This article integrates advocacy analysis with findings from the author’s doctoral research on social media, off-site fellowship, and young adult participation in the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color) church.
We May Be Asking the Wrong Question
For years, churches have been asking some version of the same question: Why are young adults leaving the church?
It sounds like a reasonable question. It may even sound like a concerned question. But embedded within it is an assumption that deserves examination.
The question begins with the young adult as the object of concern. Why are they leaving? Why do they not attend? Why are they not committed? Why do they not give? Why will they not serve? Why are they questioning traditions? Why are they not raising their children the way previous generations did?
The gaze is pointed in one direction: at them. Once young adults become the primary object of examination, the church can easily move from ministry to diagnosis. Their disengagement becomes evidence of something deficient within them: insufficient faith, commitment, discipline, respect, theological understanding, or spiritual maturity.
But advocacy demands another point of view. Before asking what is happening to young adults, perhaps the church must ask what young adults are experiencing inside the church.
Before asking why they left, perhaps we must ask: What happened while they were here?
Before asking why they will not return, perhaps we must ask: What exactly are we asking them to return to?
And before designing another program to attract them, perhaps we must ask the most uncomfortable question of all: What if young-adult disengagement is not merely a problem to solve? What if it is data?
Disengagement Is Data
This distinction matters. When an institution treats disengagement only as failure, its instinct is retrieval: How do we get them back?
When an institution treats disengagement as data, its instinct becomes inquiry: What is this telling us?
That does not mean every criticism of the church is correct. It does not mean every young adult who leaves does so because a congregation failed. It does not mean Christianity must be reconstructed around generational preferences.
Young adults, like every generation, can be consumeristic, inconsistent, individualistic, impatient, theologically underdeveloped, resistant to accountability, and overly influenced by their surrounding culture. But those realities cannot become convenient explanations that protect the institution from examining itself.
The empty chair is not merely absence. It is data.
National research provides reason for that examination. Pew Research Center has documented lower religious engagement among younger Black adults and lower participation in predominantly Black congregations compared with older generations. Leadership patterns deserve equal attention: younger Black adults who attend religious services are also less likely than older adults to report holding congregational leadership roles (Pew Research Center, 2021).
These numbers tell us what is happening. Advocacy requires us to investigate why.
My Research Heard Something Different
My doctoral research, The Influence of Social Media and Off-Site Fellowship: Young Adult Participation in the BIPOC Church, examined these questions through a qualitative descriptive study involving young adults connected to a BIPOC congregational context in Los Angeles.
The study included eight individual interviews and an eight-participant focus group with young adults ages 19–34 from African American, Afro-Caribbean, and biracial backgrounds.
I began with questions concerning social media, off-site fellowship, and young-adult participation. But the participants revealed something larger.
The issue was not simply attendance. It was relationship. It was trust. It was belonging. It was leadership. It was whether difficult realities could be discussed honestly. It was whether church existed only inside a building. And it was whether young adults were being invited merely to participate in somebody else’s institution or being empowered to help shape the church they would inherit.
That distinction changes the conversation.
Related: What do teens really need (and want) from the church?
Digital Connection Was an Entry Point, Not a Destination
One significant finding from my research was that social media matters—but perhaps not in the way churches sometimes imagine.
Digital ministry cannot simply mean: post more, livestream better, get on TikTok, improve Instagram, or hire somebody young to run social media. Those may be useful tactics. They are not a ministry strategy.
Participants indicated that digital platforms can create important entry points into faith communities. But digital contact did not replace trusted relationships, embodied fellowship, credible leadership, or belonging.
The church therefore should not ask, “How can social media make young adults attend church?” It should ask, “How can digital spaces begin relationships that develop into meaningful Christian community?”
That is an entirely different ministry philosophy.
Related: Understanding digital culture can help the church disciple young millennials and Gen Z
Off-Site Fellowship Revealed Something Even More Important
One of the strongest findings from my research concerned off-site fellowship. Young adults described meaningful connection occurring beyond formal church environments: restaurants, homes, community spaces, informal gatherings, and places where conversation could breathe.
Related: A fresh expression of church: something new that reminds us of old
These environments sometimes functioned as sacred and healing spaces. That finding should challenge the BIPOC church.
For generations, particularly in marginalized communities, the church building has carried enormous symbolic significance. It was sanctuary, school, meeting place, political headquarters, cultural center, refuge, organizing space, spiritual home, and sometimes a site of survival.
We should never casually discard that history. But honoring the sanctuary does not require believing that God works exclusively inside it.
Young adults may be teaching the church to recover an older theological truth: sacred community is created by the presence of God among people, not merely by the address at which they gather.
Belonging May Be the Real Intervention
The deeper finding running through these experiences was relational belonging. Churches frequently measure young-adult ministry through attendance: how many came, returned, joined, volunteered, or gave.
