Waiting for our children to return

Thanks to everyone who was so supportive of our group at Diocesan Convention! It was marvelous to see so many of you engaged with these questions we've been asking for the last year, and I for one am eagerly looking forward to the results of our Community Conversations in the coming months.

A number of the participants at Diocesan Convention asked questions of our team through our question forms, and we'll be responding to those for the next few weeks. One of the comments we received noted the fact that we (the whole church, not just our diocese) keep waiting for our children to come back to church, hoping that once they have children of their own, they'll come back to church to give their children the grounding they themselves got. This has been part of what we've observed for decades in the church, that people come back when they have families.

This worked for a long time for us, and for all of the mainline churches. We find ourselves today, however, in a world where increasingly second and third generations are being raised outside the church; and folks who weren't in the church to begin can't come back to a place they never were to begin with. We've known as a denomination that we were not going to be able to grow as a church without reaching beyond our historic constituency for almost a decade (a study report from the Episcopal Church Center in 2004 confirmed as much), so we need to start looking beyond the usual suspects if we're going to turn our decline around. 

None of this is to say that we were doing it wrong before; in fact, what we were doing before was the exact right thing, and it worked brilliantly. The tricky thing is seeing when the circumstances change, and both realizing and acknowledging when the thing we've been doing no longer works. We seem to have come to that point now, or at least it looks like it to me. 

What do you think? 

-R.C.