Church for Everyone
Building a Multi-Inclusive Community for Emerging Generations
Dan Kreiss and Efrem Smith
InterVarsity Press, 224 pages
Many of my pastor friends are concerned about their congregation’s aging populations. On Sunday mornings, they see once-young adults now middle-aged with children who may or may not attend the church. A handful of grandchildren run around on Easter and Christmas. But a huge population is missing from the church.
Other pastors want to help their churches move beyond monocultural membership to include the expanse of God’s kingdom. They want to bring in other populations, but those populations are either not present in their community or they do not know whether they will be welcomed. It’s clear that a huge population is missing from the church.
As I read Church for Everyone, I thought about my own church. Our congregation is ethnically diverse. But most of our attenders are commuters and, while we are known in the community for our local engagement, not many neighbors join us on Sunday for worship. We, too, are missing a population from our church.
There is a message of conviction, contemplation, and hope in Church for Everyone. Dan Kreiss and Efrem Smith compel us to wrestle with the question of who is missing from our congregation and why. For many, the answer is obvious but the solution isn’t. Enter Kreiss and Smith, not with platitudes, theory, or wishful thinking but with Scripture, lived experience, and a deep conviction that God desires his church (represented in local congregations) to mirror heaven. The authors remind us what that will look like: “After this, I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands”
(Revelation 7:9). Amen and hallelujah!
But a church that mirrors the kingdom doesn’t just involve different ethnicities. It also includes different ages, socioeconomic statuses, and political affiliations, among others. Kreiss and Smith are concerned about the emerging generations who are increasingly unchurched and disengaged from faith altogether. People born after 1980 represent about 23 percent of the national population, yet most churches do not see this number represented in the pews. According to Kreiss and Smith, that has to do with how this population perceives the church. Too many churches are not just monocultural but lack a serious (or any) commitment to justice and the lived experiences of people on the margins of our society. Younger people struggle to find meaning within institutions that fail to speak to their daily lives.
The goal, as Kreiss and Smith make clear, however, is not to cater to the whims of emerging generations or even to increase church growth (although that could be a byproduct). Rather, they remind us that the needs and urgings of emerging generations could be considered prophetic. Could it be that God is using emerging generations to call us back to our most faithful selves as a church community?
Because the authors are pastors with decades of experience, I am grateful for the examples they provide of churches who operate as multi-inclusive and reconciling communities. Some congregations were planted this way, and others got there through prayerful discernment and transformation. It’s hard work. But the authors remind us that it is possible! They write, “The miracle is that, despite human tendency to exclude, ultimately, God’s inclusive message as found in Scripture prevailed through millennia of oration, inscribing, translation, canonization, and interpretation.”
Of particular interest to me is the call to engage the brilliance and experience of Black theology, reconciliation praxis, and urban apologetics. The wider church could especially benefit from learning from those who have been doing the work of inclusion, reconciliation, and justice for decades. For those concerned about the lack of ethnic diversity in their local communities, Kreiss and Smith suggest prayerfully discerning the socioeconomic, educational, ideological, and political leaning of your congregation, and then determining who is missing and including them. The aim is deep, meaningful inclusion, not just different bodies behaving the same way.
Ministry is not easy, but this book provides hope. My church has work to do. But it’s God’s holy work for the betterment of the church and the emerging generations. It will make us better witnesses to the world. Most important, it’s for God’s kingdom and glory.
