This Is the #1 Reason Students Leave the Church

The Research Is In--This Is the #1 Reason Students Leave the Church
Author: Kara Powell more from this author »
StickyFaith.org

Research shows that 40-50% of high school graduates leave their faith in college.
Youth expert Kara Powell offers ideas on reversing the trend.

Editor's Note: This discussion with youth expert Kara Powell is a critical conversation for preaching pastors. We need to do everything we can to reverse the trend of high school graduates leaving their faith and the church. I encourage you to use this insightful talk to fuel both your teaching and your passion for cultivating a church where next gen disciples thrive.  

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Kara Powell, our recent guest on the ChurchLeaders Podcast, is the Executive Director of the Fuller Youth Institute (FYI) and a faculty member at Fuller Theological Seminary. As a youth ministry veteran of over 20 years, she serves as an Advisor to Youth Specialties. Named by Christianity Today as one of "50 Women You Should Know," Kara is the author or co-author of a number of books including Sticky Faith and more.

In this important conversation we cover the changing trends in youth ministry, why high school graduates really leave the church, and why we should listen to our student’s doubts and hit tough topics head on.

LISTEN NOW! 

Here are the highlights from Kara’s research and insights on reversing the trend of milennial faith drift (*edited for clarity).

Kara, what has changed the most in youth ministry over the last decade?

Over the last decade the professionalization of youth ministry has really gorwn. There is much good as a result of this like better trained leaders, more called people, better pay, more resources, and specialized education programs. The downside is many churches feel like they can outsource spiritual formation of young people to their designated staff member. The result is churches have moved away from investing in the lives of students themselves.

So what’s the #1 Reason this generation walks away from their faith?

Of all the youth group participation variables we’ve seen, being involved in intergenerational worship and relationship was one of the variables most highly correlated to young people’s faith. So in other words, while it’s great that there are better trained, more called, more specialized paid and volunteer youth leaders—the downside is that the gap between the overall congregation and the youth ministry is growing, which ends up being toxic to young people’s faith.

As a result, students graduate and all they know is the youth ministry and the youth leader. They don’t know their church; they don’t know adults in their church. No wonder they drift away from the church because they feel like they’ve graduated out of it. Really good research indicates that almost half of young people drift from God and the church after they graduate.

This is why the Fuller Youth Institute (FYI) does what they do. They are figuring out how to get students to have “sticky faith.”

What is needed to bridge that gap between the youth and the church?

We need a 5 to 1 ratio. Many children’s and youth ministries will have one teacher for every five kids. But to bridge the gap, there should be five adults for each student. This is a research-based reversed ratio. Ideally, there should be five people praying for one student by name and showing up at their sporting events throughout the year. It’s a paradigm shift. It’s not about finding five small group leaders per student, it’s about finding five adults who show an interest in your student or child.

The church can creatively empower parents to surround kids with their team of adults. Ask your son, daughter, niece or student, “Who’s on your team?”

(Research shows five people is best, but Kara clarifies it doesn’t have to be five people. Even just one person or two people is better than none.)

The key is to motivate and equip parents to create that team. Then the youth pastor can focus on the kids who don’t have parents at home who are able to do this.

Here are a few practical steps for youth leaders to get started:

Talk to senior pastor and/or supervisor. Explain the vision and get their support. It’s helpful to know your supervisor’s love language (adapted from Gary Chapman’s work). Know what is most meaningful to them whether its scripture, research, or examples. Then frame the change you think God intends for your ministry along those lines in ways most meaningful in the context of your church like evangelism, discipleship, and growth.
Next, get parents on board and train them. Explain why you’re doing this and how you plan to accomplish the vision, then offer resources and training.
Identify the students who don’t have involved or available parents. Talk to them and get an idea of who they look up to and who they might like to have on their team. You can be the catalyst to create that team with them.

How should the church approach doubt in ministering to students?

One of the greatest surprises out of the Sticky Faith research was data related to doubt. In their 3 year study of over 500 students in first three years of college, they found doubt is fairly pervasive in young people, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing. What is toxic is unexpressed or unexplored doubt. When young people have the opportunity to express or explore their doubt, it is correlated with stronger and more mature faith.

Kara shares it’s often those tough questions that help God become even more real to us. However, toxic messages of doubt start young. When something bad or scary happens, it’s typical for a third or fourth grader to say, “I don’t understand why God would allow this earthquake to happen.” So often, well-intentioned Sunday school teachers quiet the young student instead of offering an answer. This tells kids the church can’t handle their questions and neither can God.

Leaders should raise tough questions on purpose. The church and youth ministry should be the first place young people feel they can go to with their questions. This starts with adults. We must raise our own tough questions and talk about tough sections in scripture. This shows students God is bigger than your toughest question.

The four most powerful words can be “I don’t know, but.” Maybe you don’t have a ready answer, that’s okay! Discover the answer together or get back to them.

The worst response is to do nothing. The best response is to partner with parents. Students do best when they feel like they’ve come to their own conclusions. We can look at scripture together and talk through “what do you think this means?” It’s messier and harder, but so worth it because young people will own the insights from those conversations.

Now what?

Kara shared the number one reason why young people are walking away from their faith—it’s a lack of intergenerational worship and relationship. But we can be part of the solution. Focus on connecting and cultivating relationships between youth and adults within the church. Make that a primary focus for your ministry and we’ll see those statistics start to shift.

