Posted on 04/07/2013 7:22:38 PM PDT by hiho hiho
We all know them, the kids who were raised in church. They were stars of the youth group. They maybe even sang in the praise band or led worship. And then… they graduate from High School and they leave church. What happened?
It seems to happen so often that I wanted to do some digging; To talk to these kids and get some honest answers. I work in a major college town with a large number of 20-somethings. Nearly all of them were raised in very typical evangelical churches. Nearly all of them have left the church with no intention of returning. I spend a lot of time with them and it takes very little to get them to vent, and I’m happy to listen. So, after lots of hours spent in coffee shops and after buying a few lunches, here are the most common thoughts taken from dozens of conversations. I hope some of them make you angry. Not at the message, but at the failure of our pragmatic replacement of the gospel of the cross with an Americanized gospel of glory. This isn’t a negative “beat up on the church” post. I love the church, and I want to see American evangelicalism return to the gospel of repentance and faith in christ for the forgiveness of sins; not just as something on our “what we believe” page on our website, but as the core of what we preach from our pulpits to our children, our youth, and our adults.
The facts:
The statistics are jaw-droppingly horrific: 70% of youth stop attending church when they graduate from High School. Nearly a decade later, about half return to church.
Half.
Let that sink in.
There’s no easy way to say this: The American Evangelical church has lost, is losing, and will almost certainly continue to lose OUR YOUTH.
For all the talk of “our greatest resource”, “our treasure”, and the multi-million dollar Dave and Buster’s/Starbucks knockoffs we build and fill with black walls and wailing rock bands… the church has failed them.
Miserably.
The Top 10 Reasons We’re Losing our Youth:
10. The Church is “Relevant”:
You didn’t misread that, I didn’t say irrelevant, I said RELEVANT. We’ve taken a historic, 2,000 year old faith, dressed it in plaid and skinny jeans and tried to sell it as “cool” to our kids. It’s not cool. It’s not modern. What we’re packaging is a cheap knockoff of the world we’re called to evangelize.
As the quote says, “When the ship is in the ocean, everything’s fine. When the ocean gets into the ship, you’re in trouble.”
I’m not ranting about “worldliness” as some pietistic bogeyman, I’m talking about the fact that we yawn at a 5-minute biblical text, but almost trip over ourselves fawning over a minor celebrity or athlete who makes any vague reference to being a Christian.
We’re like a fawning wanna-be just hoping the world will think we’re cool too, you know, just like you guys!
Our kids meet the real world and our “look, we’re cool like you” posing is mocked. In our effort to be “like them” we’ve become less of who we actually are. The middle-aged pastor trying to look like his 20-something audience isn’t relevant. Dress him up in skinny jeans and hand him a latte, it doesn’t matter. It’s not relevant, It’s comically cliché. The minute you aim to be “authentic”, you’re no longer authentic!
9. They never attended church to begin with:
From a Noah’s Ark themed nursery, to jumbotron summer-campish kids church, to pizza parties and rock concerts, many evangelical youth have been coddled in a not-quite-church, but not-quite-world hothouse. They’ve never sat on a pew between a set of new parents with a fussy baby and a senior citizen on an oxygen tank. They don’t see the full timeline of the gospel for every season of life. Instead, we’ve dumbed down the message, pumped up the volume and act surprised when…
8. They get smart:
It’s not that our students “got smarter” when they left home, rather someone actually treated them as intelligent. Rather than dumbing down the message, the agnostics and atheists treat our youth as intelligent and challenge their intellect with “deep thoughts” of question and doubt. Many of these “doubts” have been answered, in great depth, over the centuries of our faith. However….
