3 Common Traits of Youth Who Don’t Leave the Church

I am writing this post as a follow up to my blog post from a couple of weeks ago as colleges as atheist factories:

http://stevenuessle.blogspot.com/2014/09/colleges-as-atheist-factories.html

This post will take a look at the traits in young people that allow them to keep their faith as they leave the house of their parents and continue on in their lives and all the potential challenges that may come out.

One of the main thoughts I had in regards to youth and college, and it was confirmed from a conversation I had with an individual who worked with Christians at college, is that youth who “lose” their faith are probably more accurately thought of as youth who never really had faith to begin with. The other option is youth that had a faith that seemed to be on fire, but was built upon very shallow roots that couldn’t withstand the first challenge or setback. I was interested to hear stories of kids who come to college seemingly on fire for the Lord, but it was lost within a Semester. And what was really interesting was that this individual could pick out, within minutes of meeting a young college student, who would maintain their faith throughout their time at college.

I suspect that his observations would dovetail nicely with the article I am going to share, “3 Common Traits of Youth Who Don’t Leave the Church”. I think of this article as I consider the ways that I will raise my son, but I also think that there will be value for those in youth ministry (and the church as a whole) as they consider how they want to interact with the youth and what are truly the most important lessons and virtues to instill in the youth that they are working with.

Again, I also want to state my standard disclosure about youth ministry. It is really hard and I am certainly no expert. I did not grow up in a youth program and I have not spent much time working with you. There are countless articles that are written on how to do youth ministry better (I am going to link to one in my next post), and everyone has great ideas and how it can be improved, especially those that don’t work with youth. But with that said, I do think it is interesting to think about the traits that result in individuals staying in the church, to think about how youth ministry and parents can develop those traits, and to know that there are so many ways that youth ministry and parents can get from here to there.

This is the article that I will be working from:

http://www.faithit.com/3-common-traits-of-youth-who-dont-leave-the-church/#.U_AdBt0Wp2_.facebook

The article is written by a high school pastor and sets the tone by sharing the concern of many parents. Not that there child will misbehave and get into drinking and partying and perhaps worse activities as a teenager, but that as soon as they leave the house they will move on from the church. So many stories of good kids in good Christian homes leaving the church, and mounds of data suggesting that young people are leaving the church.

I have, of course, written much about young people and the church and some of the reasons that people are leaving or are no longer attracted to the church, and those certainly apply, but I also want to highlight this article as getting at something a little bit more foundational.

The first trait - They are converted.

The author wants to stop thinking about good kids and good attendance to church and youth events, and to start thinking of true conversion to a life with Christ.

There are plenty of good people in the world who want no part of Christ. And being a Christian is so much more than merely being a good person. We can train people to be good, our country does a pretty good job of that. What is much harder is to train disciples, to train youth that want to be a disciple of Christ.

However, it stands to reason that people who will stay in the church are people that have been transformed by the church. The youth that will stay in the church is the youth that will church as more than a religion consisting of attendance and good behavior, and more of conversion. Once you have been converted and tasted that the Lord is good, this will stay with the individual for the rest of their lives.

I agree, conversion and being a disciple is the key.

The second trait – They have been equipped, not entertained

The author, again a high school pastor himself, cuts to the heart of youth ministry. He describes fun events that he has partaken in with his youth, but acknowledges that there is so much more needed. There is nothing wrong with fun and entertainment, and that is an important part of fellowship and growing in confidence, but there must be more.

The baseline that the writer suggests is to send out youth with the ability to share the gospel, disciple a younger believer, and lead a Bible study.  If the youth pastor has not done this, he has not equipped his youth with the tools necessary to stay in the church once they leave. If youth do not have a desire for Bible reading, Bible study, and strong examples of discipleship and prayer, they do not have much.

He finishes this section with some questions. The idea should be that when the youth leave after graduation, they should be the type that are ready to join a college ministry, find a church, and be able to lead and disciple other young believers.

I certainly agree with this point. The youth must leave being equipped to continue ministry after the youth group. Mere entertainment will provide no foundation going forward.

The third trait – Their parents must preach the gospel to them

This is the final part of having children ready to leave for college. It is impossible for the youth pastor to do everything for the youth of the church. It is also the responsibility of parents and even the rest of the church to continue to preach the gospel to the youth. There must be a setting beyond just the youth group where youth can develop the skills and equipment necessary to remain in the church.

The common thread the writer mentions is that for every twentysomething who is ministry minded is that they come from a home where church and the gospel is not something on the periphery, but is absolutely central to the life of the family. This is the final trait of a youth who will not leave the church.

But, as the author concludes, all of this still might not matter. Parents and youth ministers can do everything perfect and it still might not matter. The point of this article and my blog post is not to say that there is a magic wand that can be waved and everything will work. There is no 100% formula. But following these guidelines will certainly increase the chances.

I want to conclude with his final paragraph:

Youth pastors, pray with all your might for true conversion; that is God’s work. Equip the saints for the work of the ministry; that is your work. Parents, preach the gospel and live the gospel for your children; our work depends on you.

My next post will examine some articles on youth ministry.

Colleges as Atheist Factories?

