There is something frustratingly ironic about being a “young person” and leader in our church. On the one hand, our movement supports young leaders once they have been identified through programs that are often spearheaded by the killer team at Pulse. But on the other hand, the historic and systemic decision making at the heart of our movement has at best naively undervalued or at worst actively undermined the role, importance and inclusion of emerging generations.
This is not a reflection of the state of current youth groups, camps, and lay leadership development. Instead, try to imagine the historic trajectory of our church. Zoom out.
We are aging and shrinking. If we are honest, we must stop referring to ourselves as one of the three major Christian denominations in the country. It simply is no longer true, and nobody else has been referring to us as such for a long time.
I have no doubt already provoked a few different responses for you regardless of your age. It is an uncomfortable subject to broach, because it is easy to fall into the trap of the “in or out” binary defined by being “young” anymore. I want to discard that binary rhetoric for something more holistic and productive, and I hope to prompt a conversation that isn’t bogged down by the fruitless game of generational whack-a-mole we seem locked into at the expense of the actual faith development of young people.
There are irrefutable facts that must be accepted as true at scale before our movement can be prepared to move towards a future in which young people are truly given the opportunity to flourish and be an integrated part of the church’s present and future without tiptoeing around for fear of accidentally breaking a window or two.
Here are some stats.
According to Assembly via the 2023 Act2 Project’s report In Response to God’s Call, the average age of Uniting Church attendees is 68, with 57% of attendees over the age of 70. 62% of attendees reported to be retired. While the 2013 report indicated a median weekly attendance of 35, in 2023 that number dropped to 28.
According to the NCLS, 24% of Australian church attendees across all denominations are between the ages of 30 and 49. By comparison, that number in the Uniting Church is roughly 15%. Only about 8% of UCA attendees are under the age of 30.
We are shrinking, and we are aging. Fast.
Here’s another fact. In the late 1990s, the UCA’s specified role of ordained youth worker was dissolved. I suggest this is the most important and least acknowledged moment in the short history of our movement. It has shaped the fabric of our church in ways that only accelerated through the 2020s and into the 2030s, and yet it seems to have been obscured by the hazy mists of our nostalgic yearnings for a church of the past. Many don’t even know about it. It’s like we lobotomised ourselves and don’t remember that we once had a fully functioning brain, happy with our restricted capacity. This change in ordination structure meant those already in the process of formation for the specified youth worker role were offered pathways to become either ministers of the word or deacons, and definitively removed the option for future youth work candidates to pursue ordination. No stipend, no housing, no financial incentive to follow a calling to work in ministry with a focus on young people.
I am one of a huge number of people who found a way into church leadership through youth ministry. I have worked in two different congregations over eight years, and have been employed casual, permanent part-time, full-time, and eventually in a specified ministry of pastor role. I have given a significant percentage of my adult life to lay ministry outside of employment, volunteering countless hours on top of paid ministry hours.
I am also one of an equally significant number of people who have come out on the other side of this and chosen not to pursue youth ministry – or indeed ordination – long term. . There are an increasing number of people bucking this trend, but there is a huge number of people who probably would have made wonderful ministry agents in youth ministry, but have either stepped away temporarily or moved on entirely.
I often get asked why this is. Why didn’t you pursue your calling to youth ministry? When are you going to do a period of discernment? Often in a condescending tone, usually coupled with an air of disappointment. Disappointment with whom, I often can’t tell.
One of the biggest problems that our movement has to confront is the fact that it simply isn’t a viable career path. For young people in their twenties and thirties, the fact that there is no longer an option to pursue specified ordination in youth ministry means that it simply is not a career that allows for things that many in older generations take for granted, like housing stability. When it comes down to it, the lack of housing allowance and stipend associated with ordination is enough to cap many people’s time in paid lay ministry at 30. Unless you can generate a second income – whether through a partner or a second job – it is an increasingly impossible vocation for young people to pursue outside of ordination.
I just turned 28, which means that I have never known a Uniting Church with ordained specified youth ministers. Listen:
I have never known a Uniting Church that values and prioritises young people.
There is a gaping demographic hole in the centre of our movement that threatens to swallow the entire thing whole. The statistical trajectory shows no signs of this trend reversing. For all the broader reports of cultural swing back to spirituality and church attendance amongst young people, it isn’t reflected internally. I feel like screaming when external influences are invoked as causes – what else could it have possibly been, other than the decision to remove our Next Gen workers from our roster of ordination? How could anything else be even remotely as important? We dissolved the leadership sowing into emerging generations, and are then surprised twenty years later to discover that those generations never emerged. What did we think was going to happen?
The last generation of “young people” with a connection to a time before this fundamental change are growing older and rarer. I have no memory of a time before, or a previous era to which we might return someday. For everybody roughly my age and younger, this is how it has always been, and this is how we assume it always will be. There is no connection to a historical church that has built up decades of goodwill. This is simply the way our church is, and it has not prioritised our wellbeing or that of generations already arriving after us.
Let me say it again, because this is important: this is how it always has been, and this is how we assume it always will be.