7. You sent them out unarmed:
Let’s just be honest, most of our churches are sending youth into the world embarrassingly ignorant of our faith. How could we not? We’ve jettisoned catechesis, sold them on “deeds not creeds” and encouraged them to start the quest to find “God’s plan for their life”. Yes, I know your church has a “What we believe” page, but is that actually being taught and reinforced from the pulpit? I’ve met evangelical church leaders (“Pastors”) who didn’t know the difference between justification and sanctification. I’ve met megachurch board members who didn’t understand the atonement. When we chose leaders based upon their ability to draw and lead rather than to accurately teach the faith? Well, we don’t teach the faith. Surprised? And instead of the orthodox, historic faith…..
6. You gave them hand-me-downs
You’ve tried your best to pass along the internal/subjective faith that you “feel”. You really, really, really want them to “feel” it too. But we’ve never been called to evangelize our feelings. You can’t hand down this type of subjective faith. With nothing solid to hang their faith upon, with no historic creed to tie them to centuries of history, without the physical elements of bread, wine, and water, their faith is in their subjective feelings, and when faced with other ways to “feel” uplifted at college, the church loses out to things with much greater appeal to our human nature. And they find it in…
5. Community
Have you noticed this word is *everywhere* in the church since the seeker-sensitive and church growth movements came onto the scene? (There’s a reason and a driving philosophy behind it which is outside of the scope of this blog.) When our kids leave home, they leave the manufactured community they’ve lived in for nearly their entire life. With their faith as something they “do” in community, they soon find that they can experience this “life change” and “life improvement” in “community” in many different contexts. Mix this with a subjective, pragmatic faith and the 100th pizza party at the local big-box church doesn’t compete against the easier, more naturally appealing choices in other “communities”. So, they left the church and….
4. They found better feelings:
Rather than an external, objective, historical faith, we’ve given our youth an internal, subjective faith. The evangelical church isn’t catechizing or teaching our kids the fundamentals of the faith, we’re simply encouraging them to “be nice” and “love Jesus”. When they leave home, they realize that they can be “spiritually fulfilled” and get the same subjective self-improvement principles (and warm-fuzzies) from the latest life-coach or from spending time with friends or volunteering at a shelter. And they can be truly authentic, and they jump at the chance because…
3. They got tired of pretending:
In the “best life now”, “Every day a Friday” world of evangelicals, there’s little room for depression, or struggle, or doubt. Turn that frown upside down, or move along. Kids who are fed a stead diet of sermons aimed at removing anything (or anyone) who doesn’t pragmatically serve “God’s great plan for your life” has forced them to smile and, as the old song encouraged them be “hap-hap-happy all the time”. Our kids are smart, often much smarter than we give them credit for. So they trumpet the message I hear a lot from these kids. “The church is full of hypocrites”. Why? Even though they have never been given the categories of law and gospel…
2. They know the truth:
They can’t do it. They know it. All that “be nice” moralism they’ve been taught? The bible has a word for it: Law. And that’s what we’ve fed them, undiluted, since we dropped them off at the Noah’s Ark playland: Do/Don’t Do. As they get older it becomes “Good Kids do/don’t” and as adults “Do this for a better life”. The gospel appears briefly as another “do” to “get saved.” But their diet is Law, and scripture tells us that the law condemns us. So that smiling, upbeat “Love God and Love People” vision statement? Yeah, you’ve just condemned the youth with it. Nice, huh? They either think that they’re “good people” since they don’t “do” any of the stuff their denomination teaches against (drink, smoke, dance, watch R rated movies), or they realize that they don’t meet Jesus own words of what is required. There’s no rest in this law, only a treadmill of works they know they aren’t able to meet. So, either way, they walk away from the church because…
1. They don’t need it:
Our kids are smart. They picked up on the message we unwittingly taught. If church is simply a place to learn life-application principals to achieve a better life in community… you don’t need a crucified Jesus for that. Why would they get up early on a Sunday and watch a cheap knockoff of the entertainment venue they went to the night before? The middle-aged pastor trying desperately to be “relevant” to them would be a comical cliché if the effect weren’t so devastating. As we jettisoned the gospel, our students are never hit with the full impact of the law, their sin before God, and their desperate need for the atoning work of Christ. Now THAT is relevant, THAT is authentic, and THAT is something the world cannot offer.
