Millenials and Worship

Nice article further building the case that a vibrant, traditional form of worship is appealing to young people nowadays.

HT to Kelly Klages

Faith: New Generation Is Looking Back

by Uwe Siemon-Netto

WASHINGTON, April 18 (UPI) -- A new generation of worshipers is confounding pastors and church musicians alike.

No sooner had they got used to sometimes nerve-wrecking new forms of worship smacking of trivial entertainment, than a youthful thirst for tradition seems to be the liturgical aroma of the day.

Meet the Millennials who are succeeding the Baby Boomers and the GenExers. The Millennials are young people born between 1981 and 2000.

"They are called that way because they will presumably live most of their lives in the new millennium," explained Robert Olsavicky, an organist and graduate student at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. Olsavicky has become a specialist of the roller-coaster changes in worship preferences, changes that parallel developments in society at large. According to Olsavicky, today's young Christians often desire the exact opposite of what the Rev. Rick Warren, a Californian church growth promoter, preaches. Warren shouts at fellow pastors, "Why are you still using that pipe organ people hate?"

"What is happening in the religion of teenagers is nothing short of astounding," wrote Robert Webber in the current issue of Reformed Worship, a theological journal. "They want to return to a more stable time, a period of tradition. Not the tradition of the fifties, but of a much earlier time, the tradition of the old, very old times." Webber is director of the Institute of Worship Studies at Northern Baptist Seminary in Lombard, Ill. He sees in the "tradition emerging among the Millennials, Generation X and some Boomers a tradition of classical Christianity filtered through the grid of postmodern, post-Christian, neo-pagan society."

Olsavicky, who is also the musical director of First United Methodist Church in Butler, Pa., concurred: "They are looking back to the Reformation era."

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