By Sarah Stanley
Last week, Rachel Held Evans wrote an article discussing millennials leaving the church. This piece quickly went viral prompting responses from various commentators, debating “why those belonging to the millennial generation are leaving the church and what should be done about it.” Research fellow at Acton, Anthony Bradley, discusses Evans’ piece in “United Methodists Wearing A Millennial Evangelical Face.”
Jeff Schapiro, at the Christian Post, discusses this debate and summarizes several commentators’ opinions, including Bradley’s:
Anthony Bradley, associate professor of Theology and Ethics at The King’s College, states in a blog post that Evans’ article focuses on “a narrow subculture of conservative American evangelicals” and not the universal church. It does not address, for example, why millennials are leaving other groups, such as Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, mainline Protestant and broad evangelical churches.
Bradley, who spent more than 20 years in the United Methodist Church (UMC) before joining the Presbyterian Church in America, says everything millennials are looking for in Evans’ opinion could be found in mainline denominations like the UMC, yet even the UMC is “hemorrhaging.”
“The bottom line is that most American Christian denominations are declining across the board, especially among their millennial attendees, and it would require a fair amount of hubris to attempt to explain the decline across America’s 350,000 congregations,” wrote Bradley.
