Every Lutheran congregation I've belonged to (including a couple next door to universities) was family-focused. Unmarried young people were invisible. Basically none of the non-worship activities were relevant to college age singles.
Perhaps my experience is unusual, but I tend to doubt it.
Are they family focused because there is some scriptural foundation that requires it, or is it just inertia? Is there any reason why congregations should be family-focused to the extent that unmarried young people (and unmarried middle-aged people and widows and widowers) should be excluded? Is it a positive thing that congregations should be so unwelcoming to single people? Perhaps that's why so few of the adults who are (for all practical intents and purposes) chased away from our congregations when they become adults, and when they do finally marry and start families, they return to churches other than Lutheran churches.
Want to know the best way to chase away an entire generation? Make the congregations unwelcoming to single adults, so that they stop attending when they leave their parents' homes. Enough of them will eventually marry people of other faith traditions, and when the time comes to return to church with their kids (since clearly, having children is a requirement for full participation membership), there's a good chance they'll go to a church of the other spouse's faith tradition, or they'll compromise on a church of neither of their faith traditions.
When I married my then Roman Catholic wife, we came very close to compromising on becoming Episcopalians, as we both saw that as the middle ground between Lutheran and Roman Catholic. And please, we don't need any nitpicking corrections about that compromise. For one thing, we didn't do it. For another, whether that perception is accurate or not, a great many Lutheran and Roman Catholic pewsitters perceive it as being accurate, and that perception is what drives choices.
We ended up raising our daughter Lutheran, but my wife didn't officially convert until after we had been married over 20 years, several years after I became a Lay Worship Leader.
