Oct 12
12
Can we stop Christian kids from leaving the Church?
I said a few weeks ago that we would have some comment on a new study released on why Canadian youth are leaving the Church. The study, “Hemorrhaging Faith,” was sponsored by several different groups, including the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. This trend seems to be the subject of a growing number of discussions among church leaders in the past few years. This study is apparently the first one providing a useful amount of Canadian data and analysis. Christian leaders involved in the project have, therefore, said that it’s a very important piece of work. The results, though, weren’t unsurprising so I’m not sure how important the project really is. In an article on the report published by EFC’s magazine, Faith Today, John Wilkinson, chair of the EFC’s Youth ad Young Adult Ministry Roundtable, said “For those of us who are close to what is going on in youth ministry across Canada, the research findings are not so much surprising as they are confirming.” There may be one important exception to this, which is what we want to consider here. At this time, we have not yet read the original report. We have been following some of the comments made by others.
This is quite a demoralizing exercise – not the data about young people, but the analysis and reflections on the data by others. This is a multigenerational phenomenon. Culture doesn’t go from faithful and zealous for God to children abandoning the faith in one generation. And we see some of the problems today’s young adults have inherited in the observations being made about their parents, the observations being made about today’s 30 and 40 and 50 year olds.
Twenty-three percent of those who responded to the survey were “Engagers” – young men and women who continued to participate in the life of the church. “Most young adults who are in church on Sunday are Engagers. Almost all Engagers report having experienced God’s love and answers to prayer. They are more likely to be female than male. Engagers generally report having opportunities to serve and lead in their local church and having attended Christian camps and mission trips. Engagers are the most likely to have a parent born outside of Canada. Their parents are most likely to have consistently lived out their faith at home and in a church context.”
One valuable observation from the study was that young adults tend to leave the church at “transition points,” and those transition points were not simply the move from high school to university or college. Faith Today reports: James Penner, co-author of the report and the co-founder of research firm James Penner and Associates, said, “‘And evangelical churches need to ask themselves, “What happens at the transition points for youth when you have these fabulous programs and para-church ministries that start and stop?”‘ The significance of transition points – those pivotal moments that change a youth’s life because of changing circumstances in their home life or church, and/or significant birthdays that move them from one age group and one church program to another (or not at all) – may be one of the most startling insights provided by Hemorrhaging Faith. … The importance of transition points caught [Reg Bibby's] attention as new information as well. ‘The fact that when we are looking at decline, the decline between childhood and teen is greater than the subsequent teen to young adult drop-off is significant. That blows a stereotype right there,’ says Bibby. …”
“… Rick Hiemstra, director of research and media relations for the EFC [said,] ‘The report showed something very important – that transitions are not just when youth go off to college, but transitions are also what they experience going on around them in church, like when a youth pastor leaves and church just isn’t church anymore to them, so they stop going.’ In many cases, says Hiemstra, churches and parents do not handle transitions well. ‘We lose more kids transitioning between Sunday school and youth programs than from teenagers to young adult status, sometimes because that is when parents give them the freedom to choose whether or not they go to church,’ says Hiemstra.”
So children are leaving the church at a younger age than has been discussed up to this point. It’s not at university and college. It’s already been noted by thoughtful analysts that young adults don’t lose their faith overnight at university. It must have been weak already. How did it get weak? And why do children in fact abandon their parents’ faith even earlier? We are talking about a societal dynamic here, not isolated incidents. The most obvious reason is government schooling. Most children spend most of their day listening to people who treat their God as pond scum – or worse. And nobody counters these messages. Parents and pastors don’t know all what’s being said. And it’s incessant. Christianity becomes just an emotional shot in the arm once on Sunday, not an intelligent historic reality that impacts every area of life. Children in such a situation are simply being logical when they walk away from the religion their parents claim to possess.
Churches that set up normative experiences for children on the basis of heathen categories promote superficiality and set children up for rejecting the faith at transition points. When institutionalized programs replace parents with youth leaders as the esteemed adults for youth, when age segregated ministry is the norm instead of the age-integration of the family, then you are dislocating youth from reality. You are also making them vulnerable to leadership transitions and are feeding the sin of the fear of man by nurturing a peer pressure environment. This is also very humanistic and consumer-oriented rather than a model of ministry that promotes effective discipleship towards servanthood and leadership. No wonder many of these youth leave the church at transition points, when something they’ve anchored to changes.
