Churches usually lose young adults for the same reason they failed to reach them in the first place: the institution was built for the people already inside. When the announcements, the website and the unwritten rules all assume a committed member, a newcomer can attend for months and still feel like a guest. Olu Brown, who planted Impact Church in Atlanta, made the opposite bet. He designs the church for the person who is not yet sure it is worth their time. Then he works to make it a place that can handle the hard conversations those people bring with them.
What does it mean to build a church for the unconvinced?
Brown starts from an honest admission about himself. He told Lisa Fields that “if I weren’t a pastor or a clergy person, it would probably be pretty difficult for me to go to church.” He went further: “I would be one of those that you would have to encourage over and over again.” He treats that reluctance as information. He asks what would actually keep a person like him connected, and he lets the answer shape the ministry.
The result is a change in who the church imagines as its audience. In Brown’s words, “I don’t think first about people who are already in the circle, if you will, but I think about those people who aren’t necessarily convinced.” He names what they are unconvinced about: “that the local church is the best answer, that Jesus Christ is the best answer.”
That second phrase matters for the whole model. Brown still claims Jesus is the answer. What he refuses to do is act as though everyone in the room already believes it.
Look at what he says actually changes. He mentions marketing, the general announcement and the website, adding, “It changes the way we do social media, it changes the way of our website layout.” Then he sums it up: “Everything has to shift.” Every item on that list is a point of contact. These are the places where an institution shows, before anyone preaches, whether it expected you to come.
This is where institutional culture works quietly. A church can preach an open invitation while every surrounding signal assumes insider knowledge: references nobody explains, schedules built around longtime members, announcements that only make sense if you already know the people involved. None of that is false doctrine. It is a culture, and young adults read it fluently.
Is this a claim about all young adults?
No, and Brown is careful here. “And not to say all young adults or millennials feel that way,” he said. His claim is about method: designing for the skeptical person changes how a church works. He also admits his church does not fit everyone. “I’m sure even our church isn’t necessarily the platform for all people, including younger adults,” he said. Some young people tell him it is “a little bit too contemporary for me, or it’s too transparent for me.” That is a real counterexample to the assumption that every young adult wants a casual, contemporary service.
Brown’s own setting shows why local knowledge matters. Impact Church sits near the Atlanta University Center, the cluster of historically Black colleges where Lisa Fields first heard students talk about his church. When she asked whether students there were rejecting Christianity as the white man’s religion, a message she said groups such as the Hebrew Israelites press on campuses, Brown answered with history, pointing to the Ethiopian Orthodox and Coptic churches as older than Christianity in Europe. He also admitted his church had not yet had those conversations directly with its young adults. A church can be good at drawing students and still leave their sharpest questions unaddressed. Lisa’s own experience with pastors points the same way: the most pressing question varies, and “it really depends on where you are in the nation.” A church that wants to keep young adults has to learn which questions its own people carry.
Isn’t designing for skeptics just consumer church with better branding?
This is the strongest objection, and it deserves a direct answer. If a church organizes itself around what outsiders find appealing, it may end up competing for attendance the way businesses compete for customers. The message gets softened and success is counted by headcount.
Brown’s handling of college students is the best evidence against that reading. He said that in its first few years the church deliberately did not run a pickup for students, because they saw other churches doing it. Their message to the campus pastors was, “we want to invest in you and not take students away from you.”
A church chasing numbers would have sent the vans on day one. Brown chose to strengthen the campus ministries already serving those students. Students came anyway, and he noted, “it wasn’t because we were picking them up.” Only then did the church add transportation, while still aiming to support the campus ministries at the AU Center, Georgia State and nearby schools. It also began offering a free monthly meal from good restaurants, which Brown pointedly contrasted with a few sandwiches in plastic bags. The purpose, he said, is “connecting with them a much deeper level than only picking them up for worship.”
The real line between building for the unconvinced and consumer church has little to do with style. It is whether the church will give something up for a person’s good when that does not raise its numbers. Brown’s first years near the AU Center show that kind of restraint.
