A Question for Megachurches: Where Are All the Old People?

 

                The other day I stumbled across the Facebook page of a megachurch from a few states away, and a few things struck me. The first was, “Where are all the old people?” Nearly every picture featured people in their 40s and younger. As I kept scrolling and digging and searching, I was able to see just a couple scattered faces in the pictures there of people who may have been in their 50s or 60s, but it was rare. And I saw none in their 80s or 90s.

                Now, this is a question you don’t hear asked very often. No one is asking, “Where are the old people?” Because, by and large, the church has done a much better job retaining membership and belief among older adults. The question on everyone’s mind is thus, “Where are the young people? How can we get them back in church?” And so, the megachurch, that statistically is likely to have 70% of its population younger than 50 according to a 2020 book Handbook of Megachurches, they look like the ones with the magic bullet who have figured something out that everyone else needs to emulate. And indeed, I am happy and thrilled that they are finding ways to reach young people for Christ. It is part of my own faith journey that I came back to faith through a megachurch. So I must admit that a megachurch pastor could rightly walk into most congregations in America and ask, “Where are the young people?”

                But, here’s the thing, if you ask that question to most any of those churches, they will not lack young people for lack of trying. They greatly desire to reach young people. However, with low rates of church attendance among young people, it is easy for a church to lose out on having them due to a competitive market for a scarce subset of people. However, if you were to ask a megachurch, “Where are the old people?” I don’t think they could similarly answer by saying, “We are trying to reach them, we greatly desire them among us… they just aren’t showing up.” No, on the contrary, I think they are doing very little to try to reach that age demographic, and in fact, the lack of elderly people in the churches may be less a bug, and more a feature.

                When elderly people, those 65 and older, are an abundant age demographic, making up 33% of the U.S. church population, when they are found in great numbers in nearly every church in America, how is it that megachurches, according to a 2009 Hartford Institute study, only have 7% of their members aged 65 or older? I think if you asked them why this is, they might say, “We are focusing our effort on targeting the lost sheep, the younger people that are more likely to be unchurched.” Or they might say, “Elderly folks are resistant to changes, and are more interested in keeping things the way they like them than in altering the style of the church to be more attractive to young people, so they don’t fit well in our church.” And there may be some definite truth to that. But on the other hand, I know many elderly Christians who are deeply interested in seeking out the lost sheep, of doing anything they can to reach the next generation for Christ, why are they seemingly not joining forces with megachurches to accomplish these worthy goals? Could it simply be that older Christians have more institutional loyalty and are sticking with the churches they’ve been in for ages, whereas younger Christians, more transient, are more willing to church hop to the megachurch in town or to have recently moved towns and thus be in need of finding a new church? That surely accounts for some of it.

                I raise these points because I don’t want to assume that the lack of elderly in megachurches is always due to malicious motives. But I do want us to ponder and wrestle for a little bit with whether there could be any truth to the fact that megachurches may be sending implicit and sometimes unintentional signals to elderly Christians that they are not wanted there. Could it be that elderly Christians see their gifts and talents neglected in megachurches? They may, for example, have great musical ability they bring to the table, but they are overlooked in favor of younger, more attractive worship leaders. They may find that the young people who predominantly make up this church are really only there to try and make friends with others from their peer groups. They may thus feel neglected and overlooked, like few are interested in befriending them there. They may find in megachurches people who are less interested in intergenerational fellowship and more interested in maintaining the age segregation they are used to from growing up in our school systems. They may feel like they are viewed as someone not to be seen, not to be made part of any of the church’s marketing images because their gray, aging face may risk signaling a church that is outdated or out of touch. They are thus seen as a negative, not as a positive. The wisdom and the life experience of the elderly that should be valued are instead overlooked and deemed unimportant. Are we telling them that their ways of worship are obsolete and worthless, as if there couldn’t possibly be any worth in singing old classics like Amazing Grace or How Great Thou Art? As if no young person could benefit from those songs or be drawn to Christ by songs that weren’t written in the last 20 years and that are missing an emotion inducing bridge replete with key change… The motives may be malicious, or they may not be, but I wonder if the lack of elderly people in megachurches is more a feature, and not a bug.

But by having these people excluded from our churches are we perhaps not missing a key portion of the body of Christ? As Paul taught in 1 Corinthians 12, “the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable.” “The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you.”” It is my belief that the body of Christ is worse off whenever we are missing any demographic: whether that is age, race, gender, or something else. But whereas there is much written on ways to become more racially diverse or how to empower women in leadership or attract young people, no one at the megachurches seems to be asking why so few elderly are involved.

