The Future is Here
Ten years ago now, my first book dropped in America, Church Zero. It ruffled some feathers.
It was a call for the church to wake up to the realities that were just around the corner, namely the decline of the church in the face of an irreversible age gap that was occurring.
For some reason that I can’t fully explain, I had a sense that it would make sense in ten years time. I actually wrote, “If what I’m saying doesn’t make sense to you now, wait another ten to fifteen years and it will.”
Little did I know that COVID and the Pandemic lockdowns would accelerate the decline. What I did know was that my message was not well received. After giving away nearly 1,000 copies at a pastor’s conference, I walked past a group of ministers who were holding the book in their hands, while waving the insert inside. I overheard one say, “Who the hell does this guy think he is, telling us that your churches are dying but we just can’t see it?” Another remarked, “He has guts if nothing else.”
Needless to say, my book did not win me friends, but it did influence people.
Fast forward to today, and nearly everything that the book predicted DID actually come to pass, but not because I had prophetic powers. I had been to the future, but not with a time-traveling DeLorean. I’d been a missionary to Europe, planting churches on the front-lines for 12 years, and coming back to America in 2011 was like returning from the future with Biff Tanner’s Almanac from 50 years on.
"The churches that won’t heed Jesus’s call to get out there will die—and in fact are already dying from within. This isn’t just happening in Great Britain. The dry rot in America has already set. We’re just repeating Britain’s pattern fifty years later. In the 1950s in Britain, the churches were full, packed with families. Preaching legend Peter Jeffery recalls how on the streets of Britain in the fifties, an open-air preacher would draw folks out of their front doors, toting folding chairs so they could listen. In the sixties, however, the sexual revolution put the church to bed, and the youth slowly trickled out of the church scene. Nobody panicked. Do you know why? The churches were still relatively full. One decade, two decades later, and the silver heads woke up to the widening maw of an irreversible generation gap as they literally died off one by one. As the numbers in the church graveyard increased, the numbers in the pews decreased. When they woke up to the shrinking church—evidenced by the empty pews—the panic finally broke out. But by then it was too late. When I returned to the United States after being abroad for twelve years, the first thing I noticed was that we’d lost the youth on a Sunday. Nobody is worried; the numbers are still big. Wait ten years. Churches that depend on their size tend to rest on their laurels.”
Today, saying these things isn’t only non-controversial, we no longer have to say these things at all.
Everyone knows that the future is here. It came while we were all on lockdown, chewing the wallpaper off the walls, and trying not to lose our minds.
The question is, what are we going to do about it? The irreversible age gap has occurred. It’s what Chestly Lunday at NewBreed termed the Silver Tsunami.
All churches and ministries are currently facing it. When the Boomer generation drops off, there will not be the same numbers of Gen-X to fill the seats. Death by attrition has arrived.
So what do we do?
Looking back to the pages of the New Testament, we can see where Jesus started. He started with youth. He went after the younger generation. At thirty when he started his rabbinical ministry, he followed the custom of picking teenagers (roughly the age of 15 was customary to start following a rabbi). If you think about it, Jesus resembled a youth pastor more than a traditional pastor.
NewBreed’s tagline is "Disciple Like Jesus to Plant Like Paul.” Without the discipleship part, you’ll never plant like Paul. Therefore, we’re beginning to recover the disciple-making approach of Jesus, and focusing on reaching the next generation with it. I started ministry as a youth pastor, and I’m not too proud to start focusing the rest of my time on the next generation in the same way that Jesus (and Paul) did.
After all, whatever we do, whatever strategies we try to implement, they all have a shelf-life with the approaching age-out of the church. The next generation can carry all of that forward, but we have to reach them first.
If you’d like to join NewBreed on this journey, you can support us by partnering financially
Peyton Jones is a serial church planter, author, speaker, outreach consultant, and founder of NewBreed Training. Born in Washington, D.C. but raised in Huntington Beach, CA (Surf City), he married the girl he fell in love with at 17. He is the adoptive father of two awesome young ladies, Liberty and Eden.