c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is an Episcopal priest in Winston-Salem, N.C, an author and a former Wall Street Journal reporter. E-mail him at journey(at)interpath.com.)

BOISE, Idaho _ Sitting in the home of an actual young American family in this city brimming with young people, learning about a new church focused on the young, I am intrigued how everyone suddenly seems to have discovered the youth market.

On election night, we heard both candidate Dole and victor Clinton voice special pleasure at what this election has meant for the young. Their comments sounded contrived, like a newly discovered sound bite. But it’s clear that both seem to have looked around their political rooms, seen a lot of gray hair, and discovered there is another world out there in which 20-somethings are charting new courses without much regard to the baby boom and World War Two generations ahead of them.

Corporate America is struggling to catch the youth wave, too. They still use sex to sell products, but for the 20-something audience, the bosoms are athletic and the message liberated. Nike, retrofitting the same assertive anger that sold $100 Air Jordans to poor young blacks, urges the hip young shoe-wearer to shout,”This is my planet. Hallelujah.” In the end, of course, a Lucky Strike is a Lucky Strike, no matter how many pouting 20-year-old Harley-owners are used to sell it. Marketers will always adapt to a new generation of customers. But what about churches?

On this trip West, I have been studying churches that are intentionally opening their doors to young adults, not as future paying customers to keep the old ways alive, but as constituents with their own needs and gifts.

Mainline churches have scanned their pews and seen gray hair. But adapting has been difficult. New clergy tend to be second-career men and women. The average age of parishioners in established churches is pushing 60, pastors tell me. After decades of fighting, prayer books and hymnals still reflect 1950s tastes, with a nod to the 60s and little awareness of the 90s.

I see congregations trying. They repaint their nurseries, add preschools and day schools, start singles ministries, experiment with new music and compete for young clergy. Some are succeeding. But singles ministries often end up serving divorced boomers, not young people in their 20s. Young pastors too often get assigned to helping boomers raise their teen-age children, rather than to bringing their younger friends into church leadership.

The obstacles are great. The”grayed”don’t let go easily, says an Episcopal pastor in Florida. Redeveloping an existing congregation means conflict, verging on trench warfare, as each opening of the door is greeted with fear, eviscerated in committee, and fought over.

An East Coast pastor says she was called to lead a traditional congregation into new ways, but”I feel like I’m pulling stumps instead.” Music is one battleground. If trying a new hymn evokes instant protest, then revamping a music ministry to meet the quite different musical tastes of a younger generation is almost beyond comprehension. Boomers still think campfire songs of the 1960s are contemporary music, a young pastor tells me. Try reggae rock, try Joan Osborne singing”What if God Was One of Us.”With synthesizers available, who wants pipe organs?”Gen X-ers”know about these church conflicts and want nothing to do with them, a pastor says. The bitter fights that denominations have gone through over modernity seem to have succeeded only in wearing out the older and convincing the younger that denominations aren’t safe.

Savvy church developers within mainline traditions don’t even mention denomination. One startup pastor I visited keeps his denomination’s prayer books in a closet, shuns centuries-old worship traditions, hired a rock musician for Sunday worship, and is successfully reaching the 70 percent of young people who, he says, are unchurched and will remain unchurched if church stays the same.

Many religious entrepreneurs step totally outside the world of denomination and hold”seekers”services with music, preaching and environments that appeal to the unchurched young. They invite boomers and beyond to join in, but they must leave outside their baggage from decades of denominational warfare.

As a 51-year-old, I find these new churches exciting and fresh. Folks, of course, are folks, and generation X-ers are just as fallible as boomers. But freedom from inherited baggage makes a surprising difference.

With no need to fight over memorial plaques, Rite One versus Rite Two, Latin versus English, wafers versus bread, Bach versus Osborne, blue walls versus green walls, it is possible to focus on faith.

MJP END EHRICH