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.
Top 10 Reasons Kids Leave Church
10. Kids leave church because 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 a 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. Kids leave church because 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. Kids leave church because 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. Kids leave church because we 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?
