10 Surprising Reasons Our Kids LEAVE Church by Marc Yoder

Editor's Note: We encourage you to share your opinions, both your agreements and disagreements, about this article in the comment section below. We also encourage you to answer these questions: Why do you think young adults leave the church? What's the solution to bring them back? 

We all know them, the kids who were raised in the church.  They were stars of the youth group. They may have sung in the praise band or led worship. And then … they graduate from high school and they leave the 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 Noah’s Ark themed nursery to jumbotron summer-campish kids church, to pizza parties and rock concerts, many evangelical youths 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 is 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 the church is simply a place to learn life-application principals to achieve a better life in the 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

10 BIG Things Jesus Said that We Often Forget

by Joe McKeever

“Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not the things I tell you” (Luke 6:46).
“If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them” (John 13:17).
I apologize for the title. There are wonderful churches filled with faithful disciples of Jesus Christ who are getting these things right; I don’t mean to imply otherwise. But that does not negate the fact that untold thousands of churches still exist primarily for themselves, have no vision outside their doors and no compassion for anyone knocking on those doors.
If none of this fits you or your congregation, give thanks. If it does, you are hereby assigned to take the lead in reversing matters. However, do not miss our notes at the conclusion.

1. We keep forgetting the second commandment is a command.

We want our religion to be private, just “me and the Lord.”
Jesus refuses to play that game. He said, “And the second is like unto it. Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (Matthew 22:39). This is a command, not an option, an opinion, a wish, a Facebook “like” or a good idea. To love one’s neighbor strongly is a key component of the kind of witness Jesus envisioned His people extending to the world.
So, why don’t we obey it? We have found it inconvenient, difficult and demanding. When we love people — truly care for them to the point that they know it — they might need us, and that would interfere with our schedule. It’s much easier to love the lovely, to care for the appreciative and to reach out to those who need little or nothing.

2. We keep forgetting two things about His command to feed the hungry, clothe the needy, visit the sick, etc., in Matthew 25.

First, we forget that this is a command and is not optional, something the Lord hopes we might find time to do along life’s way while attending to more important matters. Jesus honestly expects His people to do this. I’m happy to report many churches are taking this seriously, and are involving their people in strong ministries to the down and out, the voiceless, the forgotten.
Secondly, when we do these things “unto the least of these my brethren,”  He takes it personally. We are to do good to everyone, but brothers and sisters in Christ have dibs on our assistance. Paul said, “As we have opportunity, let us do good to all, especially to those who are of the household of faith” (Galatians 6:10).
A side note: Nowhere — underscore that — nowhere! does the Bible tell the church to take care of all the poor of the world. It gets tiresome hearing people say that the government would not have to get involved in welfare if the church did its duty. (It’s almost ludicrous to imagine Jesus telling the handful of disciples in Jerusalem that they were to go into all the world and meet the physical needs of the billions. He did not do this. Let us give thanks.)

3. We forget that loving people and loving the Lord is all about action, not emotion.

When our Lord told us to “love your enemies” in Luke 6:27ff, He immediately explained that what He’s calling for is action: do good, bless, pray, give, etc. Throughout the Upper Room discourse (John 13-16), Jesus emphasized that whoever loves Him keeps His commands. Words are important, of course, and emotions can be, too. But nothing packs more punch than actions, the works we do. The Lord said, “Whoever hears these words of mine and does them is like one who builds his house on a rock” (Matthew 7:24).
No one can command his own emotions — fear, anger, love, hate, etc. — to the point of being able to turn them on or off at will. So, if love is merely a feeling, in calling on us to love anyone (God, neighbor, family, disciples, enemies) the Lord is asking for what cannot be given. Fortunately, what He is calling for is far more manageable and doable. We can give, pray, bless and/or help others. To do so — regardless of how we feel about it! — is to do a loving thing.

4. We keep forgetting the Lord told us to expect to be treated badly.

“An hour is coming for everyone who kills you to think that he is offering service to God” (John 16:2).
God’s people keep expecting to be loved and appreciated by those to whom we minister and often end up getting blind-sided by their hostility. We wonder, “Why are they treating us this way? All I was doing was helping and blessing.” “Where is God? What’s wrong?”
Answer: Nothing is wrong. You are right on schedule.
We have forgotten Matthew 10:16-22 and similar passages where Jesus warned us that we would be hated “by all for (His) name’s sake.”
I run into disillusioned ministers who were badly treated by churches, and are angry at the Lord who called them into this work but seems to have no place for them to serve. Some no longer go to church. You wonder if these people don’t read their Bibles. Don’t they see that Scripture warns us to expect trouble from inside the church as well as outside? (Acts 20:28ff for one.)

