Springfield, IL | More than 200 church leaders gathered at the IBSA Building in January to focus on the question of how to reach the next generation at the 2026 Illinois Leadership Summit. College age adults are part of that next-gen group. But the term has come to mean a broader age-range including Gen-Z and Gen Alpha, from middle school to well after the old designation of “college and career.”
Instead of calling this “reaching the next generation,” pastor and author Andy Addis recommended the phrase “stewarding the current generations.” He gave pastors of churches a key definition for successful ministry: intergenerational.
Many Illinois pastors first met him several years ago at the Midwest Leadership Summit, the larger multi-state version of the IBSA event. Addis leads a rural Kanas church that grew into multi-site congregations with video preaching venues in rural settings. In unlikely locations, Addis connected with young people.
“The median age of Christians is 54,” Addis pointed out, 10 years older than a decade ago. “In the average congregation, more than 40% of the congregation is over 60.” Churches are aging faster than the American population. That’s not the fault of the older members, but the failure to make younger disciples.
Addis identified as major issues:
- Replacement failure (few newer members)
- Cultural time-locking (holding on to a certain timeframe and letting the world go by)
- Program gravity (so many programs that they steer the church)
- Leadership aging (often matching the age of the pastor)
- Conflict avoidance (keeping the peace seems more important that shaking things up to reach new people).
“Pursuing the next generation is good, but stewarding the current generations is a more biblical response,” Addis said. His use of the plural “generations” is important. Frustrated by the absence of young people, some churches turn away from the current generations in their pews. (Or chairs.)
As a result, they try to create ministries for young adults, and end up siloing them as if church were one big youth group. Ultimately, this becomes cultural time-locking.
(There are many megachurch examples of this. Leaders of a certain age latched onto Hawaiian-shirt wearing rock-and-roll seekers, and held on well beyond retirement. 1980s and 90s cutting edge became mainstream, then old hat. Then just old.)
Reinvention should not mean repeating this with a new generation. Let’s not do the time warp again. Instead, Addis, himself in his 50s, points to the success of churches without silos, his own included.
Addis studied national demographics. Church membership is older than the national population by about 10 years. People are living longer, and the church isn’t bringing in new members in proportion to the aging of the nation. In the average church, 40% of adults are over 60. That information was expected.
What wasn’t expected is Addis’s distillation of statistics that show focusing on next-gen ministry isn’t enough. Churches that reach young adults successfully are not those that create age-graded silos for them, but those who bring young people fully into body life, including leadership.
It’s all about building meaningful intergenerational relationships. Research shows that young adults who stayed in church after graduating and leaving home had intergenerational friendships at church. That’s about 20% of young adults. The other 80% left. This intergenerational approach is the least pursued version of “next gen.”
Among Illinois churches, Addis concluded that:
- 30-40% are siloed with age-defined ministry.
- 45-55% are multi-generation, with various ages sharing the space, but not much else.
- 8-12% are cross-generational, with efforts to bring age groups together for specific ministries (such as adopt-a-college student).
- 2-6% are intergenerational, with full engagement of all ages.
Honest assessment of its “next gen” vision can help a church move from anxious focus on recruiting young people to becoming a truly intergenerational church that is always incorporating the next generations.
The Illinois Leadership Summit was held January 20-21 at the IBSA Building in Springfield.
View the full videos of speakers at youtube.com/@IllinoisBaptist.