Those metrics are useful. But they are insufficient. A person can attend without belonging. A person can volunteer without belonging. A person can sing on a worship team without belonging. A person can sit in the sanctuary every Sunday and remain relationally invisible.
The more meaningful questions are: Who knows them? Who notices when they disappear? Who listens to them? Who mentors them? Who trusts them? Who gives them responsibility? Who allows them to question? Who expects to learn something from them?
That is the difference between institutional participation and relational belonging.
Related: How mentoring can change today’s narrative of young people and the church
Black Women Have Been Warning the Church About the Gaze for Generations
This conversation cannot responsibly occur without womanist scholarship. Black women have historically sustained extraordinary portions of Black ecclesial life while simultaneously negotiating racial and gendered systems of power.
Related: What God has strengthened me to do
Womanist theologians such as Katie Cannon, Delores Williams, Jacquelyn Grant, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, Emilie Townes, and Eboni Marshall Turman refuse to allow Black liberation to be discussed while Black women’s experiences remain peripheral.
Their work forces an uncomfortable but necessary question: Can an institution call itself liberating if liberation is distributed unequally inside the institution?
The implications for young adults are enormous. Young women do not merely hear what churches preach about equality. They watch what churches do with power.
They see who preaches, who makes decisions, who controls budgets, whose theology becomes normative, who receives mentorship, whose leadership is questioned, who performs enormous amounts of institutional labor without corresponding authority, who is expected to serve, and who is expected to lead.
The church is teaching ecclesiology every time those decisions are made.
Latina Women Ask Us to Examine Everyday Life
Mujerista theology adds another indispensable dimension. Ada María Isasi-Díaz insisted that theology must take seriously lo cotidiano—the everyday lived realities of marginalized women.
That insight should radically reshape young-adult ministry. The church often begins with Sunday. Young adults frequently begin with Monday: rent, work, student debt, family, relationships, childcare, identity, racism, sexism, immigration, loneliness, purpose, mental and emotional well-being, community violence, economic instability, and vocational uncertainty.
Young adults are asking whether their faith has something meaningful to say about the lives they actually live.
Therefore, the ministry question cannot simply be: Did young adults attend worship? We must also ask: Did their faith accompany them home?
Asian American Women Reveal the Difference Between Presence and Power
The same institutional examination must extend across BIPOC communities. Research on Asian American congregational practices has documented meaningful disparities in leadership opportunity for women and underrepresentation of adults under 30 in congregational governance.
These findings expose an important distinction: representation is not power.
Having young adults in the building does not mean young adults are shaping the institution. Having women in ministry does not necessarily mean women possess institutional authority. Having BIPOC people present does not automatically make an institution equitable.
The question is not merely: Who is in the room? The advocacy question is: Who can change what happens in the room?
Stop Confusing Service With Leadership
Churches often say, “Our young people are involved.” Look more carefully.
They sing. They run cameras. They create graphics. They post social media. They greet. They work with children. They set up chairs. They serve food. They help with technology. Those are meaningful ministries.
But where are they when the budget is created? Where are they when strategic priorities are established? Where are they when theological questions are discussed? Where are they when governing bodies meet? Where are they when community partnerships are chosen? Where are they when pastoral succession is discussed? Where are they when resources are allocated? Where are they when the future is designed?
A church cannot claim to empower young adults simply because it has found productive ways to use their labor.
Service without voice is not empowerment. Participation without authority is not ownership.
Silence Is Also Communication
My research surfaced another difficult finding. Silence around issues affecting young adults—including mental health and sexuality—can contribute to disengagement.
That does not mean churches must abandon theological conviction. It means silence is itself a theological response.
When young adults are wrestling with something central to their humanity and the church refuses to discuss it, the church has still communicated something: This subject does not belong here. The person experiencing that reality may hear something even more damaging: Perhaps I do not completely belong here either.
Related: Three ways churches can be hospitable in a time of faith deconstruction
Advocacy does not require churches to eliminate theological disagreement. It requires churches to create communities mature enough to have difficult conversations without treating difficult people as disposable.
From My Findings to a Framework
The findings from my research suggest a ministry architecture I describe as the Davis Framework for Digital Discipleship. It consists of five interconnected dimensions:
Digital Invitation
Digital platforms function as accessible entry points into community rather than substitutes for community.
Relational Belonging
Young adults need to become known, valued, trusted, and connected rather than merely counted.
Off-Site Fellowship
Christian community intentionally extends beyond formal worship environments into spaces where authentic relationships and spiritual exploration can develop.
Peer Leadership
Young adults must participate not merely as recipients of ministry but as architects, leaders, mentors, and theological contributors.
