Issue No. 438 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features the latest book from Barna—and their robust research on Millennials and growing “resilient disciples.” Must-read. And this reminder: click here to download free resources from the 20 management buckets (core competencies) and click here for my review of Fearless Innovation: A No-Nonsense Guide.
5 Years in the Paint Aisle Won’t Make You a Painter!
The authors of Faith for Exiles leave no cherished church practice unrebuked. They write:
A few years ago, the Barna team was conducting research among teenagers who had left the church. While interviewing a young woman about her relationships with the church before she left, David asked, “Did you have good friendships at the church?”
“No, not really. I guess a couple of my age group were my friends, but not close.”
“None of the adults?”
“No.”
“What about the youth pastor?”
“The youth pastor was paid to be my friend.”
David needed a couple of seconds to catch his breath. “What do you mean?”
“That was part of his job. He’s paid to be a marketer of church to teenagers.”
Ouch.
Whoa. We have a big problem—and David Kinnaman and Mark Matlock are gutsy enough to talk about it. My words (not their words): Sunday morning at 11 a.m., while helpful, is not the whole enchilada. And the more we persist in adding more bells and whistles to the one-hour per week “main event”—putting most of our eggs into this basket—we are deluding ourselves. The king has no clothes, colleagues. It’s time to admit it.
The authors’ research concludes that “many young people (and older adults, for that matter) are dutiful churchgoers while remaining spiritually inert. Church involvement is a necessary but insufficient condition for resilient discipleship.” They add, “It is difficult if not downright impossible, to shape hearts and minds with only a few hours a week to work with.”
Yikes! “Let’s say you show up at a home improvement store and stand in the paint aisle every week for five years straight. You even attend a couple of demonstrations by the experts in the orange aprons. That doesn’t make you a painter.”
The good news: this book is hopeful, not disparaging. Subtitled, “5 Ways for a New Generation to Follow Jesus in Digital Babylon,” Faith for Exiles delivers on its bold promise—and along the way, you’ll experience all the emotions: mad, sad, glad. (I got teary-eyed reading some of the Kinnaman and Matlock family stories to my wife.)
Until Faith for Exiles was published last September, I had not seen such thoughtful segmentation thinking since The Engel Scale (see “Segment Your Customers Prayerfully” in the Customer Bucket of my book). High fives to the authors!
The Barna research reveals that “Resilient faith is not easy to sustain in any context, but it’s even harder for young people in digital Babylon. Among today’s 18- to 29-year-olds, here is what’s happening among those who grew up Christian.”
• 22% are Prodigals (Ex-Christians)
• 30% are Nomads (Unchurched)
• 38% are Habitual Churchgoers
• 10% are Resilient Disciples
The book defines each segment and notes that “Habitual Churchgoers” have attended church at least once in the past month, “yet do not meet foundational core beliefs or behaviors associated with being an intentional, engaged disciple.”
You might be discouraged upon learning that 90% (the first three groups above) are not on the disciple path, but Kinnaman and Matlock will, in fact, encourage you. They see great promise in the 10% and their research and practical next steps will inspire you to focus on the few. (Hmmm. Reminds me of the Parable of the Sower in Matthew 13. If you’re a leader at a Christian college or camp, youth ministry or church—and/or you’re a fully devoted parent or grandparent—this is a must-read.)
So…the authors share their robust research and recommendations in five meaty practices for growing resilient disciples:
• Practice 1: To form a resilient identity, experience intimacy with Jesus.
• Practice 2: In a complex and anxious age, develop the muscles of cultural discernment.
• Practice 3: When isolation and mistrust are the norms, forge meaningful, intergenerational relationships.
• Practice 4: To ground and motivate an ambitious generation, train for vocational discipleship.
• Practice 5: Curb entitlement and self-centered tendencies by engaging in countercultural mission. (For example—read about 18-year-old Katie’s amazing Ugandan adoption adventure on page 201. Eighteen!)
So what’s with the Babylonian exile metaphor? “Ancient Babylon was the pagan-but-spiritual, hyperstimulated, imperial crossroads that became the unwilling home of Judean exiles, including the prophet Daniel in the sixth century BCE. But digital Babylon is not a physical place. It’s the pagan-but-spiritual, hyperstimulated, imperial crossroads that is the virtual home of every person with Wi-Fi, a data plan, or—for most of us—both.”
“In digital Babylon, where information (and any thing we could ever want or need) is instantly available at the godlike swipe of a finger, Almighty God has been squeezed to the margins.” They add, “That transition—from faith at the center to faith at the margins—is happening in North America and other societies in the cultural West. Our data show widespread, top-to-bottom changes from a Christianized to a post-Christian society.”
