Why do so many young people leave the Church in America? People who research such things say 70% and more of 18 year olds who grow up in church, stop going. Some of them will come back later when they get married and/or have kids; some of them never do.
Why?
Do young people find church boring? If so, is that a church problem or a young person problem? Maybe it’s both.
Is the problem found in the opposite direction–do youth groups focus too much on entertainment and too little on substance?
Is the problem too many broken homes, resulting in (among other things) kids bouncing back and forth and not developing strong roots in a single church?
Are churches so desperate to fill slots in youth Sunday School classes that they are using incompetent workers? Does the word “incompetent” sound harsh? Maybe it is. You know what definitely sounds harsh? A 70% dropout rate.
Is the problem that church/Christianity just seems irrelevant to too many 18-year-olds who grew up there? Is this an explanation, or a simple restatement of my original question? Should I stop making this more complicated than it is and just get back to my point?
Do too many churches fail to equip young people for this world that we live in? Is this because there are too many church staff members who are isolated from the “real world?”
Have too many church lay people expected the church staff to do all the work instead of living like “a priesthood of believers?”
Do too many youth simply live for the satisfaction of their own pleasures?
Maybe instead of looking everywhere else, I need to focus more on what I can do. (Of course, in fairness to me–and I definitely want to be fair to me–maybe writing a blog like this one is an example of me doing something.)
There are lots of possibilities, but what are we going to do about it?
Thom S. Rainer and Sam S. Rainer in their book Essential Church? say that the church needs to do more to encourage a personal, spiritual relationship. Young people (and everybody else) need to focus on individual prayer and Bible reading, as opposed to simply relying on corporate worship for their encounters with God.
PleaseConvinceMe.com recently suggested that churches need to stop teaching youth and start training them. The argument was that the church treats discipleship of youth (and everybody else) like it’s a school class with no tests. How hard would you study your notes if you knew you would never be tested over the material? What if instead, suggests the PCM blogger, our young people were trained like boxers? What if we told them, “You’re going to go out in the world and get hit, now what are you going to do when that happens?” What if, the blogger went on, the church actually scheduled some events? He took his young people to interact with atheists and Mormons.
I think we’ve got some recipes for success here.
But what do you think, dear reader? What’s the root of the problem? What’s the solution?
Well, I think if Protestants sent their kids out to serve as missionaries like the mormons do, our churches would be growing too, and our young people’s faith would be stronger for it. Wouldn’t that be something!