Hey Millennials, Got Religion?

When the Revered DeForest Soaries attends gatherings of his fellow leaders in the Black Church, he often finds himself the youngest man in the room. Soaries, the senior pastor at First Baptist Church of Lincoln Gardens in Somerset, New Jersey, is 62-years-old. The graying of the church leadership (both among the professional clergy and laypeople) started to really concern him a few years ago, he tells me, when he learned that “the youth director for the National Baptist Convention was 80-years-old.”

To address the problem, he decided a few years ago to fire his wife. Donna Soaries was the head of the annual women’s retreat ministry at Lincoln Gardens. Attendance at the retreat often tops one thousand people, which is why organizing it takes up much of the year and why being in charge of it is considered a great honor and responsibility in the congregation. But Pastor Soaries tells me that his wife had been in the role for 16 years, and many of her friends had been serving on the committee for a similar length of time.