While this might be uncomfortable to hear, this is a very common sentiment amongst our next gen members. We look towards other movements and see a demoralising gap. We see flourishing youth and young adult ministries that our friends deeply connect to, that provide life and structure to their discipleship. But we also see an alarming trend towards fundamentalism and extremism in these churches, and desire to see a place in which progressive theology can reach a similarly wide-reaching and youthful audience.
Inside this conundrum is a sparkling opportunity. The UCA has something life-giving and vibrant to offer everybody, young and old, but especially young people who do not accept the sexism, racism, homophobia and transphobia that grows in other traditions that are more superficially attractive. Good social media presence, loud music, and a room full of actual young people go a long way, but they cannot cover a fundamental position that does not allow for the safety and ultimately salvation of all. More and more young people are finding that they are only able to compromise on their theology for so long before they are unable to sustain membership in a church that requires such compromise.
It is not an opportunity to reclaim some sort of past glory, some outdated image of a church that served a generation wonderfully but is no longer culturally relevant. It is not an opportunity to make us feel better about ourselves by achieving vain self-actualisation. It is in recognising that people of all ages are fed up with wanting a Biblically robust and theologically progressive church and not finding it. The ship of the past has sailed, and none of our young people are interested in it. Our opportunity is in telling a better story about the present and the future that brings hope, life and joy.
The gap between that vision and where we are today is vast. For many, this reality is the source of deep pain and grief. So many faithful disciples have gone ahead of us and paved the way for our movement to disciple people over the years, and that it has come to this is a tough pill to swallow. But I will remind you once again that it is a pill that our young people didn’t have a choice in swallowing.
Thankfully, our faith is not one of rationality and logistics, and it is not a faith of census data, systemic shortcomings or budgetary restrictions. We worship a God of abundance, and a God who longs to see the law of Love infect all people. Young and old.
So where does that leave us? When we decide to collectively divert our eyes away from a facsimile of a past church and towards the thing that God is urgently calling us towards, whatever that may or may not be, how do we decide what to do next?
There is a very real version of our future that involves many churches shutting their doors permanently. Of course that is something that we should be trying to avoid at all costs (to point out the bleedingly obvious), but sometimes things must die for the new to be born in its place.
I am not saying that the Uniting Church needs to die for us to be able to find a way forward. I know plenty of people who would happily stand behind that statement, but I am not one of them. I don’t think it is particularly helpful, and is usually said by people who seem to conveniently disappear when an alternative solution is actually required. I am suggesting that we have to be prepared to allow parts of our church to die and be pruned away for the overall health of the church to flourish.
We are going through an intense period of collective change and transition. The 3P Project has forced a great many of us to reckon with the reality that our church is changing, and we do not know all of the outcomes . For many this is terrifying, and understandably so when jobs and vocations are involved.
But remember what I said earlier?
This is how it always has been, and this is how we assume it always will be.
What an incredible opportunity to discover what God has in store for us next. Because God is at work. Her pursuit of reconciliation and flourishing will continue long after denominations have come and gone. Regardless of the UCA’s involvement in the mission of God, that mission will continue. God doesn’t require us to get our collective shit together to be at work – God continues to do what God always does and always will do, and the Gospel will transform people with or without the UCA. We have an opportunity to loosen our grip on things that no longer bring life and reach out to new and vibrant things that will happen with or without us.
I am more than aware of all of the preconceptions and assumptions about the attitudes of young people, and the last thing I want is for anyone to bemoan another “shouting at the clouds” think piece without any substance. Forgive my use of the young/old binary to illustrate this, but in my experience it is often the case that whenever these concerns are raised by “young” people in the presence of “old” people, they are dismissed. Perhaps because of the widening gap between the two parties in the conversation. But for whatever reason, there is a false equivalency that is consistently drawn between a criticism of the structural integrity of the Uniting Church and a disconnect with Christian faith and discipleship itself. They are not one and the same, and it is an insult to the intellectual and theological integrity of our young people to imply as such. If we allow ourselves to fall into the trap of a turf war between young and old then I am genuinely worried about our movement’s future. I do think that the ship has well and truly sailed on being able to return to whatever the UCA used to be. It simply is no longer feasible given our gutting of next generation ministry in removing the possibility of ordination from those leaders. We are reaping the harvest of seeds sown thirty years ago.
There is plenty already happening in our churches that show that there is more than enough life and energy to carry us through to the 2030s not with a limp, but with a skip. The implied continued evolution in the name of our movement should give us hope. We are not done uniting.
It is not a matter of conjuring up the right policy, document or planning group. It is a matter of changing culture. It is a matter of altering the very DNA of the Uniting Church in Australia. This will not happen overnight. If this is to occur, it will only do so gradually, slowly, and at a cellular level. We cannot hope to achieve an overhaul of thirty years of cultural decline with a change in policy, much like we cannot grow a local youth group by employing a uni student part time for a year without any plan of continuing that ministry. We need to look much further ahead. We need to change our perspective, and we need to commit to the long, hard journey of aligning our DNA with that of a God who does unimaginably extravagant things.
In accepting the reality of where we are today, we can let go of what we might have been. There will be grief involved in doing so, but we will then be able to finally look ahead. Not to preserve a memory of what our movement could have been, but to serve the reality of who we are today.
The alternative is the thing we fear is already uncomfortably near.
Jonty writes about film, narrative and culture on his Substack, “Postcards from the Abyss”.
