Imagine a typical Sunday morning in the house of four single, unrelated roommates in their 20s. All four grew up in Christian homes, attending church every Sunday with their families. All four graduated from college and have respectable jobs that keep them busy 45-50 hours per week, Monday through Friday. On this morning, the four find themselves doing quite different things. Dizzied and stumbling around, one of them wakes up and begins to nurse a hangover after a night of binge partying. Another leaves to go to his second job, in retail, because his 9-to-5 isn’t quite enough for him to pay off his college debt and pay the rent. The third begins thumbing on an Xbox controller, zoning into a virtual world. The fourth – only the fourth – gets dressed and leaves to go to church. Almost everyone in ministry will agree that there’s something wrong with this picture.

This troubling vignette illustrates a problem that churches have been trying to reverse for decades. LifeWay Research found that of Christians between the ages of 23 and 30, 70 percent “drop out” of going to church for at least a year between the ages of 18-22. A sizable number spend more than a year away. Common reasons for the temporary, if not permanent, departure from the Church include lifestyle changes and frequent moving; pastoral disdain or disagreement; and political, ideological and theological disagreement with church positions.

Justin Anderson, lead pastor at Praxis Church in Tempe, Ariz., makes a startlingly sharp claim: “Overall, the Church is declining and my guess would be that the decline crosses age groups.” Anderson says that most churches have failed to provide the relevancy in the Gospel to keep people, regardless of age, connected to it. But an emphasis on people in their 20s exists at Praxis Church. It’s a church plant of the rapidly growing Acts 29 Network, a group of churches that puts 20-somethings at the crux of their evangelism because they’re the toughest group to reach, says Jonathan Herron, lead pastor at Catalyst Church in Kent, Ohio. Herron and other Acts 29 pastors figure if they can reach this group, they can reach anyone – which leads to a logical conclusion that the 20-somethings are the toughest to reel in. ...