Tuesday, April 30, 2013

10 reasons we lose our high school grads

Ten Reasons Kids Leave the Church

The numbers are shocking: about 70 percent of church-going youth stop going to church almost immediately upon leaving home after high school. Why?

The linked article offers 10 reasons:

  1. We are making the church too "relevant" and not teaching our young people the deep traditions and their meanings.
  2. "They got into church, but the church never got into them."
  3. We do not treat youth, especially older youth, as intellectually capable.
  4. We did not equip them for the moral and spiritual struggles of life with a strong Christian foundation.
  5. We give them "hand me down" religion.
  6. We offer them "community" but not much more - and they find other communities.
  7. We over-emphasize feelings and they look for other opportunities to feel good about themselves.
  8. They got tired of pretending, especially in front of their parents and church people, that because they "have Jesus," everything is fine in their lives.
  9. We make Christianity into rules to be followed rather than a calling and life to be lived.
  10. They just don't need the church any more because we present the church in a consumerist mode - and they stop being consumers. 
Read the whole thing.

Related:

A recent nationwide poll on religious identification noted that respondents citing “no religion” (The Nones) made up the only group that grew in every state, most numerous among the young: A whopping 22 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds claimed no religion, up from 11 percent in 1990. Worse yet: The study also found that 73 percent of Nones came from religious homes; 66 percent were described by the study as ‘de-converts.’

This gave me pause, because the mechanism was not holding. More precisely, the church I grew up in was not making disciples.


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