There’s no denying it: fewer people are attending church on a regular basis, especially among older Gen Zers who are now in their mid-20s. While many congregations within the United Methodist Church are faced with declining attendance numbers amid theological turmoil, one Tennessee church is hoping to buck that trend by meeting with people in unconventional spaces.
Bearden UMC in Knoxville has expanded its ministry into new territory, with a men’s ministry at Topgolf, and plans for a monthly meeting at a local brewery.
Although Bearden UMC still meets at church on Sundays, the Rev. Bradley Hyde told The Christian Post the church has branched out to develop relationships and meet the needs of the community in the hopes of stemming a sharp decline in attendance.
“I know that when people would move into a community years ago, they would look for a church, and when people who may not have been churchgoers would move into a community, they would meet people who went to a church, and they would find the church and they would go to a church, and that’s just not the culture anymore,” Hyde said in a phone interview on Thursday.
He pointed to a general narrative among “some media venues” and in popular culture where people have simply “developed a bad taste for church.” “Just because we sit here doesn’t mean people are going to show up,” he added. “People just don’t do that anymore.”
With over two decades in ministry and a role on the UMC’s Holston Conference, Hyde said the unconventional outreach ideas came during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, as he read about “getting outside the walls of the church.”
Hyde said he worked with a number of young adults in their 20s and 30s who were “already just leaving the church and didn’t really want to come to ‘organized religion.’” “I can’t tell you how many times I heard that,” he added.
As the pandemic slowly subsided, he began taking one-on-one meetings with people in restaurants, coffee shops, and, yes, breweries, which started Hyde thinking about doing ministry differently.
It wasn’t until he moved to Bearden in March 2022 and heard from members of the church that his plans began to take shape. “I decided once I got here, after doing a lot of listening to this congregation the first few months, OK, we’re going to jump in, we’re going to do things differently,” he said.
After conducting a number of focus groups with his parishioners, the need for better community outreach was clear. In response, Bearden launched a number of new initiatives, including collecting unsold produce from local vendors and give them away at the church. But it would be the men’s ministry meeting at Topgolf and a meeting at Knoxville’s Albright Grove Brewing Co. that really had people talking. (SOURCE)
