Student ministry is known for wild and crazy antics, but student leaders deal with a lot more than errant dodgeballs or wondering how many pancakes a kid can eat on a retreat before he gets sick. By the way, the answer to that one is 23 – and I know that because I watched it happen.

Most Elders have self-identified as someone who believes that giving their time and talents to their local church something they're called to do. Most elders bring various skills and knowledge from their workplaces to create a well-rounded team. And most elders enjoy seeing people get to know Jesus and watching their church grow.

Mission Drift is what happens when your church slowly moves away from where it's called by God to go. And we call it a mission drift because, typically, it happens very slowly. So slowly that often you don't even notice.

It's not a sprint away from your Mission; it's a slow, unnoticeable, sometimes undetectable, drift.

I met with a church a few years back, and I asked them many of the same questions I presented in my previous post. I was sitting a team of leaders putting different church areas into a “Mission” or “Method” category. When I came to Sunday School, their answer was clear. They believed their Sunday School was a Mission in their church, not a method. 

As I often do in these moments, I asked them to explain…

In almost every church I visit, people ask me this question:

“Mike, why aren’t young people committed to the church anymore? They seem to have forgotten about loyalty!”

Why don’t Millennials stick around at the churches they grew up in? Why aren’t they coming back to their ‘home church?'“

Where I live (in the Kitchener Waterloo area), Nones made-up 24% of the region in 2011 (and I would expect that number to be much higher today). Nationally the number of Nones has grown exponentially over the past 40 years from 4% of our population to about 24% as of 2011. As church leaders we can't ignore this - so the topic of Nones has quickly risen among church leaders in all denominations. Questions like ‘What do we need to know’ and ‘what do we do next’ are being asked.