced enough to recognize vanity stories.Such stories are an embarrassment to the rest of the class. Please try to not indulge.
If you are attending a church meeting, even if the talk or class is boring, please be respectful and stay off your cell phone. It is hard to believe how so many people try to multi-task around their worship of God. It is rude to be on your phone when you are talking to a friend. To be on your phone where you are supposed to be communing with God is… much worse. Not only does God deserve to be offended, you communicate to the whole congregation how little you think of the church meeting you are sitting in.
I would like to move on to the content of our classes, be they Sunday School, Relief Society or Priesthood. Should we discuss the “Difficult Questions”?
If we are going to be able to answer difficult questions being asked of today’s newer generations, I propose that we have to be willing to discuss those questions in class. I have told multiple people that the topics of my podcast are those they would never hear in Sunday School. Because in most Sunday school classes there is a long list of subjects that will simply not be discussed. I am not talking about embarrassing subjects like sex in marriage. I am talking about something as simple as discussion about new interpretations of scripture.
Let me give you an example. With this new year, the topic for Sunday school class is the Old Testament. For me personally, this is the most difficult of the scriptures to discuss in Sunday School, as many classes end up focusing on accepting the literacy of Old Testament stories. This past Sunday was especially difficult, since we discussed Noah’s Ark. There were members of the class (most of them older members) who still believe that Noah and his sons built an ark the size of a small cruise ship, loaded wild animals two-by-two into their assigned rooms, and survived a world-wide flood. They are welcome to their beliefs of course, and I am not here to criticize them. But there is another interpretation of this story. I have never heard it discussed in class, but let me summarize it to make my point.
If you read the arguments for and against the Noah’s Ark account, then you will read that, logically, a global flood must have caused an incredibly thick sediment layer, which would have been deposited in about 2500 BC. This layer would have had to cover the globe, and most assuredly, be accompanied by lots of fossils from the bones of drowned animals. Interestingly, much of the science of geology was developed by scientists who were faithful church members and sought to prove the truth of Genesis by finding evidence for Noah’s flood. However… no such sediment layer has ever been found, even when searching in deposits that were dated to have been around 2500 BC. These findings of geology rather demanded a change in our interpretation of the account of Noah’s Ark. There are several other reasons to doubt an actual global flood ever occurred, if you wish to read about them.
Since contention is strongly discouraged in church classes, when someone makes a comment taking Noah’s Ark or a six-day Creation literally, rarely does anyone challenge the comment. No alternative interpretations are offered. What do the Millennials sitting in the last row of the class think of all this? Most of them have attended college science classes. They know the Creation lasted for more than 6 days and may know that Noah’s flood could not have been global. If consideration of those scientifically-based interpretations are not even considered in Sunday school, should we be surprised if they don’t return?
If we are going to present talks, give lessons, or even make comments in classes, we need to be sure that our Gospel Understandings are accurate and timely. That is often going to take study outside of church. Whether we realize it or not, the declaration of Outdated Gospel Beliefs, in talks or in classes – and the consequent eye-rolling we see in our younger adult membership - is causing people to leave the church.
The world has moved on since the 1900s. Set your cell phone down by an old rotary dial, corded telephone. By comparison, the rotary phone is clunky and seriously out of date. Some of our old understandings of the Gospel are just about that clunky. We are asking younger generations to accept old clunky doctrinal interpretations as truth – and they are not willing to do that. Instead, they walk away from such Gospel Doctrine classes shaking their heads in disbelief and frustration.
Almost a year ago, I posted a podcast called, “Are the Old Testament Stories True?” I believe they are probably based on truth, but the accounts are almost assuredly inaccurate. Noah probably existed (though many believe he was simply a folk hero). My belief is that Noah built a raft to house his family and farm animals from a regional flood that the Lord told him was coming. It is a good story that teaches the importance of maintaining your righteousness in a time of great wickedness. How could this story have gone from being a raft to an ark that would save all the animals of the Earth? We need to realize that if we believe that Moses wrote the book of Genesis, he did it in about 1500 BC. It is believed that Noah’s Flood occurred in 2500 BC. Thus, the account of Noah’s Ark was part of the people’s oral history for 1000 years, a full millennium. Oral histories are not known for their accuracy. Storytellers like their stories to be appreciated by their audience – so oral stories are often exaggerated a bit with every telling. This is a very human trait; I know my personal experiences have gotten more exciting as I have related them over the years.
The fact that many of the Old Testament stories were oral histories for years explains a lot. Was Jonah actually swallowed by a whale? Could a man actually survive in a whale’s stomach for three days? Did Joshua actually halt the sun in the sky (or, in more modern terms, stop the earth’s rotation) in Joshua 10, or did it just seem like it? The surface of the earth is spinning at roughly 1,000 miles-per-hour. With the momentum that exists on the earth’s surface, halting it would cause entire continents to slide out of their place. Mountain ranges would topple. Tsunamis would cover the earth. To stop the progress of the sun and the moon, just to give the Israelites a couple more hours of sunlight to battle the Amorites, seems like an enormous use of God’s power. Might there have been some exaggeration in the stories of old?
You can believe that the Old Testament stories are literal or, like me, you can believe that they were stories meant to teach a principle – even if the telling was an exaggeration of the actual event. Jesus taught in parables all the time. Often, He did not bother to state that a story was a parable, rather assuming His listeners (and future readers) would figure it out. If Jesus can tell a parable, without noting it was fiction, we still shouldn’t take it literally. Why can we not apply this same logic to Old Testament stories?
