A few months ago, I ran into a young man that I had met several months earlier. We had interacted only a few times before. This time we were both traveling through the Denver airport. Thanks to social media, we discovered we were both waiting on flights in the same place.

We decided to grab a meal together. We sat in a restaurant with the bustle all around us, watching airplanes roll past the window, each of us ultimately headed somewhere different.

After we caught up, he asked me a question that I haven’t been able to shake. ‘Would you be willing to disciple me?’ he asked. Then he said, ‘I want to become the man that God is inviting me to be.’

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I wish I could tell you that was a one-off conversation. It was not.

In different places and in different words, I keep hearing the same request.

It is often quiet, sometimes awkward, and rarely packaged as a grand proposal. It feels more like a cry rising from the next generation. Will you walk with me? Will you help me grow up in Christ? Will you show me what obedience looks like in real life?

He was not asking for a better church experience. He was not asking for more content. He was not asking for Christianity to be reframed within his generation’s experience.

It was the opposite. He was asking for one-on-one formation. He was asking for someone to walk with him as he grows in Christ; not receiving Christian content, but learning a way of life.

Churches and missions sending organizations alike are asking the same question: How do we reach and then mobilize the next generation?

[destacate]Perhaps the question before the global church is not simply, ‘How do we reach young adults?’ but, ‘Are we willing to pursue them and walk with them towards becoming a disciple of Christ?[/destacate]Attendance patterns have shifted. Institutional trust is low. Many young adults keep the church at a careful distance, even while they still express spiritual curiosity.

The most common assumption is that we have an attraction problem. If we can be compelling enough, clear enough, strategic enough, excellent enough, then young people will come back.

But what if that is the wrong diagnosis? What if the deeper issue is not attraction, but discipleship?

If we misdiagnose the generational problem, we will spend the next decade improving experiences while losing disciple-makers.

I do not mean that as a slogan, and I do not mean it as a critique of every church. I mean it as a question worth asking with honesty, because the answer will shape the future of evangelism, leadership, church planting, and missionary sending.

And this is not only an American question. The United States may be one of the loudest laboratories for institutional decline, but the forces shaping young adults are increasingly global. Urbanization disrupts intergenerational life.

Digital technology reshapes attention and identity. Economic uncertainty delays adulthood. Mobility fractures local community. The details differ by region, but the formation challenge is shared.

Conversations like the one I had in the airport, are why I am increasingly convinced the problem does not lie inherently in rethinking tactics for reaching the next generation.

Perhaps the question before the global church is not simply, ‘How do we reach them?’ Perhaps it is, ‘Are we willing to pursue them and walk with them towards becoming a disciple of Christ?

The hunger beneath

When young adults drift from church, we often call it disinterest. Yet in many contexts, what looks like disinterest is actually discernment.

They are not necessarily rejecting Christianity. They are rejecting the thin, nominal Christianity that they have seen modeled.

[destacate]Young adults are not necessarily rejecting Christianity. They are rejecting the thin, nominal Christianity they have seen modeled[/destacate]They are tired of belonging without responsibility. Tired of belief that does not cost anything. Tired of inspiration that evaporates by Monday. Tired of communities that gather around preferences but struggle to speak about holiness, obedience, sacrifice, repentance, and mission.

In other words, we have tried to solve with production what can only be solved with apprenticeship.

This is why certain simple ministries are quietly bearing fruit. Not because they have mastered youth culture, but because they take young adults seriously.

They open Scripture. They pray. They confess sin. They share life. They call people to follow Jesus, not merely to attend events.

It is not flashy. It is not complicated. It is discipleship.

Adolescence without apprenticeship

For most of human history, communities guided the transition from childhood to adulthood through responsibility and apprenticeship.

A young person did not become mature by waiting. They became mature by being trusted, trained, corrected, and sent.

Modern life has weakened many of those pathways. In much of the world, young adulthood stretches longer than it used to.

The expectations of maturity are delayed. The structures that once carried intergenerational wisdom are thinner. In some settings, the church has mirrored this pattern. We segment by age.

We professionalize ministry. We replace apprenticeship with programming. Then we act surprised when maturity is slow.

The result is not always rebellion. Often it is drift. Many young adults want mentors but have no clear way to find them.

They want to contribute but are rarely entrusted with meaningful responsibility. They want to grow but do not know what the next step is supposed to be.

[destacate]We professionalize ministry and replace apprenticeship with programming. Then we act surprised when maturity is slow.[/destacate]In that environment, attraction becomes the strategy because formation feels difficult or at best, slow. But attraction does not produce resilience. It produces attendance.

Why press this point now? Because young adults are telling us, directly and indirectly, that they are hungry for what is real.

They are surrounded by information and starving for wisdom. They are digitally connected and relationally isolated. They are anxious about the world and uncertain about their place in it.

Many want purpose, but do not know what is worth giving their lives to.

And they can sense when the church is offering them religious content instead of a way of life.

This is why the opportunity before us looks less like attracting young people to church and more like forming them into disciples.

Their longings are not problems to solve with tactics. They are invitations to build communities of apprenticeship, mentorship, and mission.

Discipleship is not the church’s ‘next-generation strategy’. It is the church’s core work.

What could the next decade look like?

Imagine what might happen if churches treated discipleship as the organizing center again.

Imagine congregations where teenagers and young adults are not primarily consumers of events, but apprentices in a way of life. Where older believers know younger believers by name, not as a ‘demographic’, and where younger believers are trusted with real responsibility before they feel fully ready.

[destacate]The question is not whether this generation is reachable. It is whether we are willing to do the slow, costly, life-giving work of making disciples [/destacate]Where Scripture is opened in kitchens & workplaces, and not only from a platform. Where mission is not a trip a few people take, but a posture a whole church learns.

That kind of church will not be built quickly, and it will not be built by charisma alone. It will be built by the ordinary long-faithfulness of its people, practiced over time, across generations.

The work before us

The future of the church will not be secured by bright lights, and preachers that have the ability to hold our attention. It will be secured by faithful formation.

If we return to the work we were given from the beginning, we may find that many young adults are not waiting to be entertained. They are ready to be discipled.

And if they become disciples, they will not only remain in the church but, by God’s grace, they will also become disciple-makers, church planters, and missionaries who carry the gospel to the very last tribe and the very last tongue.

The question is not whether this generation is reachable. The question is whether we are willing to do the slow, costly, life-giving work of making disciples.

Billy McMahan is the Southwest Mobilizer with Africa Inland Mission and also serves as the President of the Great Commission Research Network. 

This article originally appeared in the July 2026 issue of the Lausanne Global Analysis and is published here with permission. To receive this free publication from the Lausanne Movement, subscribe online at www.lausanne.org/analysis.

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