Why Churches Are MUCH Older Now...

Welcome to the Rainer on Leadership Podcast, your online home for leadership lessons and advice for the local church.

We talk about practical solutions for pastors and church leaders.

Episodes are hosted by Tom Rainer, Sam Rainer, and Josh King.

Hey what's up and welcome to this episode of Rainer on Leadership Podcast for Leadership in general.

But particularly that of the local church, my name is Josh.

My name is Sam and I am old.

You're always trying to set up the topic.

I know I try.

I try.

Yeah that was as direct as you possibly can be.

Yeah well my kids, they think I'm old.

Yeah my kids definitely think they don't say it a lot but I can tell.

I could say I could see it in their eyes.

I could see it in their eyes.

I don't care.

I like being my age.

You know what I do too.

And I don't mind, I don't mind getting older.

I don't mind the extra gray hair, the wrinkles, everything, it's okay.

Not worth worrying about.

But churches are much older now, which is what we're going to be talking about.

Is aging even really a problem?

I mean is it, is it even an issue?

Should we even care about it because the US is aging more on that here in just a second?

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It's like the great Southern Seminary.

No I do not.

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Link is in the show notes and check them out.

All right Josh.

You and I believe, I know I have, I'll speak for myself, have inherited an older church.

Let's see how many times have I done that?

One, two, three times.

You're talking about the folks are average age older.

Not the church it's old.

Well I've had, I've had churches founded in the 1800s that I've pastored.

And thankfully, no one was still alive from the 1800s.

That would have been really interesting.

We were, yeah, I'm just talking about, I'm talking about like not, this is an old established church.

Yeah.

I'm referencing, yeah, the congregation, the people themselves, the average age tends to be a little older.

Have you ever had like an older church, so to speak?

Well, yeah.

The church I'm passing now, first about the church Lewisville, now known as Valley Ridge Church.

By all intents and purposes, it's very old.

I mean, the vast majority of the people were over the age of 65.

I didn't know that.

Yeah, I didn't, I guess.

I mean, we've talked a lot about our churches, but I guess I didn't ever really ask about the average age of Valley Ridge Church.

That was a key characteristic when I got here.

Now we've gotten a lot younger in the last two years, but very much that was a characteristic and an issue and a topic to talk about on getting much younger.

So here are the stats.

The US population has a median age of about 39 years old, maybe 40 now.

The last date is 39, but it keeps getting older as a nation.

In the 1970s, it had been the low to mid-20s to giving an idea of how much we have aged as a nation.

But most denominations have a median age of a congregant of 60, 60 years old.

By the way, that's also the typical age of a pastor as well.

So what this means is that generally speaking, just any random church that you were too sample, most of them are going to be at least one generation older than their community.

So is it a problem that churches are getting older?

No, in the sense that the US is getting older, so you would expect that churches would follow that same demographic trend.

Where it becomes a problem is that the churches are a generation or two older than the community.

I think that's where the problem is.

So this is a great reason why you need to know your community report, which is available at churchancers.com.

Just click on the demographic report at the top.

Go to churchancers.com, demographic reports.

We can give you all of this data and much, much, much more.

Yeah, churchancers.com where you can get that and it can tell you at the median age of your community and then you can compare it to your database and get an idea of whether or not your church matches your community.

So we talk about cultural matches, demographic matches with churches and their communities.

I think this is one key element, particularly, and this is, I want to be careful here, but particularly with retirement age people.

Because once you retire, nothing wrong with that, by the way, if you're listening to this and you're retired, I hope you're having a great retirement.

And I know you never retire from ministry. I get that. I'm just talking about vocationally.

Your lifestyle changes significantly. Let me just say that as it should, as it should, but there is a much greater disconnect with people who are retired by design.

Then those who are of working age. So once a church is full of retirees, again, if that's your church, there's nothing wrong with that.

You can't help your age. You can't help the fact that you're retired.

But if once you get all of the people that are like, or the vast majority of the people that are retirement age, it really changes the dynamic of everything.

Don't know how you feel about this, Josh.

Oh, I've got complex feelings about...

Well, gender complex feelings.

Demographically driven church health or church growth, just to speak in a broad sense of terms.

I think that there's a number of ways to look at different communities. There's a number of challenges that come into play.

And so whether it's racial or generational,

I think that there are some questions that I kind of have on like, what do we do about this or that?

Let's just stick to age since that's the topic.

