What do young people really need from church?

In the last two or three generations, so many new and different answers have been given to this question that you could be forgiven for failing to keep up.

What young people need from their church, the gurus tell us, is specialised youth ministry, and specialised youth workers, and contemporary music, and midweek sports clubs to keep kids out of trouble, and midweek social activities to keep teens off the streets, and accessible worship, and youth-centred sermons, and shorter sermons, and interactive sermons, and audio-visual sermons, and online resources, and social media engagement, and a thousand and one other things. If churches don’t provide these things, we are warned, young people will undoubtedly turn away from Christ, we will have failed the next generation, the church will wither and die, and it will all be our fault.

Well, I’m sceptical. It seems to me highly unlikely that any of these activities are essential for young people to keep following Christ, for at least two reasons: First, none of them have a particularly high profile in the Bible. Second, for around 2000 years, countless millions of Christian young people have managed to grow into well-adjusted Christian adults without any of them.

So whatever benefit there might be in some of them (and I’m a fan of some contemporary Christian worship music, for example), none of them can reasonably be regarded as essential.

So then, what do young people really need from church?

The answer, I suggest, is the same as what young people have always needed, which is pretty much the same as what every Christian of every age has always needed.

• They need the godly example of older, wider Christian men and women who will model the kind of character to which they should aspire (Proverbs; Titus 2).
• They need parents who are committed to bringing them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord (Ephesians 6).
• They need Elders who teach sound doctrine and shepherd the flock with Christlikeness of character (1 Tim 3; Tit 1; 1 Peter 5).
• They need to worship together with the whole people of God (Nehemiah 8; Hebrews 10; 12), including people who are different from them (1 Cor 12), so that they learn that our unity in the Spirit transcends boundaries of age and culture (Eph 4).
• They need the washing of regeneration and renewal by the Holy Spirit (Titus 3), and they need to feed by faith on Christ’s body and blood (John 6).
• They need a church family who will forgive their sins, so that they in turn need to learn to forgive others (Matthew 6; 18).
• They need to pray and read the Scriptures (no biblical references required, I assume).
• Above all, they need the preaching of the gospel, since it is this, and this only, that is the power of God for salvation (Romans 1), and by which they are called by the Spirit’s power to the repentance and faith that the gospel itself requires.

They certainly don’t need a church desperate to pander to their every felt need or the latest trendy fad, since that will simply teach them the two-fold lie that they, not Jesus, are the centre of the universe, and that something other than the gospel is the means by which God brings new life to a sin-sick world.