If you go to a Sunday service at many Black churches, you won’t find a lot of young people there. Pew Research Center confirmed this generational gap, which has also attracted media attention. Congregations that once served as the political, social, and economic nerve centers of their neighborhoods face uncertain futures as millennial and Gen Z Christians opt for online services, seek membership in multiethnic churches, or ditch church altogether.
There are many reasons young people are stepping out of the pews. Some just don’t want to go to church or to be affiliated with one religion. Others think the Black church is not involved enough in contemporary political and cultural issues. And a subset of young Black Christians distrust spiritual leaders, feel that they don’t fit in at church, or have had upsetting experiences they often call church hurt.
Some of these sentiments echo in my own journey of walking away and coming back to the Black church about ten years ago, at 30. My relationship with the church changed when I understood the deeply personal reasons behind why I left, studied Scripture for myself, and transformed my understanding of the role God intended church to play in my life. I realized what we all eventually discover: There’s no perfect church or perfect Christians, just a perfect Savior worth following.
Whenever I meet anyone new, I do not enjoy answering the question “Where are you from?,” because the predominately white suburb where my parents chose to raise me is not what I would have picked for myself. My parents grew up in tight-knit segregated Black neighborhoods in the 1960s. When they had the opportunity to choose where to live in the mid-1980s, they moved to a northern Atlanta suburb that had a population of roughly 50,000 people.
The makeup of the town meant I was isolated from the Black history and institutions that were important touchpoints with my own culture and with the city of Atlanta—the only exception being a local Black church my family attended. When I was five, my mother reminds me, I asked her why the people at my school were white when the people at church were brown. I remember some kids asking me if they could touch my fade or if I was black all over my body. Others were overly eager to make “a Black friend,” which made me acutely aware that I was not like them.
Since my extended family lived elsewhere, our church became my version of the proud Black neighborhoods where my parents grew up. Church was the place I could see people who looked like me, and it was the center of my family’s social life. My father taught the high school Sunday school class for decades while my mother poured her heart into the children’s program and youth ministry.
My parents, particularly my dad, cast large shadows. It seemed every active member knew him and by extension knew I was his son. Growing up, I often felt as if fellow church members treated me like a carbon copy of my father, even though both of us were (and still are) very different from each other. We don’t share the same ministry gifts. But the constant comparison made me wonder if God wanted me to be a replica of him. Those feelings planted seeds of anger, hurt, insecurity, and spiritual doubt, all of which were then watered by legalistic attitudes within the congregation.
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This was the beginning of a complicated relationship with my church. On the one hand, it was the place where I met my childhood best friend, and I felt the Holy Spirit moving as our youth choir sang a rendition of Psalm 23. I loved and respected many of the members. On the other hand, it was also the place where, like many Christians in predominately white evangelical churches, I saw the excesses of the ’90s purity culture.
As a teen, I involuntarily joined a junior-high vow-of-purity program in which my peers and I were told we could risk going to hell for having premarital sex. A sin? Yes, but surely not one uniquely beyond the reach of God’s mercy. The well-intentioned but ultimately poor theology didn’t stop there: our teachers also told us we would face the eternally fiery furnace if we listened to secular music, especially if we did so on a Sunday.
Then there’s what didn’thappen. We didn’t have nuanced conversations about honoring God with our sexuality. My biggest takeaway from our church was that Christians shouldn’t talk, joke about, or even acknowledge our sexual desires. There was also little to no conversation about how to stay true to the biblical sexual ethic in a nation where many who oppose our views on sex align with us on racial-justice issues—and where those hesitant to address injustice call themselves Christians too.
Then there was the case of traditional marriage, which our church rightly promoted as a worthy aspiration. But at times, it felt as if we were championing the American dream (the spouse, the house, the kids) instead of preaching the whole counsel of God, which says not everyone is called to marriage or parenthood (1 Cor. 7:1–8). Moreover, even when Christians are called to this path, their journeys may not follow the formulaic fairy tale we were sold.
Over time, I struggled with how a church that seemed to paint every issue in black and white could be a relevant part of my life when the situations I encountered Monday to Saturday had many hues of gray. So I left.
When I went to college, I was still a Christian. But church was no longer where I rooted my social or spiritual life. I eventually found a group of friends (made up of fellow jaded Christians, agnostics, and “spiritual” people) who embraced candor and occasional irreverence and were not preoccupied with whether everything I said, did, or thought was a sin. I wanted a community that could handle my doubts about legalistic biblical interpretation and did not shy away from the fact that life is sometimes messy—even for the most dutiful Christians. My friends provided that, but my spiritual life petered out.
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Years after I ran away from church, however, God used another Black congregation in Harlem, New York, to shake me out of my spiritual slumber. He also pushed me to confront a hard truth: The root cause of my attitude toward the church was my own spiritual immaturity.
I visited the Harlem church with my then-girlfriend, now wife, after our yuppie peers suggested it was a fun place to go before brunch on Sundays. There, the doubt and criticism of church behaviors I encountered as a kid were welcomed, not rejected. The church pushed us to read the Bible cover-to-cover so we would know what was in it and what was not. At that point, I couldn’t have told you the general narrative of the Bible from Abraham to Jesus. I knew hymns but not the context of the Bible passages that inspired them.
The other church members and I did not always agree with each other—or our pastor—on theological interpretation. But we learned how to disagree with a Bible-centered perspective.
The accounts of Israel’s monarchs in the Old Testament showed me God doesn’t relate to every generation of a family the same way, so I did not have to feel guilty or insecure about having different gifts than my dad. I didn’t feel pressure to never miss a church service, which felt like an expectation growing up. The Harlem church’s training gave me a spiritual defensive mechanism against the subtle forms of legalism that bothered me as a kid and that, I believe, have led a chunk of young people to walk away.
But the fault isn’t with Black churches alone. Many young people, including me, left because we had a distorted view of our local congregations. We didn’t see Black churches as what God intended: a joint spiritual savings account that requires investment from every member. Instead, we saw them as tools we could use to withdraw support, prayers, love, and a weekly sermon about rules we had to follow.
Maturity in the faith requires taking ownership of our relationships with Christ and looking for opportunities to help others lean into that same fellowship, not expecting everyone (including churches) to cater to our every need. That doesn’t mean we won’t face pain. Other believers might continue to hurt us, and life will have messy seasons. But when our faith and hope are rooted in Christ—not in people or circumstances—we can better weather those storms.
Today, my wife and I are raising our kids in a racially diverse community in Atlanta. We go to a Black church, but we don’t rely on it to be the only place where our kids encounter people who look like them. My dad and I respect each other’s differences and allow each other the space to worship and serve in our own ways. Our churches are not perfect, and neither are we.
Black churches, like all other congregations, are made up of people, not walls. They are imperfect, but they are also one of the instruments God is using to renew the world. Millennials and Gen Zers should avoid squandering their proud legacy and choose to invest in them instead.
Michael Lyles II is an executive recruiter in Atlanta and a member of Elizabeth Baptist Church, where he teaches a children’s church class with his wife, Kristina. He has written for Our Daily Bread Publishing and is part of the volunteer answer team at GotQuestions.org.
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