On a similar note, likely due to there being so few older people at those churches, I almost never hear of a funeral happening at a megachurch. And think just how regularly funerals would be happening in those churches of thousands if their age demographic matched the rest of the U.S. church. But even when funerals do happen at those churches, I get the sense that they are kind of hidden under the rug as much as possible. After all, it is hard to look like a cool, hip, and desirable church if you’re burying someone new every week, if people are constantly reminded of their frailty and mortality. But I just wonder if this lack of funerals doesn’t shape the culture of those churches. For there is something formative about being in an intergenerational church community where you are often around those who are aging, suffering, and dying. Does this not in some ways form us in the way of the cross: the way of humility and suffering and death we know we must all walk? It is only in the church full of the young that we can fall into the errors of the prosperity gospel that link faithfulness to health and wealth. It should be no surprise that that error is far more prevalent in megachurches, as they lack the elderly.

There were a few other things that struck me from the Facebook page of this megachurch. One was how manicured everything looked. Only professional quality photographs. People always seemed posed in ways that look exciting or captivating, they often looked ecstatic, like they were having as much fun as if they were riding a rollercoaster. And while this sense of energy and excitement may draw more people to want to come to the church, are we doing the world many favors by modeling this Instagram worthy type of Christianity? They somehow make the Christian walk look never boring, never sad. Yet is not so much of the Christian life merely walking with God down in the valleys? Is not much of the Christian life things that are ordinary or routine or unglamorous? Is it ok to be bored in church every now and then? Because one will not be able to live the Christian life well for long at all if they are not willing and able to be bored, if they are not able to do the sometimes hard work of reading and interpreting obscure passages of the bible, if they are not able to pray and serve even when they don’t feel like it.

On the Facebook page I saw how in the services the teaching pastors were always followed by cameramen plastering their face in larger-than-life size on the screens of the church, and then online, many of the pictures were professional shots of the pastor next to a deep quote from his sermon. It makes them look so cool. They look like celebrities, like people on my TV screen I’d see at home. Yet as effective as these strategies might be at drawing people in to the church building, I wonder if that image of the attractive pastor in their hip clothes and cool haircut squares with the Jesus we are meant to model of whom Isaiah says in Isaiah 53 that “he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.”

I wonder if the celebrity-like ways these pastors are portrayed on stage and online are truly consistent with the humility that is a major virtue of our faith. Even if they teach humility from the stage, is their life modeling humility or modeling pride? Is the way the church captures and markets their life implicitly teaching people that to be a good Christian, good at living out the great commission, we need to always look amazing and captivating. And is it modeling the implicit idea that if you follow Christ like me, you’ll have adoring crowds supporting you? Does the purpose of the church subtly shift from focusing glory on God to focusing a lot of glory on its pastor?

I do not mean to be overly negative towards megachurches. Again, I re-found my faith at one. I know there is much they do well that we could emulate. But I just wonder if we should be wrestling more with how Jesus seemed to be surrounded by the poor, the sick, the sinners, by blue collar fishermen and unpopular tax collectors, and how megachurches seem to be filled with the healthy, wealthy, and beautiful. I wonder if we should wrestle anew with the fact that as important as evangelism is, we must make sure we are drawing people by the methods of Christ, and not drawing by the methods of the world. And maybe one way to do that is to draw people not by their desire to be among the hip and the cool, but drawing people by the message lived out among us that the elderly, the average Joe, the awkward middle schooler, the chatty Kathy, these are the very people whom Christ calls his beloved children, and even they have gifts and talents that we want to highlight and uplift in this diverse body of Christ. I wonder if it just doesn’t signal a different kingdom ethic to let ordinary people, with just a little bit of stage fright and lack of confidence in their reading ability, still go up and get a chance to read the gospel reading one Sunday. I wonder if it just doesn’t signal a different kingdom ethic to feature a musical performance from a trumpet student who is not fully polished in their ability. I wonder if that just doesn’t seem a little more real, a little more authentic to worship, and a little less manicured. And I wonder if that signals better that church is a place for ordinary people with ordinary struggles, people like me and you.

Finally, I wonder how these megachurches might look 50 years from now when all those in their 20s to 40s are now in their 70s to 90s. Will they still feel a sense of welcome and home in these churches? Or will they feel pushed to the side in preference of the next generation? Or perhaps they will themselves harden around preferences of the millennial generation and just eventually become that old church that doesn’t accommodate to the new generations, just like those baby boomer and silent generation churches today that they currently despise? Or will we find a way to be an intergenerational church, a church that is home for all, young and old alike?