Somebody posted a link to Facebook today that made me stop and think a bit about a problem that many (if not most) Baptist churches are facing today. I'm talking about the exodus of young people from the church. I have been disturbed by the weakness of our discipleship ministry in our own church for some time. Not so much the adult classes, where 40 somethings and older take the ministry seriously and generally do a good job of communicating the truth of Scripture.
That's not to say that our Children and Youth teachers are lacking in talent or dedication to the task. But teaching children and youth is a much more difficult task than dealing with adults - most of whom are there because they want to learn more of the Word of God, and because they enjoy the fellowship of other believers.
Certain traditions have evloved that have led us to have to do student and children's ministries in a "certain manner". Take a few minutes and read the following article which I have copied and pasted from it's website. (its a little easier to read this way as the website is full of ads and the article is broken up over several pages). In the article that follows, Marc Yoder brings some ideas to the table that might surprise you in his article entitled:
10 Surprising Reasons Our Kids LEAVE Church
by Marc Yoder
"The American evangelical church has lost, is losing, and
will almost certainly continue to lose our youth.
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 percent 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 to.
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 five-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 and 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 large church board members who didn’t understand
the atonement. When we choose leaders based upon their ability to draw and lead
rather than to accurately teach the faith, well, they 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 lives. 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.
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, struggle or doubt. Turn that
frown upside down, or move along.
Kids who are fed a steady diet of sermons aimed at removing
anything (or anyone) who doesn’t 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 were 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.
Our kids leave because we have failed to deliver to them the
faith “delivered once for all” to the church.
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) ... 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. "
Food for thought folks.
Food for thought!
