Over the past 15 years there has been significant research into church attendance carried out by a number of organisations. Across the board the trend has been one of decline. Although this decline is across all age groups it is at it’s greatest amongst 15-35 year olds. It has been suggested that the least likely person to attend church is a 20-25 year old male.

In St. Michael's we are blessed in having a quite large group of teens and twenties attending each week. However, close to all of these people have grown up in church or have come to St Michael’s from other churches.

We, like most other UK churches are failing to reach this group. In York there are between 20,000 and 30,000 people within this ‘missing’ generation.

We can respond in one of two ways: we can continue the way we are and serve the few or we can try new things, new styles, and new contexts until we begin to reach these people. If the church has a future with this missing generation then we must engage with it in a fresh, culturally relevant, expression of our faith.

We are obviously faced with a difficulty, how can we continue to serve those who are already attending and reach those for whom church is obviously not working?

It appears that in St Michaels we are extremely well equipped to deal with this problem.We are used to new styles of worship, we are used to experimentation, we are used to releasing people to new services, we have done this in the past and we can do it again.It is from these brief thoughts I have outlined above that the vision forConversations was born.

• What if we stripped a service back to its essentials and rebuilt a fresh expression of those essentials?
• What if we worshipped God in new ways?
• What if we taught the Bible in new ways?
• What if we reached out to the world in new ways?
• What if we ministered to each other in new ways?

Maybe we could at least make a dent in the vast numbers of missing people.How will we do it?

Experiment, creativity, critical thinking and honestquestioning of what we do and why we do it. At this stage all we know is that we have to do something. We will start with what we trust the most, Jesus.

We will teach. We will have some musical worship and we will have some food together. This seems a good place to start.

We want Conversations to be a place where we can train up teenagers and young adults in ministries that will enrich the wider church, we want to disciple people in their gifts and give them opportunity to ‘try them out’.If you are interested in being involved then come along (6pm every Friday for an hour and a half) and introduce yourself.

We hope to share food together every week but it really depends on people bringing something along. Crisps, muffins, fruit, soup, bread...whatever really.

If you can’t come please pray for us, what we want to see happen is much bigger than we feel able to achieve.

For more information: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it (if you are on facebook pop by the conversations facebook group and say hi.)

"Our experience over the last few years has been that new services create opportunities for more people to be involved with ministry and when they target a particular group in our society they grow more effectively. ‘Conversations’ is another attempt to reach those outside the church in a relevant way. I think it’s a terrific vision which we’re right behind." Roger Simpson