Contextual Worship
Worship must remain rooted in Christian identity while speaking intelligibly to the cultural and lived realities of the people participating in it.
Digital invitation should lead toward relational belonging. Relational belonging should deepen through embodied fellowship. Fellowship should create pathways toward leadership. Leadership should help shape contextual worship and ministry.
The result is neither an online church nor simply a traditional church with an Instagram account. It is a hybrid ecclesiology of relationship, presence, leadership, and belonging.
Advocacy Requires Structural Responses
If disengagement is data, churches cannot respond with programming alone. The response must become structural. My research led to several practical recommendations.
A Young Adult Prophetic Leadership Cohort
Do not simply create ministry for young adults. Develop young adults who can exercise meaningful theological, organizational, and community leadership.
A Trauma-Informed Congregational Culture
Churches serving communities affected by racism, poverty, violence, grief, displacement, discrimination, and other forms of trauma must understand how those experiences shape participation, trust, relationships, and spiritual formation.
An Annual State of the Young Adult Church
Churches should systematically listen—not once, and not only when attendance collapses. Every year, ask young adults about belonging, leadership, worship, justice, relationships, digital engagement, community needs, and institutional trust. Then report what was heard and explain what will change.
A Hybrid Ministry Blueprint
Digital ministry, off-site fellowship, embodied worship, discipleship, and community engagement should operate as one ecosystem rather than competing programs.
Intergenerational Reciprocity
Older generations possess wisdom young adults need. Young adults possess insight older generations need. The relationship must move beyond one-directional mentorship toward reciprocal formation.
Resource: Intergenerational relationship toolkit
This Is Not an Argument Against the BIPOC Church
That point must be unmistakable. This is an argument for it.
The Black Church matters. Latino churches matter. Asian American churches matter. Immigrant churches matter. Indigenous Christian communities matter. Multiracial BIPOC congregations matter.
These institutions carry histories that cannot be replicated by generic American Christianity. They have preserved culture, language, memory, music, theology, resistance, family, community, political agency, dignity, faith, hope, and sometimes survival itself.
That history is precisely why the present moment deserves urgency.
We do not critically examine institutions because they are worthless. We critically examine institutions because they are valuable enough to save.
Advocacy is not institutional destruction. It is refusing to confuse institutional preservation with faithfulness.
Change the Gaze
Imagine an empty chair in the sanctuary.
The traditional question is: Where did they go?
The advocacy question goes further: When did they stop feeling that this chair belonged to them? Did anybody notice before they left? Did anybody ask what they needed? Did anybody trust them enough to lead? Could they bring their questions into the room? Could they disagree? Could a young woman see a pathway from participation to authority? Could young adults influence the institution rather than simply inherit it? Could they encounter God outside Sunday morning? And when they told us what they were experiencing, did we believe them?
The empty chair is not merely absence. It is data.
It may contain information about leadership, belonging, gender, culture, trust, technology, justice, power, theology, relationship, and institutional credibility.
The church’s first instinct cannot always be to diagnose the missing person. Sometimes we must examine the system surrounding the empty chair.
Stop asking only: “What is wrong with young adults?” Ask: “What are young adults revealing about us?” Then go one step further: “What must we change together?”
Young adults do not merely represent a demographic that the BIPOC church needs to recapture. They are theologians in formation, leaders in formation, prophets in formation, pastors in formation, elders and deacons in formation, community organizers in formation, parents in formation, teachers in formation, and the next generation of people who will determine what our churches become.
The question therefore is not simply whether young adults will return to our churches. There is another question facing us: Will we build churches in which they can belong, lead, question, heal, serve, challenge, create, worship, and become?
That requires more than another program. It requires advocacy. It requires institutional humility. It requires shared power. And it requires the courage to change the gaze.
References
Cannon, K. G. (1988). Black womanist ethics. Scholars Press.
Davis, A. A. (2025). The influence of social media and off-site fellowship: Young adult participation in the BIPOC church (Doctor of Ministry dissertation). New Brunswick Theological Seminary.
Gilkes, C. T. (2001). If it wasn’t for the women: Black women’s experience and womanist culture in church and community. Orbis Books.
Grant, J. (1989). White women’s Christ and Black women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and womanist response. Scholars Press.
Isasi-Díaz, A. M. (1996). Mujerista theology: A theology for the twenty-first century. Orbis Books.
Marshall Turman, E. (2025). Make the church great…again? Christian ethics, Black womanist resonance, and the paradox of decline. Studies in Christian Ethics, 38(1), 5–18.
Pew Research Center. (2021). Faith among Black Americans.
Townes, E. M. (2006). Womanist ethics and the cultural production of evil. Palgrave Macmillan.
Williams, D. S. (1993). Sisters in the wilderness: The challenge of womanist God-talk. Orbis Books.