There's whole differences in the way that generations are.

What they value, what they do, their lifestyle, the things they look for in a church, let's say.

And so I know that there's this sort of concept of all things to all people.

However, most churches aren't equipped to be all things to all generations.

And there are things that like maybe...

And I'm thinking particularly here in a Metroplex where you have many options and you've got many people and just a lot of people.

Similar there to your area.

I don't know. You're not saying this, but I want to make sure that our listeners are not hearing something along the lines of, old would be bad.

I think that like sometimes my theories are like same team different positions.

And so you might be leading a church that just really gears towards boomers or this certain generation or millennials or something.

You're going to have different challenges. You reach different people.

There's our church because of our choir and because of some of our architecture.

We just tend to attract empty nesters.

Like that age and older. They just love us. They come. They stay. They love us.

And they're great. They serve. They give. There's all kinds of stuff.

We have a church, a world famous, one of the most podcasted pastors in the world is less than two miles from me.

And because of their architecture and their worship style, they generally attract 30 and younger.

And I know that they're frustrated with that sometimes.

And we're frustrated with ours sometimes.

But I'm wondering what could actually be done about that and how you actually kind of flesh that out.

So those are some of my complex feelings of, is there anybody?

And I'm sort of this way sometimes that just feels like this is who we are.

And we're just going to lean into this and reach the mess out of empty nesters.

And then we will progress in our age as we do different things.

You've definitely hit on a good point. One, old is not bad.

Totally agree with you there.

Because as I've said before, and we'll probably say again, you can't help your age.

Like there's nothing you can do about it. You were born in a certain year.

And you had no say in that year and the day that you were born.

So no, old's not bad.

But where I think it does become a problem is when the church feels outdated.

And if you're all 90 years old in your church, that's a problem.

I don't think anybody would say, hey, we're going to be fine.

It's very clear what you need to do.

Now, to the church that, hey, the average age is 48 or the average age is 38.

I don't know that there's a meaningful difference.

That's a 10 year age gap in average age.

And those two churches are going to feel different, look different.

Because 10 years is a significant number when you're talking demographics.

But I don't know that, hey, we're average age 38, hey, we're average age 48.

You know, the average age in the United States is right around 40.

So I don't know that those two churches are meaningfully different.

The other thing that I will say is that the older you are as a church on average,

you tend to be wider.

Because when 70 and 80 some things were coming of age in the United States,

the white population in the United States was 80 plus percent.

Some places 90, 95 percent.

This whole idea of multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, whatever you think about that.

That's a relatively new phenomenon with the influx of immigration.

I know there's a lot of feelings about that.

I'm just talking reality and just talking stats here.

We are a much more diverse nation,

but that diversity is found in the younger generations, not the older generations.

So if you are significantly older than your community,

there is a likelihood that ethnically you're wider than your community.

And again, that's not racism or anything like that.

That's just reality.

I'm not claiming that a church that's all white in a changing community is like,

oh, you're doing something terrible.

No, it's just reality.

And it is something that the church will eventually have to address.

Or you'll just age out.

And that is a problem.

So I'm with you generally, not a problem.

So you're reaching empty nesters.

Great.

This just seems to be who's attracted to your church.

That's a good thing.

But at some point, the church becomes so old that it's hard to get out of that mold, I guess.

Yeah.

I think you're spot on.

I agree with what you're saying.

When I talk to pastors, it just seems that those who focus in on

that whole saddleback Sam concept where you just kind of create this person

and then you build your whole church around that generation,

they're the ones I really struggle with.

Why can't it be church answer Sam?

And just everyone say, like, this is the ideal.

This is our target.

You know, he's got a painter.

He's got a pager on these pleated khaki pants.

You know, he's got a bit of a yuppie look to him and a 90s haircut.

You know, if you guys have seen the picture of saddleback Sam, right?

Absolutely.

Yes.

Yeah.

Let's get this thing up to date.

When people do that, when they create this person by default,

you're zeroing in on one particular generation.

And I just feel like it's consumer driven.

It has to be.

And so if there's a fixation on a certain generation,

let's say you want to be young and hip, okay, well, you're fixated on that.

And largely, you will reap what it is that you're trying to achieve there.

Your church's position to reach young adults.

And so you'll get young adults.

If you're planting a church and you're geared towards that,

that's all you're going to get.

If you are taking over an established church and you're trying to gear everything that way,

then you're going to get that plus a lot of heartache.