Rick Hiemstra postulated that some youth may stop going to church at younger ages ” because that is when parents give them the freedom to choose whether or not they go to church.” I hope that’s not true. What a gross abuse of parental authority not to require one’s children to attend church and so to experience the worship of God with the family of God and to come under the preaching of the Word of God. It is scandalous before God and His Church for the father – the spiritual head of the home – to capitulate to pressure from a child to let him/her stay home from church. If this is a common reality, perhaps the main problem is that the parents are already battling their child on other important issues. There again, in most cases, is the evil effects of government schooling. Look what government schooling typically does to the spiritual health of a family! Perhaps also these parents are failing to receive adequate godly counsel from their pastors about the nature of their responsibility as the heads of their homes, as the parents. Maybe they are also getting inadequate teaching on the importance of weekly Sunday/Sabbath worship with the people of God. Voluntaryism in the Church reflects the humanistic individualistic spirit of our age. It’s a cancer in the Church, and needs to be rooted out – for the glory of God and for the sake of our children.
Mr. Hiemstra made another comment about transition points in the Faith Today article: “They’ve never been in the service, we’ve spent years teaching them that there is nothing going on of interest to them upstairs during the service, then they age out of Sunday school, so why would they be suddenly interested in what we are doing?” All churches that don’t require and facilitate children of all ages participating in the worship service with their parents on Sunday need to repent immediately – YESTERDAY! Mr. Hiemstra is exactly correct. A child’s participation with his parents in the worship of God is a crucial component of godly discipleship and mentoring. Obstructing this opportunity and responsibility causes children to stumble. What did Jesus say about this? ” It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble (Luke 17:2).” Separating children from their parents for the church service also puts the church at odds with the family in terms of their spheres of authority in this world. Parents should understand their place enough that, even if an alternative to the real worship service was available for their children, they wouldn’t avail themselves of it anyway. This kind of church model sets itself up for the destruction of our youth and – for those who have the eyes to see – is one of the causes of the current trend of children and young adults abandoning the church.
The Faith Today article discusses the importance of parental influence on children’s decisions to continue with the Church and Christian faith.
“‘Parents probably don’t feel they are influential, but in long-term stability of spiritual centredness, the family is actually more important than the Church,’ says Don Posterski, author, researcher, cultural strategist and consultant for Hemorrhaging Faith.”
OK – this throws me! Why on earth would parents not think they are influential? Are parents not reading the Bible? The Bible is clear on the influence of parents – for good or ill – on their children. And plenty of research has backed this up. Is Mr. Posterski correct on this point that many parents don’t feel they are influential? Is this hyper-insecurity on the part of parents? Is it denial? Are these parents spending all their time watching foolish sitcoms on TV that beat up on dads and disengage mothers? Or is this a message parents might be getting form churches that have pulled their children away from them through a busy institutionalized and professionalized youth and children’s ministry package that competes with the nurturing of healthy family relationships?
According to the Engager young adults who responded to the survey, their parents’ influence was very important – parents who visibly engaged in spiritual disciplines and modeled the faith before them, and parents who talked with their children about their faith, deliberately passing it on. Well, du-uh! Isn’t this normal Christian parenting? What is it about parenting that makes it Christian if the parents aren’t doing these things? Most of these aspects of life don’t require effort. One has to exert more effort to avoid doing them. And more important than providing and protecting, the husband’s/father’s God-ordained role as head of his home is to provide spiritual leadership. We don’t do it perfectly, but we must be taking that responsibility seriously. So, what these young adults are saying is that parental example matters. Go figure!
On the matter of parental influence, Faith Today continues: “According to the report there were frequent ‘instances where parents deliberately pass on their faith. Contrary to common belief, this usually doesn’t look like lecturing. The most effective faith instruction takes place organically’.”
A phrase in the above citation really confuses me: “Contrary to common belief.” Say what? Are most Christian parents trying to turn their homes into institutions so that they look like a mini government school? What do they mean? I don’t know anybody who thinks that most learning in the home is through lectures rather than “organic” relationship. Yet this report says this is the common belief, and this report showed that common belief to be wrong. If that is a common belief, then Christian parents are as desperately confused and vulnerable to exploitation as today’s heathen parents. All a person has to do is read the Bible thoughtfully – or even just step outside the bubble of their own limited experience and review history to see that normative parent-child relationships are “organic.” This is the model of normal family relations where we see discipleship, mentoring and well-rounded training. It is attempts to duplicate this in a wider context that produces mentoring models for leadership training and apprenticeship models for a growing number of vocational pursuits. Using the lecture as a primary model for learning is an aberration, pushed on us by the modern humanist model of schooling. Lecturing has its place, but not as the primary mode for most learning. Yet, if this report is correct, most Christian parents have imbibed this aberrant ideology, and are even trying to replicate it in their homes. This is a tragedy with incredibly serious implications.
