RelevantPew

Most people in my life know I’ve been working on a dissertation project for a while now that I’m pretty passionate about. This project came out of my love for youth ministry and how every year it is difficult to graduate a new group of students and wonder how they were going to do in the world. The more frustrated I got about the state of many mainline denominational churches the more passionate I got about wanting to help solve the problem. Hence “RelevantPew”. Basically this web resource will be a place for churches who are trying to reach the 20-something generation. It’s a site where they can log on and find out information about the 20-something culture, their beliefs, what makes them tick, what they are passionate about, what churches are reaching them, what resources might be helpful.

I’ve been in design and content phase for a while and the site should be ready to put content on sometime in May. What I would love to have is some of you who read this posts some comments about what you would like to see on the site. What would be helpful for churches to know and what you think would benefit them as they try to reach out to this generation.

The idea behind the name “RelevantPew” is relatively simple. After the Reformation many churches were hurting financially and started a practices of selling pews to families. It got to such a level in some churches that there was no place to sit unless you “owned” a pew. Across the United States there are 1,000′s of churches that now have the opposite problem. They are full of pews but have no one to sit in them. The goal of the site is how can an established church work to reach a generation who has been lost. I’m not advocating churches radically changing everything they do. Just that they would realize some change needs to happen in order to be relevant to this generation.