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. Kids leave church because 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. Kids are leaving church because 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. Kids leave church because they figure 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 principles 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.