See original article on www.sermoncentral.com/

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 Kara Powell
StickyFaith.org
Kara Powell, PhD, is the Executive Director of the Fuller Youth Institute (FYI) and a faculty member at Fuller Theological Seminary. As a youth ministry veteran of over 20 years, she serves as an Advisor to Youth Specialties. Named by Christianity Today as one of "50 Women You Should Know", Kara is the author or co-author of a number of books including Sticky Faith, Essential Leadership, Deep Justice Journeys, Deep Justice in a Broken World, Deep Ministry in a Shallow World, and the Good Sex Youth Ministry Curriculum.

3 Reasons Young Adults Are Leaving the Church

3 Reasons Young Adults Are Leaving the Church

By Baptist Press
August 6, 2013

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (BP) — Why young adults leave the church is one of the most vexing questions facing the church today.

A LifeWay Christian Resources survey from 2007 indicated that 70 percent of 18–22-year-olds stop attending church for at least one year. Surveys by The Barna Group repeatedly have shown that a majority of 20-year-olds leave church, often never to return.

Citing a recent study by the Brookings Institution, author Rachel Held Evans recently suggested, in essence, that millennials are leaving evangelical churches in search of more progressive fellowships because of dissonance with the more conservative doctrinal stances and cultural convictions of their former congregations.

Yet it seems to reason that if compromising biblical convictions attracted millennials, then mainline denominations would be teeming with young adults. On the contrary, mainline churches are proof positive that liberal theology does not magnetically draw young adults to church.

Causation for young adults exiting the church has been studied for decades, yet little has been accomplished in the way of reversing it. As a Gospel preacher, seminary president and father of five young children, to me this is more than a theoretical concern.

At the risk of being overly simplistic, I want to suggest three factors that often are overlooked in this discussion.

They Never Joined the Church Spiritually

Many young adults leave the church because they were never truly converted to Christ in the first place. John the Apostle warned us, “They went out from us because they were never of us; for if they had been of us, they would have no doubt continued with us.”

In His sermon on the mount, Jesus soberly warns, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord!’ will enter the kingdom of heaven; but he who does the will of my father in heaven.”

In fact, this is a troubling but recurring theme throughout the New Testament. Jesus frequently warned of pseudo-converts, most memorably in His parables of the four soils, the wheat and the tares and the sheep and the goats. This grievous occurrence is why Paul exhorted the Corinthian church to “examine yourselves to determine whether you be in the faith.”

This predicament is as old as the church itself, and it is no respecter of age. Young adults have not cornered the market on unregenerate church membership, but with so many other pressures and opportunities associated with their life stage, their exit ramp is more predictable and more pronounced.

In other words, young adults are just one bloated demographic slice of an ever-present challenge within the church today: unregenerate church membership.

They Never Experienced the Church Corporately

To their own detriment, too many churches function like a confederation of parachurch ministries meeting under the same roof. For instance, many young adults traveled from children’s church to children’s ministry to the youth group and then to college ministry.

Amazingly, many young adults spend 20-plus years in a local church with the congregation as a whole always being an ancillary group and with their predominant religious attention focused from one of the church’s subgroups to the next.

Age-graded and targeted ministries can be healthy inasmuch as they undergird the life of the church and facilitate strategic discipleship and family ministry. But when they displace the central and formative place of congregational worship and corporate gatherings as a whole, they prove detrimental to both the individual and the local church.

In fact, the beauty of the New Testament church is its homogeneous diversity: Jew and Gentile, young and old, rich and poor, all united by the Gospel and gathered around the common ministry of the Word, the Lord’s table, prayer and fellowship, together as the body of Christ.

There is a sweetness in God’s people, and we rob our children of experiences of God’s grace when we neglect to incorporate them into the corporate body. It is for this reason I want my children to know the saintly widow seated behind them and the contemporary adult couple seated in front of them as well as they know the children in their own classes.

When they are disconnected from the congregation, it should not surprise us that young adults, who have never known the church as a whole, are disinclined to embrace it when their age-graded group has run its course.

Do you want your children to participate in the church when they become adults? Then cultivate their participation as they travel life toward adulthood.

They Never Came to Love the Church Personally

Though the church is not perfect, it ought to be cherished, warts and all, by every member of the congregation, including our children. As parents, we cultivate this by esteeming the church — and the individuals who comprise it — before our children. As a parent, my wife and I have long since covenanted together to guard our tongues, especially before our children, about the ministers and members of the churches we have joined.

Granted, no church is perfect, and if you ever find the perfect church, don’t join it, or you’ll likely ruin it. At the same time, a spirit of criticism and sarcasm about the pastor and other members of the congregation mark the homes of too many church members.

In so doing, children are hearing reason after reason why they should doubt the Word of God, not value fellowship of the saints, and be indifferent toward gathering with God’s people. When this occurs, why should young adults commit their lives, time and resources to a pastor and group of people they have overheard their parents repeatedly denigrate?

Why do young adults leave the church? This is a pressing concern but an often misplaced question. Instead of focusing so much on why young adults leave the church, let’s focus more on how they enter the church and how they engage it along the way.

And when you show me young adults who are truly converted, have ministered and worshiped with the church as a whole and have grown to love the people of God, I’ll show you young adults who are a lot less likely to depart the church anytime soon.

Jason K. Allen is president of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Mo. This column first appeared at his website, jasonkallen.com. Get Baptist Press headlines and breaking news on Twitter (@BaptistPress), Facebook (Facebook.com/BaptistPress) and in your email (baptistpress.com/SubscribeBP.asp).

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