When Young People Leave the ‘Church’

So young people are leaving the church: a disastrous omen for the future of Christianity.  We must do something.  Something different than what we have been doing.  Because the church is failing this generation. 

 

It is common to point to the pizza and games youth-group-without-accountability-or-education program as the culprit for the apostasy of college students.  Church should not be about entertainment, say the pious parents who with the next breath criticize the musicians on the praise team and complain that the worship style at their congregation doesn’t suit their tastes.  Perhaps we are not sheltering youth enough.  Maybe they need more authority figures, a connection with the whole church, including their parents. 

 

Some on the conservative side of the question point to the content of what we teach young people.  Survey after survey reveals that teens don’t know the basics of Christian theology, and certainly aren’t decision-making from a Christian worldview.  These kids have no foundation to abandon, Christian leaders rightly argue.  They’re hungry for answers.  And when we don’t equip them in the realm of apologetics, high school and college professors have little difficulty refuting the shallow traditional faith of their students. 

 

Maybe the church is too legalistic, parents and pastors suffocating kids with expectations of holiness, that ever-imposing scale of good deeds versus bad deeds on which to measure God’s favor and wrath.  When at last free of the oppressive constraints, these young adults bust out with a liberal longing for pleasure, enjoying an affirming group of friends that encourages them to stop stifling their own feelings.  So we the church ought to offer more grace, somehow imparting to the up-and-coming generations the relationship aspect of Christianity.  Like so many who have been in the church for decades, these teenagers just want to know that God is love, and He wants to be your friend, to give you your best life now. 

 

“These are the leaders of the future,” is quoted, by some with hope, by others with dark foreboding.  But our model of ministry leaves a wide gap between involvement in youth ministry and being incorporated with the rest of the congregation.  Smaller churches have no college ministry.  Even those with college ministries have merely moved the disconnect to a later date.  Those in the club of grown ups are unwilling to speak to or invest in the younger individuals – let alone take their advice – trying to move into life and faith that is overwhelming without examples.  There is truth to the protest that kids are irreverent and disrespectful and self-absorbed.  But listen to what we’re saying.  Those are the kids.  What toddler have you met who knows anything different than irreverence and selfishness?  Yet the older people attempt to train them, not fight them.  Church has failed to welcome the post-education demographic; can we be surprised they leave?

 

Yet maybe that is exactly what the young adults ought to do: leave.  An institution so divided and impotent as the evangelical church, so lacking in love or substance, is more likely to inspire bitter memories of religious hypocrisy and to shore up doubt in the power of a God mostly ignored in the actual workings of the organization.  I will say more: perhaps the adults should leave, and the young parents who feel they ought to raise their children in Sunday school should never come back.  Christians should take on the personal responsibility of living a communal faith in the Lord Jesus Christ: embracing grace as a gift both received and distributed; trust in the power and authority of the Creator God of the Resurrection; loving, serving, and discipling their fellow children of God; humbling themselves before the voice of God coming through Scripture, teachers, and youths; pursuing fellowship with God and with each other; and living out a life so different from the world that those exposed have no doubt that only the miracle of God could give such abundant life! 

 

And just maybe when we see such a symptom of desperate unwell in our churches, we should repent, falling on our faces before the Lord of Wisdom, desiring His healing and direction rather than the empty programs and various solutions proffered by man. 

To God be all glory,

Lisa of Longbourn

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Two Countries of the USA

Christians occasionally run up against the argument that religious wars recklessly took the lives of thousands of people.  Take the Crusades…  So of course Christianity is a religion of hate and violence, and it is hypocritical for purportedly teaching about loving one’s neighbor at the same time.  Guilt by association is a hard reputation to shed.  It is hard for me to have to defend myself over a crime for which I don’t feel guilty, especially when I don’t feel guilty because I wasn’t alive then.  I want to be loyal, but consistency and honesty are more important to me. 
 
Pro-life groups have the taint of extremists who bombed abortion clinics.  But I didn’t do that or condone that.  In fact, I cannot remember a bombing of a clinic in America since I turned 13 and started paying attention.  Is murdering millions of babies ok because one of the thousands of protestors was inexcusably destructive? 
 
Zionists have been shamed by a branch of extremists who wanted to use terror to further their cause.  In the case of Zionism, as opposed to that of Islam, the difference was that they were condemned by the mainstream.  Strategists, leaders, and supporters of the state of Israel sought peaceful means of creating a Jewish homeland.  Only once attacked and threatened by hostile (to say the least) neighbors who denied their existence and legitimacy did Israel take a position of miraculous strength, and apply military power. 
 
Committing a crime yourself and framing your enemies for it is classic double-agent strategy.  The ultimate example is Emperor Palpatine and the Clone Wars in Star Wars.  Or if you’re more for history than fantasy, you might refer to Hitler excusing his invasions of Austria, Czechoslavakia, and separately of Poland.  Yes.  We’re talking the trigger for World War II. 
 
During our involvement in World War II, America made the distasteful and unjust decision to inter our Japanese civilians in labor camps.  In the interest of humble honesty, I always feel obligated to admit that occasionally my country is not defending virtue and liberty.  I’m a fan of history, not names and dates so much as the connections of the dots.  What were the politics, the motivations, the idealisms that drove countries to war and revolt, to peace and surrender?  What little difference in choices would have changed the course of the world? 
 
So I have to note that the president who ordered Japanese interment during World War II was a Democrat.  Knowing that makes me feel a lot less responsible.  There are almost two countries in this America.  They alternate power, a check and balance between irresponsible oppression and defensive freedom.  I never realized it before, but I’m more or less loyal to the Republican America. 
 
But. 
 
My Republican America participates and upholds the same Constitution that occasionally puts Democrat America in power.  Even if I’m voting against them, I’m still endorsing the system.  How much responsibility does that give me? 
 
Some lifestyles are a package deal.  For example, I’m learning that to believe Church should be held in homes is a lifestyle.  Substituting a gathering in a house doing all the biblical things for the Sunday morning “worship service” in a sanctuary isn’t sufficient.  My friends would call the package living missionally.  I already believe that Christian community does life together and that the most effective Church in history met more than once a week. 

 

Perhaps another package deal is living in a Republic requires political involvement.  I can’t just vote and say I’ve done my part.  In fact, for decades under the US Constitution there was no suffrage for women, and their participation in the government had to be more involved and influential than that.  They had to do marches and grassroots campaigns.  We must do that and more, like paying attention to our representatives in all three branches of government, and proactively holding them accountable.  Voting is saying, “Yes, I believe in and endorse this system.”  The responsibility, then, is ours to do everything we can to ensure that the system is honorable and efficient. 

 

To God be all glory,

Lisa of Longbourn

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