Reaching the Millennials: An Interview with Thom Rainer from Preaching Magazine, Vol. 27 No. 4

Preaching: You mentioned church starts. It seems that a lot of the best and brightest young ministers coming along are saying, “I’m not going to inherit the problems of a previous generation of churches. We’re starting fresh with new churches.”

Rainer: You’re absolutely right. I have one son of my three who is involved in a church plant. These millennials, these young adults, many of them are frustrated with church as usual, with local church actions, business and what they perceive as irrelevancy. So they’re starting churches.

Yet I would have a challenge for some millennials as well. Keep planting churches, have that attitude; but we’ve got about 400,000 established churches in the United States that we cannot give up on. I would say not only start churches, but prayerfully go into these churches to try to revolutionize them even if it takes a lifetime of ministry, because we’re not planting enough churches to sustain the fall off of the established churches. I hope we’ll see both groups rise up, more church planters and more church people as millennial leaders going to established churches to turn them around [CCS, underline added].