That last citation also includes the observation that, for those young adults still attending church, “there were frequent ‘instances where parents deliberately pass on their faith.” OK. Did they mean frequent instances over the course of the child’s lifetime at home or frequent instances every day? If this instruction is organic, and if parents are living out their faith openly, these instances would be there every day – if the parents and children are living in the same home and actually spending time with each other each day!
The church’s handling of homosexuality is also identified as an important criteria for those who responded to the survey for this report: “The perception of the vast majority of young adults is that we have handled this issue very badly as a Christian Church,” says the report. Yet again, the influence of the government schools – and the entertainment experience outside of school for those who are desensitized to it at school with the help of school friends who also continue to put pressure on them.
The Faith Today article didn’t major on solutions to draw young adults back into the church, or for parents and leaders to keep them in, not the way we have anyway. The comments on the influence of parents indicated the obvious, that avoiding hypocrisy, and actually living like Christians in front of your children, would help. Stop the presses! There was some comment provided on how churches and parents could handle homosexuality more effectively, none of which we want to reproduce here. It was noted that youth today see homosexuality more as an identity than as sexual behavior. I think we all know that by now unless we’re living with our heads in the sand. The challenge for Christians, though, while recognizing that reality, is not to accept that sentiment. Chronic sin can become characterological, but sexual sin is not inherently a component of identity.
The conclusion of the article included a recommendation from Don Posterski for the church to major on the majors and focus on the essence of the faith. And John McAuley said the church should talk about Jesus, not topics.
ChristianGovernance would not agree with this either…or sentiment. Young people need Biblical worldview training which requires talking about a lot more than simply “Jesus,” not topics. Even closer to the end of the article, we learn from James Penner that the majority of young adults who have stayed in church had pastors who could answer their questions. If you know any youth, you know that they have many more questions than “Who is Jesus as Jesus?”
Mr. McAuley’s comments in favour of camping ministry was also noted. Christian camps and ministry trips were noted as important spiritual experiences for youth. But mature Christians should not be sending the message that anything organizationally is more important than the public worship of God by His people on the Christian Sabbath – Sunday. Furthermore, I have recently read a valuable article on how unhelpful – even destructive – short-term mission trips can be, and how they end up being more for the participant than for those on the receiving end of the ministry. That is not the way they are marketed, and the Church needs to rethink this popular aspect of ministry as well. ChristianGovernance provides valuable camp and retreat experiences for youth to provide Biblical worldview training, but we will not supplant the ministry of the local church.
With his comments about pastors being able to answer young people’s questions, Mr. Penner said, “That would speak to a role that someone in the congregation needs to play. It may not be the pastor. It can be informal – in fact, informal is probably better.” Whether intentionally or not, Mr. Penner is hinting at the value and importance of discipleship or mentoring. This is one of the most important needs of all people today, and especially youth. Ideally their parents would be their best mentors, but they can also be discipled by other trusted adults. This discipleship relationship is far more important than any events or programs or fancy technology in the ministry of a church. Far more time and thought should be given to the importance of discipleship by those who want to turn this current trend around. This must be discipleship in total Christian living; in Biblical worldview; in what it means to live distinctively, revolutionary Christian lives in a world of injustice and ungodliness.
What then should we do?
This is the vision of ChristianGovernance. By God’s grace, we exist for such a time as this to serve the Church, to serve young men and women. We offer far more transformative solutions to the problems raised in the “Hemorrhaging Faith” report, not because we want to be different, but because more transformative solutions are the necessary solutions; are the correct solutions – because they are the Biblical solutions.
We have our annual Biblical worldview events (dinners/conferences) in April. We used the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic as the context for the Biblical message of courageous manhood at our first two events. We are beginning to plan our 3rd annual Biblical worldview event for next April. We are looking at Sat., Apr. 20th as the date. Stay tuned for more details.
We have our annual Biblical Worldview, Apologetics and leadership Youth camp – WAY Camp – each summer. Young men and women get pumped up and intensively trained in the truths of the Christian faith so that they are more effective servants and apologists in Christ’s Kingdom. We hope it also helps them make life-long, godly friendships as well. You can already mark your calendar for the week of June 24th for next year’s WAY Camp for your teen son or daughter.