And so there's that going on.

If your church is just geared toward, now they hardly ever say this.

I've never met a church that says,

we want to reach nothing but senior adults.

And I've never seen that.

But they will live it out in a way.

They're in the villages.

Well, yeah, I can say that.

Because that's all the people that live there.

I get it.

But there are churches that buy their choices,

buy their ministry programs.

They don't offer anything for these.

And so yeah, I just think churches that are more geared,

less worried about the generation they're reaching,

and just more worried about like,

this is who we are.

And we're going to be faithful in what we are.

They tend to be multi-generational.

They tend to stick with families.

And they tend to grow with their families and ministry programs age out,

because that's no longer needed.

And new ministries and programs are created and built.

So I think that's my pushback.

I think, you know, the purpose of this show is just talking about the reality

that a lot of churches are aging,

where I would want to interject a little bit there is to say,

they are, or they're not.

You're in particular one may not be.

But the deal is, I wouldn't focus a whole lot on that.

And we've got a couple of ideas that sometimes come up in this conversation

that we want to either knock down or really cut a bit for us.

Yeah.

I do think that there are some tribes,

denominations, if you will,

where it is a real problem, generally.

You look at the Episcopal Church,

that is ancient.

They're going to die off.

Yeah.

And then even our own tribe, the Southern Baptist Convention,

has some of the smallest percentages of the two youngest generations present.

So it's like there is a huge swath of baby boomers in the SBC.

And so we haven't seen, we've been declining for a while now,

but there is a cliff that's coming,

an actuarial cliff, if you will.

And you can see it in what's called a bee swarm plot.

Ryan Burge has really done a good job with this,

so you can get some of this at graphsaboutreligion.com.

And we've got some content that's going to be coming out

about this exact subject at church answer.

So I've got like facts and trends and data coming.

But there is a big balloon, if you will.

A pig on a python, is they used to be called the baby boomers.

And that pig in a python is kind of entering into the last stage of the python.

And once it's out, then you see this drop off.

So Burge has calculated that groups like the Southern Baptist Convention are going to see

within the next 30 years, which seems like forever.

Like here's like 30 years.

I don't want to think about 30 years out.

But within the next 30 years,

there are going to be declines of over 50% within churches,

like just generally speaking.

So there is a demographic reality to the aging of the church.

Now, I'm not an alarmist.

I'm not a sensationalist.

There are going to be churches that close, yes.

But there are still going to be plenty of people that are out there in churches

that are younger.

It just won't be as many.

So yeah, you're going to see some churches,

even healthy churches decline something because of this demographic reality.

And churches are, as the title implies, they are much older now.

You and I have said very explicitly, you can't help your age, you know,

what is old?

I mean, I don't know.

I mean, the average age is 60.

That's not that bad.

But there is a point at which it does become an issue.

And I do think that we need more churches focused on families, young people,

you know, folks that are coming to our nation.

I understand that some people would say they need to come legally fair enough.

But, you know, they're here.

What do we do about them?

And the people of color, there's just a lot more ethnic diversity in the nation

and it's found in the younger generation.

So if we don't start doing something to reach people who are just around us,

yeah, it is going to be an issue at some point.

Yeah, totally agree.

I think some people, one of the points that we were going to make was that

this idea of hiring a younger pastor is going to be the solution to this.

And in reality, sometimes that does help.

When you get a younger voice up there, there's just a different style to leadership.

There's a different style to what's being done.

But that's no silver bullet.

You can't just hire a person who's younger and then not change anything about the programming,

the actions, the hospitality of the church,

and then expect just younger families to come flooding in.

And it's that sort of mentality that often sets up a young pastor to fail.

Almost always.

Yeah.

If you think that hiring young is going to solve your problem,

like this pastor alone is going to do it.

Right.

You're almost always that you're setting up that pastor to fail.

Yeah.

It's just a view of age that is not biblical.

And so, yeah, I think the key to this is stop focusing so much on age.

And be faithful to the community that you are in.

And start looking around and asking what you can do regardless of your age.

Just what can we do to minister to the people around here for the gospel of Jesus Christ?

Good stuff. Good episode.

Thank you guys for tuning in.

And want to thank Cheney, our sponsor.

His name is Steve Cheney.

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Again, cheneyassociates.com slash church answers.

That link is in the show notes.

So, Josh, final closing thoughts.

Yeah, thank you so much for listening.

We really appreciate your time and your audience.

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