Grief comes before strategy. A church that wants to understand why young adults have left should first name the specific people who are gone and admit what their absence costs. Only then can it honestly examine the welcome it offers the ones still here. That welcome is measured by what young adults are trusted to carry and how well they are actually known, not by how warmly they are greeted. This study moves through those two tasks in order: lament, then self-examination. It reads Luke 15 with care and draws on a Jude 3 Project podcast conversation between Lisa Fields and Dr. Brianna K. Parker, the founding curator of the Black Millennial Cafe, whose doctoral research focused on Black millennials and faith.
You can work through it alone in one sitting, or with a group over two meetings. It is written for church leaders and for young adults, and it works best when both are in the room. Every reflection is private unless the person choosing to share decides otherwise. No one should be asked to tell a story they did not offer.
Name who is missing
Begin with no analysis at all. Take a sheet of paper and write down the names of young adults who used to be part of your church and are not anymore. If you are a young adult yourself, you may be writing the names of friends. You may also be writing your own name, if you are still attending but have quietly stopped believing that anyone here sees you.
Choose one name and stay with it for a few minutes. What do you remember about this person? When did you last see them? Did anyone ask why they stopped coming? Did you?
Then write one sentence that tells the truth about the loss. It can be grief, regret or simple confusion. It does not need to be fair, finished or theologically tidy. Lament in Scripture is often none of those things. This sentence belongs to you. In a group, invite people to keep theirs on the page. Anyone who wants to read theirs aloud may do so, and the group receives it without comment or correction.
One caution belongs here. The list you just wrote is not a recruitment list. If the first instinct in the room is to plan how to win these people back, slow down. Something was lost, and some of the loss may be the church’s doing. Rushing to a solution can be a way of avoiding that.
Reading Luke 15 where Jesus told it
The three parables of Luke 15 open with a setting, and the setting matters. “Then drew near unto him all the publicans and sinners for to hear him. And the Pharisees and scribes murmured, saying, This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them” (Luke 15:1-2). Jesus tells the stories that follow to religious insiders who objected to the company he kept. The parables answer a complaint.
Read Luke 15:8-10 slowly, out loud if you can. “Either what woman having ten pieces of silver, if she lose one piece, doth not light a candle, and sweep the house, and seek diligently till she find it? And when she hath found it, she calleth her friends and her neighbours together, saying, Rejoice with me; for I have found the piece which I had lost. Likewise, I say unto you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth.”
Before you apply anything, observe what the text actually says.
- What does the woman do, step by step? Count the verbs.
- Where is the coin lost? Notice that it never left the house.
- Who is invited to share her joy, and why does Jesus make that detail part of the story?
The parable’s first meaning concerns God’s joy over a repenting sinner, told to people who resented that joy. Be careful with the next step. It is easy to read every young adult who left your church as the lost coin or the wayward son, and to cast the church as the faithful one waiting at home. The evidence in this study does not support that casting. Many young adults are not running from God. They are walking away from a particular kind of church experience. The parables still have something to say to a church in grief, but the honest place to look first may be at the people in the story who never left.
The son who stayed home
Read Luke 15:25-32. The older brother has been in the field. He hears music, learns why, and refuses the celebration: “And he was angry, and would not go in: therefore came his father out, and intreated him” (Luke 15:28). He lists his years of service. The father answers, “Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine” (Luke 15:31).
In the setting of verses 1-2, this son stands closest to the murmuring Pharisees and scribes. He was present the whole time and obeyed every rule. Even so, by the end of the story he is outside the house, and the father has to come out to him. Jesus leaves the story open. We are never told whether he goes in.
What follows is application, not the parable’s direct claim. Even so, the older brother offers a way to understand something Dr. Brianna K. Parker found in her research. One of her in-depth interviews was with a young woman raised in a deeply churched family. By Parker’s account, “she followed all the rules of church, she said all her Easter speeches.” She took part in youth church and was involved at every level. Partway through the interview she told Parker she had never believed any of it.
Parker, who served as a youth pastor during seminary, describes being heartbroken when she thought it through: someone could be present “that long at that level of engagement, and you really miss them.”
Here is the grief this study wants leaders to face. Some losses never show up as empty seats. A young person can be present and active and still be lost inside the house, like the coin. Attendance cannot reveal this. Only knowing a person can.
Pause here before going on. Think of a young person in your church right now whom you would describe as faithful. Ask yourself what you actually know about what they believe, as distinct from what they do. You do not need to write the answer down.
Examining the welcome
Parker named her widely read article on this subject The Fugitive. When asked why she did not use the word refugee, she answered, “because they’re still being hunted.” Every church, she said, insists it needs young people. Then she described what that need often looks like in practice. Young adults are held at a limited level of participation, and “they don’t really inventory our gifts because they still think of us as children.”
She put the contradiction plainly. Churches have always welcomed young adults’ tithes and offerings: “I’ve never been too young to give.” Yet people under 40, and sometimes over, are still treated as too young to lead. Her summary: “you’re young until you’re not.”