We’ve traded a historic, objective, faithful gospel based on God’s graciousness toward us for a modern, subjective, pragmatic gospel based upon achieving our goal by following life strategies. Rather than being faithful to the foolish simplicity of the gospel of the cross we’ve set our goal on being “successful” in growing crowds with this gospel of glory. This new gospel saves no one. Our kids can check all of these boxes with any manner of self-help, life-coach, or simply self-designed spiritualism… and they can do it more pragmatically successfully, and in more relevant community. They leave because given the choice, with the very message we’ve taught them, it’s the smarter choice.
Our kids leave because we have failed to deliver to them the faith “delivered once for all” to the church. I wish it wasn’t a given, but when I present law and gospel to these kids, the response is the same every time: “I’ve never heard that.” I’m not against entertaining our youth, or even jumbotrons, or pizza parties (though I probably am against middle aged guys trying to wear skinny jeans to be “relevant).. it’s just that the one thing, the MAIN thing we’ve been tasked with? We’re failing. We’ve failed God and we’ve failed our kids. Don’t let another kid walk out the door without being confronted with the full weight of the law, and the full freedom in the gospel.
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Importantly, like any “customer survey”, why they *say* they didn’t like “the product” may not necessarily be the real reason why they don’t like it.
I have what may be a good analogy, from a (good) US history teacher. In most high school history classes, the students have a complete disconnect with the subject matter, from before the American Revolution, until the class is near the end and talking about current events. Then finally they have something they can connect to, something they at least know something about, that relates to where we are now.
So he decided to do something different, with exactly the same content. He decided to teach his class beginning with current events and going backwards in time.
But even then, eventually there was a disconnect, at about the start of the US Civil War. So instead, to make connections to early US history, he used large subject blocks, like “the history of slavery in the US (from start to finish)”, and “the history of US transportation”, etc.
When children are first introduced to religion, they really have no clue to what it’s about. They don’t grasp the lifetime of abstracts, like religious art, music, history, and learning, the adults share.
They have a hard time grasping five years in the past, much less 5,000 or more. Likewise, the Middle East is an enigma to them. Typically it can take years of study to get a real grasp of what is going on here.
And “monkey see, monkey do” is an awful introduction to faith. “Pray because I say so.”
This is why church school arose in the first place, so that children would get some help figuring out what in the world is going on here?
And why in the world did the Bible end, since so much that matters has happened since then?
the media, culture, schools and government are against us... even a lot of “churches” are against us
the Bible says we will be a small oppressed minority in the end
Alright, it is almost bedtime around here. But now you are speaking much more with “plain talk,” pardon the use/abuse of your moniker, than before. I will try to give you in plain talk an explanation for why I asked what I asked.
The church, the “ekklesia,” that is, those who remain in the world but are “called out of” the world, for that is exactly what the word means, are identifiable in a certain real sense. While it is certainly true that the individuals who belong to Christ and thus to the “ekklesia” are finally known only to God, it is equally true that they, as individuals, continue to seek the presence of God in this world, in which they are confined until called home to heaven, in order to have His assurance regularly that they are His and that their home is in heaven. In other words, they seek Him in whom they trust in order that He might strengthen and sustain them in the faith once and for all given to the saints until they pass through death into life.
The question is, how does one find the presence of God and, thus, the “called out,” the ekklesia, the household of faith, the brethren, the saints, and all the other synonyms the Bible uses to describe this body of which Christ alone is the head? How one understands the Bible’s identification of where God is to be found in the here and now of this world, will largely determine where one will attach oneself denominationally. For some denominations answer this question better, that is, more scripturally, than others. Objectivity in this matter must come from God and His word and not from our feelings and inclinations, which are fallible.