So I took a little bit of a break from writing over the past week, mostly because of changes with our son Theo not taking to his teething too well, which limited my opportunities to research and write. Hopefully that is somewhat behind him and I can be a little bit more consistent.

To start it back up, I want to take a look at a series of articles and consider what is happening with young people as they are moving through youth ministry and going to college, and what impact that might have on the future of Christian faith. I want to do this kind of backwards, starting with a look at Christians in college and work my way backwards. I am going to tread a little lightly in youth ministry, as I have not worked (or even volunteered) in that critical ministry, and it is probably one of the easiest to criticize and hardest to do really well. That said, I do have some general thoughts, and there are some articles I want to analyze.

I think that the passing of Labor Day and the start of the school year (for many kids) is a good time to think about ministry and kids and what is happening. One of my favorite clichés in Christianity is that the faith is only a generation from dying out. If we lose Christianity for a generation or two that will be the end of the church. For that reason, young people truly are the future of the church and of the faith. So how are our institutions treating them?

One of the common stories I come across in my Christian circles is the belief that colleges (or at least non-Christian colleges) have a terrible impact on the faith of students. I remember hearing a statistic that something like 95% of Christians who go to a secular college lose their faith during their time there. The image of the student of faith going into a college classroom, seeing all the things that they have been taught for 18 years being challenged and then having their faith destroyed is a common image. It is a common fear and a common foil in Christian redemption stories (for example, the recent Christian movie “God’s Not Dead” – which I admit I have not seen).

But is this reality? Are colleges factories for churning the faithful into atheists? Do such a large number of faithful Christians go to college and lose their faith?

I was always skeptical of this claim if, for no other reason, than my own personal experience. I came to faith during my time at college, and at a college that is probably among the most secular (and great) in the country.

For those interested, it is a story I cover more here:

http://stevenuessle.blogspot.com/2014/07/jesus-perfect-philosopher-personal.html

I always saw college as a time for exploration, and it seemed possible to me that individuals would be as likely to “lose” their faith as they would be to gain it. I also thought there were two other factors potentially at play.

The first is that people might “lose” their faith in college and in the years after because it is such a time of upheaval and transition in general. The stable faith community they had growing up is gone, they are unable to plug into a similar community in college or the years after, they get involved in other things, and faith is put on the backburner for a while. As they get older they eventually return to their faith. It is not so much that college turned them away from faith, but they decided to ignore it for a while, and then returned at a later time.

This brings me to a second point, that perhaps the faith they had grown up with was not all that strong and vigorous to begin with. If they grew up in a Christian bubble, were fed Christianese, and never really engaged it on an intellectual level, perhaps the faith wasn’t that strong to begin with. It is not possible to remain in a Christian bubble for your entire life, at some point faith was going to come into contact with many other thoughts and ideas, and it needs to have some depth to survive. This is a point I will touch on more in my next couple of posts.

All this brings me to an article from The Atlantic, that maybe colleges aren’t atheist factories after all. And this is what I want to focus the rest of the post on.

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/08/the-myth-of-the-godless-university/375950/

The article starts with the common cliché of the person of faith battling the philosophy professor who says there is no God. However, in the third paragraph comes the unlikely thesis, that attending college might make someone more religious.

The article starts by looking at history. In the 1920s and 30s the story of going to college meant you were less religious might have been true, but by the 60s there was no difference between college-educated and non college-educated as to their religious affiliation. And by the 70s, not going to college would make you more likely to be non-religious.

The reasons make some sense, mostly that over the past century there has been a change in the demographic makeup of those who go to college (namely, many more people go). So, in the 20s and 30s, when college was attended by children from elite families, they were less likely to be religious than those who did not attend college. However, but the 60s and 70s, college attenders represented a better sample of the population as a whole, and thus were more religious.

Some reasons for these findings include:

-being non-religious is now more acceptable, so it is likely that the population that doesn’t go to college would be described this way, not just the elite (who originally were the only ones going to college).

-colleges are much less hostile to faith than is assumed. There are college ministries on almost all campuses and are as easy to plug into as any college groups.

There are some problems with the study:

-it does not measure religiosity, only affiliation. So someone could ascribe to a religion but not really have it impact much of their life during their time at college, as I suggested above.

(And that I covered a little bit more here: http://stevenuessle.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-shift-from-nominal-to-none.html)

-It doesn’t cover millennials, and the issues with religious affiliation we have seen with them.

The general conclusion of the author is that even without measuring religiosity, it is likely that those that affiliate with a faith when they enter college are likely to return to it at some point in their life, and the millennials will ultimately do the same thing, even if data and studies on that issue are currently unclear.

The ultimate reason for why college attendees may become more religiously affiliated is by the nature of what a college degree means. They are “joiners”, more likely to be engaged in some sort of civic institution and volunteerism (if nothing else, the church can provide this). They also engage in social behavior in line with the church, including waiting to have children until after marriage and having much lower levels of divorce compared to non college graduates.

The key, in my mind, is to take this information realize that the myth of college as an atheist factory should be dead, and also to consider what it will take to make true disciples of Christ, not just individuals who remain affiliated to a faith tradition.