I was raised a Mennonite, an old Reformation church rooted in certain European traditions. My parents, likewise, were both brought up in the Church, and eventually married and had their children in a community where the lines of kinship and family were not always easy to disentangle. I went to Church with cousins, second cousins, great-uncles and aunts, grandparents, and whole bunch of other people who had known me and my family for what seemed like forever.
Though obviously imperfect, it was still a beautiful world, rich with memories of summers at camp, Sunday mornings with children everywhere, crowded potlucks in the Church basement, weddings, anniversary celebrations and funerals. I can still almost hear the joy and sorrow in the voices of our elders as they sat around tables, telling stories in German and broken English of the old country and God’s provision. It is for me a lifelong sadness that my children will never know that world I was blessed enough to glimpse in its final hours, before changes in our society drew a veil upon them.
The story of how my family left our ancestral church for a larger megachurch, and the story of why I later became an Anglican, in many ways was carried along by the powerful currents in our society that have unsettled the character of family and congregational life alike. Our church was like one of 10,000 ethno-religious Christian communities that was slowly unraveled by the pressures and discontinuities that modern Western culture has exerted on the fundamental integration of faith and family that Christians had long take for granted.
These pressures include conflicting and divisive views of sexuality and family life, which have now destroyed more churches than we could possibly count. They also include high social mobility, increased cost of living, and an increasingly competitive landscape in which to raise children. I have known many families who have stopped attending church not because they lost their faith, but because their kids were in high-level competitive sports, dance, or music, and in order to keep up in those systems, something had to give.
The older church communities – the one in which I was raised for example – made it easier to imagine having children and raising a family. One could see the whole scope and shape of human life playing out in the multiple generations of the church; there were kids, teenagers, young adults and adults of every age. There were deep and informal networks of support between families; and there was a rich and broad community that could draw in a single family and help carry its burdens.
There were things to do, in short, which built up family life without exhausting or overextending it. But such church communities were not built to survive the modern pace of life and have been largely outcompeted by larger churches that can customize and professionalize programming for exhausted families, who no longer operate in the rich ecosystem of the “older church” world, and who now bear the burden of parenting in more isolated forms.
One of the main reasons millennials say that do not have kids, or do not want them, is not because of climate change or the general state of the world. It is because it is incredibly expensive, careers take longer to be established, and by the time people feel ready, they are older and more likely to experience fertility issues. (See “Millennials aren’t having kids. Here’s why” by Andrew Van Dam, The Washington Post, Nov. 3, 2023.) There is real concern among millennials that they will not be able to offer their children a decent life or one that can compare to their childhood. These may seem like fairly material explanations, but I do think they participate in a deeper sense of spiritual loss and malaise.
On some level, I think millennials are fearful of how little we have to offer the next generation. Though our childhood memories touch on a world that is now gone, they are also full of video games, movies, and the dawn of the internet. The traditions we might be able to pass on often feel contrived or desperate, plucked off the shelf, or à la carte. The richness of what we have lost cannot be recreated in a few years, or even a few generations, but it does at least explain why so many young families have turned to traditional churches in search of something more rooted and anchored, whatever that might mean.
In many ways, the world of the family is smaller today and more disconnected from organic and continuous communities that make family life joyful. Not long ago, a Nigerian mother said to me that she didn’t realize parenting was difficult until she came to Canada, and was removed from her deep networks of kinship and community that knit together elements in family life she didn’t even know required mending. Her comments reflect the larger reality that the proverbial “village” required to raise children has largely disappeared. Natalie Stechyson of CBC News has reported on this phenomenon.
In many of these older Christian communities, it was reasonably clear, if not always stated, what the expectations and hopes were for sexual and romantic coupling. But as the broader culture shifted, these norms became contested by many people in our communities on the grounds that they were exclusive and led to the shaming of people who did not abide by them. The pastoral tensions inherent in this conflict of values was understandable.
But the ensuing divisions have been devastating for the unity of Church communities, and they have also left behind a silence for young Christian people on what it means to live as sexual beings. In our reticence to speak definitively on the place of marriage, family and sex, we have left our young people to be catechized as sexual creatures by the broader culture, internet pornography, and the dysfunctional individualism of Western life.
If moral and spiritual divisions in our Christian communities have led to the fragmenting and dispersal of the “village,” then the vocation of churches in the coming years will be to rebuild in some sense what has been lost. Obviously this will look very different than it has in the past. The task of forming coherent and relationally close communities, in which the generations are not tied together by kinship or culture, presents certain kinds of challenges. But they are gospel challenges that derive from the heart of Christian teaching, the reality of Jesus Christ, in whom all nations and generations find their hope and salvation.
The serious problems that will be generated by declining birth rates are in some ways difficult to place theologically. Though the effects on our taxes base and social programming will be profound, I am not sure this should be a primary factor in the church’s teaching on family formation. At the heart of our vocation is the calling to form communities in which the gift of life is received, nurtured, celebrated, and surrendered within the all-embracing grace of God, whose loves spans and holds together the generations of his people. Though these generations will ebb and flow with time, our calling is to build, nurture, and shepherd this body, amid the powers that seek to plunder, divide, and destroy.
Though I cannot prove it, I think more people would have children if they knew their kids would have a vibrant and stable community in which to grow up. It is often the intangible and informal elements of church life that lend a certain magic to childhood and family life: elders who smile when they see children running through the halls, Sunday school teachers who marvel at how fast the kids are growing up, mediocre Christmas pageants, stairwells for playing hide and seek, baptisms in which the baby never stopped crying, unusual people we never really understood but loved anyway. And underneath these and countless other experiences in the body of Christ are the everlasting arms of God that hold together the fragile and fleeting reality of human life.
The Rev. Dr. Dane Neufeld is the incumbent of St. James, Calgary.