At the same time there is another problem that besets all the denominations. They are all filled with fallen, sinful humans, whose weaknesses and sins can cloud and darken the objectivity of God’s clear and certain promises of forgiveness, life, and salvation for Jesus’ sake. So, you see, one starts with the doctrinal statements of the various denominations and then one has to put up with the failings of the individuals, clergy and lay, in those denominations. But in all things, one is always inclining his or her ear to hear the voice of the Good Shepherd in the preaching, teaching, and sacraments, which voice, He assures us, His sheep do indeed hear and follow. (John 10)
I am sorry if this is a little long. I am just trying to be careful.
There is but one church (ekklesia), one Lord, one faith etc. (Ephesians 4) But the devil, the world, and our own flesh (i.e., inclinations, weaknesses, etc.) have made what is simple so very much more difficult, even as Jesus and His apostles said would be the case.
So, in summary, when one laments those who “have left the church,” the question becomes what have they left? Did they leave that which was only a pale and weak shadow of the church or did they leave the place where Christ, the Good Shepherd, was to be heard speaking plainly and clearly the blessed Gospel of forgiveness and thus leading onward to heaven?
This is a question worth deep meditation on the part of all who would be called Christian, even all who feel the emptiness within that can be filled only by God.
That was the reason for why I asked what I asked.
Well, it is late. Time to shut down for the night.
7. You sent them out unarmed:
***Even the kids who stay in church are unarmed. They have as much of an idea of why they’re christian as the average muslim thinks of why they are muslim. Neither of them can explain their belief in a rational fashion to someone outside their faith. Eventually they end up trying to browbeat newcomers into their belief system rather than treating their questions with intelligent respect.
What turns me off from most churches is the judgmental holier-than-thou behavior of some people.
It’s firm confirmation that it’s not a true church.
There is another option which many will not want to hear is that they heard the Gospel and have rejected it. No one wants to think that of their kids. It must always be our fault. We think if only they could hear the Gospel like we di that they would react and believe. Maybe they reacted and rejected instead. When I first heard the Gospel I ran like heck. It took me 10 years to come back to it. Some it may take a lifetime and some never will.
It’s upsetting to think that the precious angels we put so much time and love into would reject us and reject the truth. It is the story of the ages. God does not have grandchildren only children.
If they never do accept and follow Christ when we are long gone and overjoyed in the Lord’s presence it is he that will hold the heartache of memories of the lost - we will no longer remember or mourn.
Mel
LOL. I am the mirror opposite. I wasn't raised in a believing home and never went to church growing up. Was curious and bought a bible to read. I realized this was the first unadulterated truth I had ever been exposed to in my life. I never looked back.
Actually God is moving in the church. Check out Pastor Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill church Seattle. 1000s of young unchurched in atheistic Seattle are showing up at church every week.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lmfn2VVvt8
My son was raised in church and he doesn’t care to attend church right now either, and he may not for a while- but I am not in the least concerned.
We pray together, (on occasion), he has been baptized by his own choice- and he lets me know that he has his faith still.. and you know what?
He belongs to God, not to me.
I actually believe every word in the Bible. God has got this one.
As a Mom, I plan to support his as he grows into adulthood. If he never goes to church again, that is his business.
The way the emergent/progressive church is taking over, God isn’t in church anymore - anyway.
Reason 0: You sent them to public school.
Most government schooled kids graduate and stop going to church, on the order of 80%.
Only about 10-15% of homeschooled graduates stop going to church when they leave home.
Want your kids to stay faithful? Keep them in church and at home while their faith is forming.
Sounds to me like he’s left the church, but remains in The Church.
Today’s generation is the most Scripturally ignorant and morally confused and lacking in conscience that America has ever birthed, yet until they reach the secular seminaries ( college), they are relatively open, but open to most anything, and someone will reach them (and is, atheism is growing fastest).
