Churching Gen X

So I'm putting lots of thought into this notion that perhaps there is a vast group of people who are not being served by the church. I'm looking at all religious organizations not just Christians. Since it's hard to count all the little special snowflakes that make up the "Pagan" community, it's hard to tell if we too are waning  However it is obvious that the christian church is. When we look at it, one thing that comes up is that the boomer generation is still served, to some degree by the churches of their parents as they have reformulated it. After that the numbers drop off dramatically. So what is it that the Gen Xers need that they do not get? What of the existing spiritual practices are not serving them and what would? If you look at the Gen Xers, they have often been screwed over by institutions so there is a lack of trust in institutional religion. They are not into doing things as their parents did just because their parents did it that way. In fact, that seems to be one way to get them to reject most anything. Perhaps we have learned far more from our parents than they think we did.

This is not to say that we as a generation do not see the need for ritual but it must be meaningful. It must be meaningful to us. I suspect that our generation is less into having someone between us and God. Yes I think that there can be a leader of ritual, one who is there to give spiritual guidance and say many of the words of ritual.  But perhaps they need not be a class apart, a job unto itself. Perhaps we will find that "church" happens spontaneously when needed rather than same bat time, same bat channel every week. Perhaps there will be a regular schedule so that those who have busy lives know they can come at particular time to get their spiritual community cup filled. May be that "church" happens with the work. I"m not sure how to bring GenX to church. Honestly, what I do know is that what is currently available is driving people away in droves. Not sure that we need an "opposite" to create an opposite effect. Interestingly a thought that occurs to me is that many people when asked say, "I don't have a problem with The Christ and His Teachings, I have a problem with Churches and how they do things."

So what is the issue? Perhaps an examination of that will give answers to how to Church GenX

Hmmmm. Community eh?

Well this is an interesting topic for me. Really in my experience the pagan community has a wide variety of broken units. Understandably so as they tend to be those who are not comfortably fitting into the nice boxes society provides for us. We are taught that we need no go between to communicate to the Gods and we can all be solitary practitioners. So what we have is a lot of special snowflakes and solitary practitioners. Creating a group of that is not an easy task nor is it frequent. For myself I find it useful to practice as the village wise woman. I keep to myself on the edge of the community, if i see things that need to be done I follow my partner's phrase, "someone needs to do something. Well I'm a someone." And I get to work. If someone needs me the Gods will bring them to me or me to them. I'm not out for my garter(s), just there should someone need something. The idea of purposely starting a group seems counter intuitive to me but likely I'll be doing that in the future as it is how my partner operates and as his partner I'll be in the thick of things.