On Religion: How A Baby Boomer Priest Helped Millennials Grow Deeper In Their Faith
(ANALYSIS) As a Pittsburgh Pirates fan, Father Stephen Noll felt a sense of loss when he learned he would need a smartphone app to attend baseball games.
Noll calls himself a “digital dinosaur, perhaps from the Jurassic period.”
What he didn't expect, after 50 years of priesthood, was for this digital divide to affect his ministry.
“I am fundamentally app-horrent,” he wrote in “Millennial People, Boomer Priest,” a book of lessons from his year as a young parish's interim pastor. The big problem was staying in contact with members of Redeemer Anglican Church, in north Pittsburgh.
It was even harder to reach potential converts who kept walking through the doors.
“Caving to the need to reach my Millennial parishioners,” he wrote, “I learned to text with the help of the voice input mic, which is a good thing since it seems no one answers voice messages — or even answers the phone at all!”
Noll was 74 when he became interim pastor on May 1, 2021, after the traumas — in pews and pulpits — of the coronavirus pandemic. He decided that many young adults were wrestling with anxiety, loneliness and other painful realities that were both modern and ancient.
According to the 2022 American Religious Benchmark Survey, many people stopped attending worship during the pandemic. Surveys before 2020 found that 25% of Americans never attended services. It was 33% in 2022.
But something else was happening during those years. Surveys found that 19% of Americans changed from one religious affiliation to another, including 6% of those who were religiously unaffiliated before COVID-19.
Noll said some of the young adults in his pews were asking hard questions about the brokenness around them, including in their own lives and the homes in which they were raised. Others were fervent, conservative believers who were homeschooled as children. Some had attended "classical" schools and explicitly Christian colleges that stressed centuries of doctrine, history, philosophy and the arts.
Charged with discovering if his fledgling flock could become an independent parish, he asked newcomers if they had considered local evangelical churches. Most told him: “No, we want to become Anglicans.”
Noll discovered that many of these young adults had, one way or the other, been exposed to liturgical worship, traditional prayers and sacraments.
“They liked what they had seen and heard. They wanted more,” he said, reached by telephone. “Some more than others, perhaps. A few did leave. Maybe they felt that things were getting too formal, too ‘Catholic’ or whatever. But most of them wanted to keep going deeper.”
These young believers were not interested in ongoing divisions between Anglicans in the Global South and progressives in the Church of England, the U.S. Episcopal Church and elsewhere.
The Episcopal Church had 3.4 million members early in the 1960s, but only 1.58 million in 2022. Noll is part of the small, alternative Anglican Church in North America, which — between 2020 and 2022 — grew from 124,999 members to 128,114.
Truth is, the newcomers in Noll's parish were not interested in wars between "Anglicans" and "Episcopalians."
“I don't think most of these young people even know what an Episcopalian IS these days. That's probably more of a problem for those of us who left the Episcopal Church,” said Noll, an evangelical who for years taught at an Episcopalian seminary that recently changed its name to Trinity Anglican Seminary.
The question, he said, is whether young people will join America’s most rapidly growing faith group — nondenominational evangelicalism — worshipping in churches with no ties to formal traditions or ecclesiastical bodies.
Facing that reality, Noll advised liturgical church leaders to “stress the basics” in terms of the doctrines, prayers and rites of their traditions.
Some liturgical congregations are growing, right now, while others are declining. The question is who will find ways to teach traditional faith to the converts who truly want to hear it.
“Most of our congregations are using the Prayer Book liturgy,” said Noll. "They may have stopped using the Book of Common Prayer in pews — they may project it up on a screen. But, nevertheless, there is a sense that this is our identity marker, all the way from the Anglo-Catholics to our more charismatic and free-form churches.”
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Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.