You may question what it is about Christianity that puts off people today.
I'm not religious, but not necessarily an enemy of religion. On the contrary, I'm happy to be supportive of religious movements if I feel their hearts are in the right place and in harmony with human rights. Just today I was more than happy to give a donation to the Salvation Army because I know they'll do the right thing with the money.
A couple of years ago some polls conducted here in the UK on religion amongst the youth came back with some interesting results. I was working for a news agency at the time so had to spend time editing the sound bytes for it from vacuously expressioned spotty teens.
A big turn off for them was that they perceived many churches being hate-factories. A depiction is drawn of rows of old angry people hating against homosexuality, hating against women or hating against alcohol and popular music. The religious are seen as rulebook ticking soured self-deprivators without joy or spontaneity. The highlight of their week is watching "Antiques road-show" or meeting a bunch of alzheimer grannies for a dusty coffee morning.
Now even I know this is an unfair view. I was Christian myself for 20 years and my time spent in church wasn't like that at all.
The thing is though, I can see how they have developed that image. In the UK especially the religious population has an average age of 58 and youngsters always have problems relating to their elders. The main reason though is news media. Whenever religion is on the news, it's because of some atrocity in the Muslim world, some Christian nutter with a Gun or controversial campaigns against gay rights or abortion. There's never any good news about religion getting widely circulated.
News media is like that though, it poisons as well as informs. It convinces you that every foodstuff will give you a heart attack, any activity will increase the risk of cancer, that every politician is a crook and that paedophiles lurk on every street corner.
When you're not religious, you no longer differentiate automatically between separate faiths. Even my girlfriend's youngest sister recently said "Christians, Muslims, they're all the same!" They see one religion behave badly, they see all religions behave badly. All are tarred with the same brush.
Even I laugh heartily at the infighting between Christian denominations.
So the newsmedia image of religion being imprinted from the world on young minds is: fighting, in-fighting, protesting, arguing, disagreeing, divisive, sectarian, violent, jihad, crusade, purification, indoctrination, dogmatic, campaigning, overturning, banning, blocking, hating, betraying of trust and antiquated.
What 15 year old without knowledge of religion wants to knowingly associate with a list like that?
You have your work cut out for you certainly. Most churches these days seem to strategically focus on keeping the members they have rather than plying for new ones.
You need to focus on two fronts.
One is the positive knowledge front, which seeks to remind people of the good religion does, and the positive effect it can have on a person or family. This is to help counter an otherwise constantly negative flow of information. Do not put down other faiths to aggrandise your own because to an outsider, that looks foolish. Don't try to use controversial measures like sexual or gender inequality to attract attention because quite frankly, all you'll attract is misogynists and bigots. It's hard enough not seeing religion as being that already without making it worse. Stay out of politics, focus on caring for all and on love.
The other is relevance. You need to remind or reassure people that your message matters. Some questions are timeless but what have you got to offer to the ipod generation? What's going to be better or right as a result of joining you? Most religions sell themselves on the line of purpose - that they can answer the question of "what's life all about?" It's not bad but it's a saturated market. Besides, not everyone gets too metaphysical, especially in an age of scientific megawonders dazzling from all quarters. What can religion give that's unique and precious to the individual?
I personally say if your denomination hasn't already, it must move with the times. Equality is here to stay, abortion is here to stay, civil rights and liberal freedoms are all here to stay. There's no fighting against secularism, all it does is result in what you've observed - driving youngsters further and further away from faith. If you resist the flow of the world for too long, you get left behind by it.