Losing Our Youth

I read an article this week contending that 70 percent of youth stop attending church when they graduate high school. If this conclusion is anywhere approaching the truth, it is a startling statistic! How can this be?

The author interviewed a sampling of youth and identified 10 primary reasons. Among them: the Church did not take their intellectual questions about the faith seriously; we sent them into the world unequipped; they never truly experienced true Christian community in the local congregation; and they encountered too much Law and not enough grace.

The saddest (and most preventable) of these, it seems, is the fact that many youth do not experience genuine Christian community in the local church. The author says it best: “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.” In other words, it is common that we shelter/isolate our children/youth from the real-life events of the church (i.e. parents' decision to keep youngsters away from funeral services). We also do not encourage inter-generational relationships.

We are the Church, the family of faith, from the oldest to the youngest. It is important that we join together for the touchstones of life; that we celebrate together the birth of children, and that we cry together when one of our church family members passes into the cloud of witnesses.

There are many ways to include our youth into full participation in church life. If we choose not to provide opportunities for our children/youth to do this, we can't act surprised when they choose something other than church when they become adults.

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What are your thoughts? How can we allow/encourage our youth to experience genuine Christian community in our local congregations? What is genuine Christian community?