5. We keep forgetting He told us to love our enemies.

This point follows on the heels of the previous ones for good reason. They treat us badly and how are we to react? We are to love them, not nurse our anger, bear grudges or protect our resentment as though we now possess a get-out-of-jail-free card entitling us to despise them.
Anyone who spends even a few minutes on Facebook reading the posts of professing Christians will come away horrified at the hostility some of the Lord’s people express toward other religions, worldly pleasure lovers and wayward politicians.

6. We no longer remember that we are commissioned to throw parties for the undeserving and undesirable.

“When you give a reception (banquet), invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, since they do not have the means to repay you; for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous” (Luke 14:13-14).
These people have our Lord’s heart. They are special to Him. “He who gives to the poor lends to the Lord,” Scripture says in Proverbs. The closer we are to Jesus, the more such ones will matter to us too. (If you haven’t read Tony Campolo’s The Kingdom of God is a Party, then get it and dive in. Tony has a way of hitting us between the eyes with the 2x4 of God’s love.)

7. We conveniently forget that “Jesus saves.”

We know He forgives and we love to sing about it. What we have pushed to the back burner, however, is the fact that He came to save sinners (see Matthew 1:21 and Luke 2:11 for starters) and that is to be our business too.
We who devote ourselves to feeding the hungry and clothing the naked and so forth, sometimes think we have fulfilled our assignment. Not even close. We fail people when we give them bread but keep silent about the Savior who can meet their true needs, fill their deepest hungers and heal their greatest hurts.

8. We forget that, with Jesus, change is the norm.

Luke 5:36-39 presents new wineskins as the Lord’s pattern for His disciples: strong, flexible, faithful, growing, etc.
We do love our status quo. Physicists call it “inertia,” the tendency of a body to go on doing whatever it’s doing at the moment, moving or remaining stationary. However, the Lord does not play this game with us. He is forever calling us out of our comfort zones, away from our customary methods, into new ways of seeing and doing and achieving. No one unwilling to constantly be changing and adapting can follow Jesus Christ for long.

9. We keep forgetting that the object is not to keep rules.

The object is obedience to the Lord, not slavishly keeping the rules. Many of the Lord’s well-intentioned children miss the fine line between those two.
“The letter of the law kills, the Spirit gives life” (II Cor 3:6). Anyone who requires a demonstration of that proof needs only to drop in on a legalistic church and hang around a few weeks. He or she will be heartbroken over the way rule-keepers “omit the weightier matters” in order to “tithe mint and dill and cummin” (Matthew 23:23).
Recently, while I was preaching in a church located near a sizeable Amish community, the pastor had stories about the interesting ways of these neighbors. One man had disinherited his adult sons for buying a car. Yet, that same man would hire a car and driver to transport him to Nashville where he would board planes to take him all over the world.
To the legalists who were twisting God’s laws into shackles for their neighbors, our Lord said, “Man was not made for the Sabbath, but the Sabbath was made for man” (Mark 2:27).
I say, without fear of contradiction, that every church in the land has members (and often leaders) who need constant reminders of this.