There is a limit worth naming. Everything here comes from Brown’s own account of his church. He reports mostly positive feedback and significant growth, from 25 people in 2007 to about 2,400 in weekend attendance plus another 2,000 online at the time he spoke. Those are his figures. They show the approach worked in one context. They do not prove it will work the same way everywhere.
How do unspoken questions turn into empty seats?
Brown never draws a straight line from avoided questions to young adults leaving. But his account of himself supplies the pieces, and they fit together.
Start with the person he designs for: someone who has to be encouraged “over and over again.” That person stays connected only as long as church keeps giving reasons to stay. Now add Brown’s diagnosis of how most of us treat God. “Some of us trust Google more than we trust God,” he said. We hand a search engine our practical questions and keep the hard ones from God. “We don’t look towards heaven and shout, we’re angry or curse and get mad. And God is saying, I can handle those kind of things.” He names the motive plainly: “because we’re really afraid to have this conversation with ourself.”
Put those together and the pattern is visible. A half-convinced young adult arrives carrying real questions about suffering, about history, about whether this faith is even theirs. If the church never makes room for those questions, they do not disappear. They go to the search bar, or they stay bottled up. Lisa Fields observed that in certain Black spaces people were long encouraged not to question God at all. Where that habit holds, a young adult can keep attending while privately concluding that church has nothing to say about what actually troubles them. For someone who needed a reason to come back each week, that conclusion is usually the last one.
Brown’s own story shows the cost of avoidance from the inside. He said that in leading a growing church, “I found myself running from those conversations.” In his family and friendships, “I found myself avoiding difficult conversations in those areas and really prolonging my own healing blessings.” If avoidance delayed healing for a pastor, it will do the same for the people he leads.
Scripture gives the church more room here than many congregations allow. The Psalms include prayers that protest. Psalm 13:1 opens, “How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” That is a poem of lament. It does not command anyone to accuse God, but it shows that honest complaint brought to God sits inside the life of faith. A church culture that treats every question as rebellion is stricter than the prayer book of Israel.
What actually keeps them?
Brown’s answer starts with leaders. In his book Leadership Directions from Moses, he describes three difficult conversations: “it’s the conversation that you have with yourself. It’s the conversation that you have with other people, and it’s also, most importantly the conversation you have with God.” The order is the point. A leader who avoids honesty with God will usually avoid it with himself, and then with the people he leads.
Culture moves from there. As Brown got better at those conversations and practiced them in front of others, he said, “then I notice the people that I’m closest to also become better at it and develop a new courage.” If leaders dodge hard conversations, the congregation learns to dodge them too, and young adults with hard questions learn there is no room for them. If leaders bring their own questions to God out loud, others learn they can too.
The second thing that keeps people, oddly, is a church’s willingness to let them go. Brown’s book draws on Numbers 32, where two tribes ask to settle east of the Jordan instead of entering the promised land. Moses challenges them, “Shall your brethren go to war, and shall ye sit here?” (Numbers 32:6), and then lets them stay once they agree to help the others take the land. The passage is narrative. It describes what Moses did rather than issuing a rule for churches. Its shape is still instructive: Moses accepted a different choice without dropping the shared obligation.
Brown applies this to people who leave his church for another. Leaders assume they must finish with everyone they started with, and “we may feel as if we’re a failure if we don’t.” He has concluded that “true leadership means that you’re gonna be saying goodbye quite often.” He admits it still stings: “I would love to tell you that I handle those experiences very well and very mature, but I don’t.” His practice is that “we should never hold them hostage beyond the time that they’re supposed to be with us and release them with a blessing.” Then he adds the line that turns it back on the leader: “Because if you can’t release people with a blessing, you can’t release yourself with a blessing.”
Brown is talking about people moving to another congregation. The faith itself is not up for negotiation in his model. A leader who treats every departure as betrayal builds a culture of guilt, and young adults notice it. Blessing people as they go makes the church easier to trust while they stay, and easier to return to later.
That practice comes with a test. Some people leave because a season has ended, and blessing them is faithful. Others leave because the church never made room for their questions or never trusted them with anything. A blessing offered to the second group, without asking why they left, is just another way of avoiding the hard conversation. Brown’s model only holds together if the leader who blesses the departing is also willing to ask what the departure is telling him.