As for why they leave, although perhaps it is implicit in the accommodationist and “deeds not creeds” points, what should be #1 is the lack of strong anointed preaching that works by the Holy Spirit to convict sinners of their damned destitute condition, as law breakers in the eyes of an infinitely holy and perfectly just Almighty God.
And whose life will send them to Hell, not heaven, being utterly destitute of any merit that would gain their escape from their just and eternal punishment and gain them eternal life. And who thus must look toward God for the mercy which is in only found in the Christ, who “once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but resurrected alive by the Spirit (1Pt. 3:18).
And thus by abasing themselves and trusting the risen exalted Lord to save them on His expense and credit, they will find salvation, being washed, sanctified and justified. And which faith decision is shown in baptism, confessing the Lord Jesus in “body language” (not that baptism itself makes one born again) and then living it out.
I have often basically told souls after giving them a gospel tract (which opens the door for an explanation), “God looks at your life and says, “the things you did will send you to Hell,” but He looks at what His Son did and says, “what My Son did can gain you Heaven.”
But the work of an evangelists is not simply to tell them how to be saved, but to bring them to the place Isaiah was when He saw the Lord Jesus (it was: Jn. 12:34ff) high and lifted up in His glory, and thus cried, “Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.” (Isaiah 6:5)
And as he found,
“The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit. “ (Psalms 34:18)
This message should be preached everywhere, but the church service is usually most conducive for conversion, insomuch as the atmosphere is heavenly and the preaching exalts the Lord by the Spirit.
But lacking this preaching and subsequent regeneration, souls simply have religion at best, and most will fall away or will be inert.
However, this conversion must be followed by discipleship which teaches sacrificial commitment and surrender to and prayerful dependance upon the Lord, versus the world, flesh and devil, and which confronts, in meekness but boldness, the issues which challenge the basic faith once delivered to the saints. (Jude 1:3
> 11. Kids only went to church became Mom and Dad said so. Now that they are out of the house, they stop attending.
Until they settle down and grow up and understand why Mom and Dad went to church.
Well put. Sort of like “conservatives are former liberals that have been lied to, one too many times”...lol
Yesterday's sermon...
melsec, unfortunately, you are right on both counts. You raise issues no one wants to think about and that there are some who hear the gospel - perhaps many, many times - and reject it.
There is another hard truth that many don’t want to hear. Many churches in the U.S. (and I’m sure other places) have so corrupted the truth either to the left or to the right while trying to make it contemporary and understandable (i.e. trying to do the work of the Holy Spirit for Him) that they lose its meaning completely. In such cases there is only enough Christianity left to inoculate the young against Christianity. That is to say, young people spend time in a church that is either post-Christian or so pale a version of Christianity as to not be and walk away thinking they know what Christianity is while in fact they never did.
I would guess the majority return when they have children. I did.
But why don’t you believe?
I’ve enjoyed reading the posts from all 3 of you. I was somewhat like cc - raised in strict catholic discipline but when I was 13 yo my folks started requiring an additional hour on Sunday for family Bible reading out loud in a circle one by one. took me another 5 years to make my ‘peace’ with Jesus and another 33 still figuring out what it all means...
Got a scripture to back-up the one below, melsec? I’ve heard it plenty but never straight from the Word.
“If they never do accept and follow Christ when we are long gone and overjoyed in the Lord’s presence it is he that will hold the heartache of memories of the lost - we will no longer remember or mourn.”
I’m trying to hold fast to the one [paraphrased] ‘train them up in the fear and admonition of the Lord and they will not depart.’
I hope and pray for all - esp. my kids and other loved ones - but I see more reasons for doubt than unbridled joy - I think it’s mostly b/c of the current state of US cultures.
I do hope we’ll see every liberal begin repenting soon over the Sanctity of Life and of Marriage - rather than this sick embrace of abortion and sexual perversions.
Great post. I am going to get with the teens I work with at Church and get some feedback.
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