10. We keep forgetting to read all the Word and not take a verse or two out of context.

“Here a verse, there a verse.”  I stand before you today to confess that I’m as guilty as anyone I know. We do love our verses, don’t we? They fit so conveniently on bumper stickers and in our tweets.
How many people know and love Jeremiah 29:11 (“I know the plans I have for you … ”) and claim it as their own, but have no clue what’s going on in that chapter and to whom it was given.
Here’s another: In Luke 9:3, Jesus said to the disciples, “Take nothing for your journey, neither staffs nor bag nor bread nor money; and do not have two tunics apiece.” Clear enough, right? Wrong.
Not long ago, a distinguished Christian columnist quoted Luke 9:3 as the basis of God expecting poverty from Christian workers. However, the Lord reversed that command in Luke 22:35-36.
It’s an easy mistake to make unless you are a diligent student of the Word.
All of which proves, once again, that His thoughts are not our thoughts, neither are His ways our ways (Isaiah 55:8).
We do like our religion easy and palatable, comfortable and undemanding, with instant rewards and no room for outsiders unless they quickly become like us.
Now, you read this and conclude that your church is guilty of forgetting the Lord’s teachings and is existing primarily for itself. What to do?
1) Consider yourself a committee of one to begin to reverse matters.
2) But you must never ever become angry at your fellow members and begin to harass them for their negligence.
3) Instead, begin showing compassion (that is, doing deeds of love) to everyone around you.
4) Then, after, say, four months of such active love, you begin to speak to a few friends in church — perhaps your Sunday School class or your fellow deacons — on your concern, giving your own testimony. See that? “Your testimony.” Do not tell anyone what they are to do. (It’s such a temptation, but squelch it.) Just tell what the Lord burdened you with and what you have decided.
5) Then, wait on the Lord. Keep close to Him, pray constantly for your leadership and the membership, and stay obedient.
6) Be patient. The decline did not set in just last week and the rotten wood in the church did not occur overnight, so reversing it will not automatically take place just because one member got his heart right.
The Lord bless you and give you great joy in serving Him and blessing others in the name of Jesus.
I leave you (and this subject) with one of the most powerful and overlooked scriptures on this subject: Jeremiah 22:16.
“‘Did not your father (that would be Josiah) eat and drink and do justice and righteousness? Then it was well with him. He pled the cause of the afflicted and needy; then it was well. Is not that what it means to know Me?’ declares the Lord.” 

Churn out Your own butter

H.B. Charles, Jr.

Simply put: "Milk a lot of cows. But churn your own butter."

I stood, called my text and began to preach. There was a weird response by the congregation. Something strange was happening, but I didn’t know what.
I couldn’t catch the vibe. The congregation, to whom I had preached several times before, was tentative throughout the entire message. But I couldn’t figure out why.
After I sat down, it all became clear. Someone leaned over to me and told me the speaker who had opened the meeting several nights before preached the same text and/or message.
For some reason, this news made me nervous. At the same time, I was at peace. I had preached what I believed the Lord wanted me to say. And my message was the product of my Bible study and sermon preparation.
They gave me a copy of the other pastor’s message. When I got to my room, I crawled into bed with my computer and watched the message.
Indeed, it was the same text. And it was essentially the same message.
We both preached the same doctrinal theme from the text. We organized the messages differently. We labeled the messages differently. I worked through the message with three main points in my outline. He had four. The homiletical approach was different. And the way we argued the message was different.
It really was the same message preached from two different perspectives.
This got me to thinking about the ethical matter of pulpit plagiarism.
The late evangelist, Vance Havner, said when he began preaching he was determined to be original or nothing. He ended up being both, Havner said.
This is true of every preacher. All faithful preachers deliver an unoriginal, “stolen” message — the word of God.
Biblical preaching simply explains what the word of God means by what it says. And if we read the text right, what we see will be pretty close to the conclusions drawn by other faithful Bible expositors.
In fact, if you come up with a reading of the text that no one else has ever seen, you’re wrong! Likewise, most Bible expositors use many of the same exegetical resources. So it should be no surprise for you to hear two messages that “overlap,” for lack of a better term.
But let’s be clear. Stealing other people’s material and preaching it as if it is your own work is wrong.
After the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007, a certain pastor preached a message he claimed the Lord had given him. Later that week, his local newspaper outed him, revealing that the message was actually from a website that sells sermons. This “inspired” message had, in fact, been preached and posted by several other pastors across the country that same day!
I repeat. This is wrong. The eighth commandment should apply to our pulpit work: “You shall not steal” (Exodus 20:15).
This is not to say that we shouldn’t use sources. To the contrary, it is arrogant for you to study a text and preach a sermon on it without consulting the wisdom of those who have, in some instances, spent a lifetime studying those passages, books or themes.
Milk a lot of cows. But churn your own butter.
When you do the hard work of personal study and sermon preparation, something wonderful can happen. For instance, you can stand and preach a text that was just preached in that same pulpit three days earlier. And you can make the point the previous sermon made. Yet, God can use your preaching — YOUR PREACHING — to declare the unchanging truth of God’s word in a fresh, new and life-changing way.