Whatever you believe, we should all be willing to discuss the range of beliefs about the Old Testament stories in our classes. We should be able to discuss church history, polygamy, blacks and the priesthood, assisted suicide, cremation, and dozens of other topics relating to the Gospel and earth life as well.
We are so afraid of giving offense in the church that, if an elderly brother tells a wild story about what Joseph Smith said that supports his notion about church doctrine, we don’t correct him during the lesson or after. Such stories do not promote faith; they simply drive away our younger, more skeptically minded church members. I realize that keeping comments doctrinally sound in their classes puts more responsibility on the teachers. The bishop has that same responsibility in Sacrament meeting. Correction can be uncomfortable, but shouldn’t we expect our church meetings to teach us truth?
The Inevitable Conflict of Generations
This conflict of generations was really inevitable, when you think about it. We now have two younger adult generations, who, with the help of Google searches, have discovered pages of text criticizing the actions and words of our religious leaders from Adam to Joseph Smith. The world has changed. As mentioned, the Church Leadership has tried to address critiques of church history with the Gospel Topics Essays and other talks, which is commendable.
So, one must ask, what do Millennial adults experience when they attend their home ward services? Is the Sunday School class on the Old Testament a discussion that allows the suggestion that we not take the text literally?
To my fellow Baby Boomers, if you are going to speak your opinion in a church class, you need to recognize how your comments affect other class members. When you comment, you teach, and your teaching can do either harm or good. You have a responsibility to make sure that your remarks are true and that you have confirmed them to the best of your ability. From comments I hear in Sunday School and other church meetings, we are not doing that very well. Considering the emphasis the church places on Gospel study, I have to wonder - how can this be?
Gospel Study
The word “Gospel” derives from the Middle English word for good news. So… Gospel Study could be defined as reading anything that relates to Christian religion. However, most church members define Gospel study as reading the Book of Mormon, often over and over again. Church leaders have stressed that reading the Book of Mormon is important – and it is. But if you are reading the Book of Mormon for the 46th time, and have not read another church book for months, I think you are missing their point. We are encouraged to read out of the best books, as we read in D&C 109.
“And as all have not faith, seek ye diligently and teach one another words of wisdom; yea, seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom, seek learning even by study and also by faith;”
Are you reading books that push your boundaries regarding scriptural understanding? A biography about a church leader is usually an inspiring read. However, it will not give you new perspectives on your understanding of the Creation, scripture, or how new technical advances are challenging our moral standards. As a church membership, we need to know what we are talking about in church. To get that knowledge, we need to read books – often books like we may never have read before.
The next paragraph is going to sound very self-serving, and I apologize. You may have noticed that I am somewhat passionate about interpreting the scriptures with the help of science. Thus, if you are interested, I wrote such a book. It is called Where Science Meets God. I spent several chapters on the Creation, a chapter on Noah’s Ark, another on authorship of the scriptures, one on the Word of Wisdom, and a few more on technology and moral issues. There are other excellent books out there as well that will stretch your understanding of the world and religion. A book called The Language of God was written by Francis Collins, the man who lead the Human Genome Project and, until recently, was the director of the National Institutes of Health. He became a Christian through his studies of biology and genetics. His book about the overlap of science and religion was the inspiration for me to write my book, only from an LDS perspective.
In any case, the separation between generations is not going to go away – but we can try to bridge them as much as possible. Whatever name we give the generation that follows the I-Generation, it too will be looking for answers to present-day questions. If all they find in church services are the same answers that were available 100 years ago, they too will go inactive in our church and look elsewhere for answers. This is not a temporary problem.
Encouragingly, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has a very strong and defensible doctrine. We have relatively new scriptures that provide new truths about our purpose on earth and eternal life. We have prophets who give us counsel and doctrine that answers the harder questions about temporal life and our goals while here. If you are a seeker of knowledge, we have knowledge readily available. We have educated and wise men like Hugh Nibley, Henry B. Eyring and others whose writings help us make sense of the realities of the physical world and the associated realities of the spiritual. As church members, we can read those teachings. With those learnings, we can turn our church services into fonts of knowledge to which adults both young and old will be eager to attend.
The departure of so many Millennials from our church has made it clear that changes are now vitally necessary. As a church membership, we have a responsibility to learn and then teach accurate and defensible doctrine in our talks, lessons, and even comments at church.
So, that is all that I have for you today. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. As I mentioned, I have a request for you. Of all my podcasts I have written in the past year-and-a-half, I feel that this is one of my most important. I have come to realize that there is very little that one person can do to help friends and family to want to attend church. But we can do something – and that is to help make our sacrament talks and lessons the most interesting they can be. We can make our Church wards havens from the outside world (in both fellowship and doctrinal understanding) - and then invite others to join with us. We need to make our church classes places where every member can test and improve Gospel learnings. If your testimony is like a rotary telephone that won’t work in the modern world, maybe it is time to buy a few books and update that testimony.
So, please forward this podcast episode to a friend. Forward it to a member of Generation X or the Baby Boomers to encourage them to learn more and consciously help make the lessons and discussions in their church wards the best possible. Or please forward this episode to a Millennial or I-Generation adult to let them know that our church wards are trying to make our church services more engaging and educational for them. Next week, we will discuss how to increase the relevancy of Church services to the younger adults of our wards, something that is as equally important as the accuracy of what is taught.
In any case, thank you for the time you have spent listening to this episode. Once again, this is Scott Frazer of the podcast “Science and Scriptures”. Have a good week and take care.