OPINION (Newsweek) – Like everywhere else across America, the church I pastor in Southern California, Harvest Christian Fellowship, had to go exclusively to online services four weeks ago. Scrambling to respond to the abrupt change in circumstance, we were pleasantly surprised when on the first Sunday of quarantine we realized our online attendance exceeded 250,000.
But then it just continued to grow. Last week, we had over a million people tune in for church. These are people literally from all around the world, from every age and background, who are missing church. So, to the best of our ability, we are bringing church to them. What’s more, hundreds of thousands of them are people whom marketers would refer to as the “target demographic” between the ages of 18 and 34. Since the shutdown started, our millennial viewership is up 235 percent.
What exactly is going on here? For decades, the church has been trying, seemingly in vain, to reach America’s youngest generations—millennials and Generation Z—with the Gospel. All the while, we’ve seen headline after headline and poll after poll reminding us that church attendance has been falling, and rapidly. The fastest-growing religion in America is now the “nones,” those individuals who aren’t necessarily atheists. Maybe they’re loosely spiritual, but they profess faith in no specific religion or tradition. READ MORE