This is why a welcome can feel warm and still wound. Being greeted at the door and handed an envelope while being kept from real responsibility teaches a person that they are valued for what they supply. In Luke 15:31 the father says something very different to the son who stayed: all that I have is thine. The father does not keep him on the edge of the household.
A practice: three columns
Divide a page into three columns. Head them What we receive from young adults, What we let young adults do and What we let young adults decide. Fill each one with specifics from your own congregation: the budget, the pulpit, the board, the hiring decisions, the order of service.
Then look at the pattern. If the first column is full and the third is nearly empty, you have found the gap Parker describes. Nobody needs to have intended it for it to be there. Groups can do this together, but it works best when leaders fill in the columns first and then hand the page to the young adults in the room. Ask what they would add or correct. Leaders should listen without explaining.
Lisa Fields offered a second test, drawn from what young adults look for in a church: “is this church having an impact or is this church just having a service?” Parker sharpened the same point when she said young adults want to see the church “not just taking photo ops with the community, but transforming the community.” Add a short fourth list under your columns. Name the needs around your building that your church actually meets, and the ones it only talks about.
Learning to listen without defending
The welcome cannot change until the church knows what it is offering, and it cannot learn that only from the people who stayed. Dr. Brianna K. Parker was blunt about this. Churches often ask young adults who grew up inside and never left what outsiders want. “That’s the worst thing you can ever do,” Parker said, because insiders like her “only know how to talk church to you.” Some young insiders, she added, have learned the habit so well that “we know exactly what you wanna hear.”
Lisa Fields made the same observation from her own Pentecostal background. Asking church-raised young adults how to reach the unchurched, she said, makes about as much sense as asking someone at the other end of life: “You might as well ask the elderly person in the church.”
Parker also insisted that young adults are not hard to hear: “Millennials have no problem speaking when asked.” Her starting point is honesty: “honesty and transparency are gonna be most important, I believe.” So the practice for this week is one honest conversation.
A practice for this week: one conversation
Choose one young adult who is outside your church or at its edge. Choose a single person, not a focus group. Ask if they would be willing to talk, and accept a no without pressure. If they agree, ask Parker’s own questions: “where are you? What do you need right now? What do you need from us? What do you need to see most?”
Then keep three disciplines. Do not explain why things are the way they are. Do not invite them to anything at the end. Thank them. Afterward, write down one thing they said that you did not want to hear and one thing your church could change because of it.
Parker’s research gives a reason to expect useful answers: “many of the church kids that have walked away, they do know what they need and they might not be in church today because they’re getting that somewhere else or something else takes priority.” Departure is often a sign that a need found another home. A conversation like this can show you which need it was.
If you are a young adult working through this study, the same questions are yours to answer. Answer them for yourself first. Then decide whether there is one leader you trust enough to show your answers to. You are under no obligation to do so.
Questions for discussion
- In Luke 15:1-2, the parables answer a complaint from religious insiders. Whose complaint about young adults gets the most attention in your church, and whose complaint gets the least?
- The coin was lost inside the house. What would you need to know about a young person in your church to tell whether they were found or simply present?
- Look at your three columns. Which single change in the third column would cost your church the most? Is that cost a reason not to make it, or a sign of what the welcome has been protecting?
- The story never tells us whether the older brother goes in. What makes it hard for long-serving members to celebrate young adults who are given responsibility they waited years for?
- Parker said, “I need to see myself in the God I serve.” What would a young Black believer in your church have to hear and see in order to say that about your congregation?
- After your conversation this week, what did you hear that you had assumed you already knew?
For whoever is guiding the group
Expect the conversation to drift toward what is wrong with young people. When it does, return gently to the columns. The question on the table is the welcome, and the people best placed to change it are usually the ones holding the pen.
Expect defensiveness too, especially from those who built the church and love it. Their love is real. Honor it without letting it end the discussion.
Some people will come to this study with a son, daughter or grandchild on their list of names. Treat that grief as grief. Do not turn it into a case study, and do not suggest that a parent’s failure explains the absence. If someone’s sorrow runs deeper than a group setting can carry, make sure a pastor follows up with them personally. Seeking help from a trained counselor is not a failure of faith.
Watch your motives as well. Parker warned against reaching young adults so that the church has “a notch on our belt” or full pews for the cameras. The reason she gave instead: “we do it because we believe in millennials and we believe in the black church.” If the group is mainly worried about survival, say so honestly. Then ask whether that is the same thing as love.
What to carry from here
Parker’s research does not end in despair: “My research showed black millennials still have hope in the black church, even if they’re not there. They just wanna see the black church at its best.”
That hope is not a promise that anyone on your list will return. Some may not, and grief that has been honestly named does not have to be resolved by next Sunday. What the hope does offer is a reason to keep the door open and change what lies on the other side of it.
Luke 15 ends with a father standing outside his own house and pleading with the son who never left. It is worth asking who in your church is standing outside right now, on the steps or in the back row, waiting for someone to come out to them.