Yikes…I had highlighted more than 100 quotable quotes for this review. Way too many. I identified more than a dozen zinger, attention-getting titles for this review. I could only use one! I was ready to wax eloquent on Practice 4’s “vocational discipleship” and why it was my favorite chapter—but it was replaced by Practice 5, which was replaced by the “What’s Next” conclusion. Killer insights: hard truth delivered with hopeful hearts. You’ll just have to read or listen to this book yourself. Don’t settle for the paint aisle at Home Depot.
Well—OK—if you insist. I’ll end with five teasers:
• “If, in trying to build our ministries, churches, and impact, we have contributed to the inoculation of a generation, how can we repent?” (See pages 56-57).
• “When Christians capitulate to the zeitgeist of cultural norms—if we cannot articulate a countercultural biblical morality, for example—we leave the next generation immunodeficient.” (Relevant metaphor!)
• David Medders at a seminar with Christian college students: “I’d like to personally repent for my generation, the Boomers, and how we’ve let these negative perceptions [about Millennials] take root.” (Must-read: pages 141-142)
• Three Buckets! Barna research identified three major career aspirations of practicing Christian teens: Entrepreneurial, Science-minded, and Creative. “Skye Jethani points out that, according to the book of Genesis, God ordains work to accomplish three things: to generate abundance, to bring order, and to cultivate beauty.” (Read more on this alignment in “What’s My Calling?” on pages 154-157.)
• “At one point in his life, Mark wrote down every biblical proverb on an index card and sorted the cards into thematic piles. As he did so, he discovered that each proverb falls into one of seven broad categories.” (See page 169 for the seven marks of a wise person, according to Proverbs.)
To order from Amazon, click on the title for Faith for Exiles: 5 Ways for a New Generation to Follow Jesus in Digital Babylon, by David Kinnaman and Mark Matlock. Click here to listen to the book on Libro.fm (5 hours, 52 minutes). And thanks to Tom Matlock (Mark’s father/raving fan) for providing a review copy.
Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
1) The Barna team “invented” the phrase “vocational discipleship.” Brilliant. Re-read the review of Non-Obvious Megatrends and how to “name” a trend. Then read about “vocational discipleship” in Faith for Exiles. Identify something we’ve recently named well—and something we’ve botched when naming it.
2) According to Kinnaman and Matlock, “Many pastors admit they don’t enjoy developing younger leaders—but ensuring the transfer of leadership to the next generation is a requirement, not a choice.” Read “Mentoring in Digital Babylon,” pages 169-174, and then re-read the reviews of nine mentoring/coaching books. Rate our organization (1 to 5, with 5 being high): How effectively are we mentoring emerging leaders?
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COVID-19: Customer Segmenting 2.0
Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets Workbook
One of the big ideas in the Customer Bucket is to segment our customers to more effectively meet their unique needs. Faith for Exiles focuses on a high priority 10% of today’s 18- to 29-year-olds who grew up Christian—but it’s a potentially high Kingdom impact segment—“Resilient Disciples.”
In Mastering the Management Buckets, we highlight “The Engel Scale,” named by an appreciative grad student who studied under Jim Engel. (Read What's Gone Wrong With the Harvest? by James F. Engel and Wilbert Norton.)
The scale begins with a -8 (a person with an awareness of a supreme being, but no effective knowledge of the gospel). It moves down to a -1 (repentance and faith in Christ), and then to a +1, +2, +3, +4, +5 and beyond (demonstrating growth in being a Christ-follower).
We note, “Fifty-two weeks of Sunday sermons may be 52 weeks of miscommunication if the message is targeted to +3 Christ-followers when 50 percent of the congregation is still at -1. Yikes!”
During this COVID-19 era, you and your team will likely move to Customer Segmenting 2.0—to go deeper on more research-based customer segmenting. Most organizations will need to drop some programs, products or services—and hone others. You’ll likely create new programs. But before you join the what-everyone-else-is-doing band wagon—and squander money down a black hole—read the Customer Bucket chapter.
And to fill in the blanks on your customer research, check out these jam-packed trend reports:
• Barna Trends 2018: What's New and What's Next at the Intersection of Faith and Culture (read my review)
• Barna Trends 2017: What’s New and What’s Next at the Intersection of Faith and Culture (read my review)
For more resources and books lists, visit the Customer Bucket.
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JASON PEARSON: UNEXPECTED CREATIVE. Look at your recent marketing campaign. Was it targeted to the Info-Sponge Customer, the Just-the-Facts Customer, the Heartfelt Customer, or the Share-Meister Customer? Read REBRAND: Workbook + Coloring Sheets for Ministry Branding, by Jason Pearson, a fun and creative starter kit for nonprofit ministry and church marketing teams. Millennials will appreciate the fresh approach (a coloring workbook!) and marketing veterans will have a good laugh and a new coaching tool. Plus, check out the innovative work from Jason Pearson at Pearpod Media (branding, digital, print, and video).
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