Why do youth leave the church?

markelliott · 3 months

I think it's complicated, but the main reason for me and many of the people that I grew up going to church with is that church didn't fill any significant void in our lives. Many of us went off to college or just moved and didn't really need the community that was once provided by the church.

Also, adolescence/young adulthood is a time where many people cut ties to their parents as much as they are comfortable/able. A lot of times, they've been forced to go to church by their parents up to that point, and thus cut it out when their emancipation happens.

I think the only real way to prevent this is to make the place of worship legitimately, independently desirable to youths. The best versions of this I've seen include separate, large services with music and an actively philanthropic youth group. Starting this from scratch is very difficult, resource-heavy, and time-consuming.. and it requires getting youth leaders who are gifted in keeping youths interested.

Good luck.

Links_to_Leek · 3 months

Stop forcing them to go. As a kid I was forced to go. I developed a resentment of the church for making me be there & my parents threatening me with hell if I didn't. Led to me becoming an atheist. If you want kids to stay let them make their own choices some will go some will stay nothing you can really do, especially adolescents they tend to rebel against any authority figure.

wishanem · 3 months

Make the church valuable to young people, and they'll stay.

When I was moved off to college I wanted something different from the church I grew up in. For a while I wasn't interested in church at all. I tried a ton of different denominations and styles, and learned a lot.

Some churches had great music, others had passionate inspiring sermons, interesting dramas, or beautiful buildings.

However, there were 4 things that got me to attend a church more than once:

Relationships - I was approached my first Sunday at one church by an elderly man who offered to have lunch with me every other week and give me advice. Some churches set up regular mentorship and small group meetings. Their value is inestimable.
Free food - Young people are poor people. Even wealthy young people are usually short on time and access to homecooked meals.
Short services - When attending church is a 5 hour commitment, I didn't attend often. Offer me a 30 minute service with an hour long lunch afterwards and I'm there as often as it's available.
Openness - Churches where only members were allowed to participate in some activities are uncomfortable for non-members. Churches which have long lists of beliefs and prohibitions with no room for disagreement feel hostile. Churches which host debates and seminars discussing controversial topics are really attractive to the undecided. This saturday I attended a seminar on "Sexual Identity" hosted by 3 churches working together, where I spoke to a Jewish girl, an orthodox deacon, and a Presbyterian Seminary professor.

About 50% of the people who attend my church are under 30, and they're all over the ideological spectrum. Churches can appeal to young people without excluding the old. It requires a little flexibility and effort, but it's absolutely possible.

Chive · 3 months

I was a regular church attendee as a teenager- voluntarily, not forced to go. I stopped attending when I stopped believing in god, didn't see the point in it after that.

sdbear · 3 months

I came to the conclusion that I was not a natural born sinner in need of forgiveness for the sin of simply being. After that, the rest just didn't seem to make much sense.

silverscreemer · 3 months

Better question to ask would be why they STAY.

cosmonaut205 · 3 months

Depending on the type of Church that you are part of, it could be different reasons.

If it's a moderate, traditional denomination, youth are leaving because they see it almost as a relic of a time that's now past.

If it's a conservative evangelical type community, it may be because they see the very things being preached against (gay relationships etc) are not really so evil in real life circumstances.

I don't mean to assume that either of these are indicative of your situation. I study this phenomenon a fair bit, and I can honestly tell you that it's fairly simple: kids these days have access to more information than ever before. If they have a question about a spiritual, ethical or moral matter, they can find something that conforms to their thinking from virtually any place in the world on the internet. They are no longer confined to their local church community for their answers, or even to socialize. Religion is becoming more individualized, and at the same time, polarized. You're getting a rise of fundamentalism and the ability to pick and choose practices from different religions. Every body has their own concept of spirituality and faith that cannot be met in whole by some groups.

I hope that sums it up nicely.

[deleted] · 3 months

Personally saw incredible hypocrisy.

Fojaro · 3 months

Youth today have better education available, so of course their critical thinking skills will be better.....that's usually the beginning of the end.

TrickyWidget · 3 months

I believe that the traditional notion of organized religion is rapidly becoming outdated. The world that youth are born into now is radically different than the one that spawned the the major traditions in the Axial Age. One of the primary roles of religion is to inform us about the nature of ourselves and the world. But the old information doesn't make much sense to modern kids. That's in part because some things have changed for the better. Old religion is stuffed to bursting with patriarchy, aristocracy, prejudice, and domination of the natural world. We've grown up a bit since then and our kids are starting to know better. It's also in part because of how things have gotten worse. The industrialized world has almost entirely lost touch with any kind of personal, immediate experience of the sacred. We've offered our kids a world where everything is "explained" by science and smartphones and shopping malls are all that really matters.

I believe strongly that we need a new kind of spirituality. Not the flacid, banal sort offered by the New Age movement. And not a regressive push back to try to reclaim "that old time religion". We need something authentic, potent, and rooted in an intimate experience of the visceral, living world. I'm not sure exactly what that would look like, but I hope we find it soon.

chukiesue · 3 months

I've remained a Christian not because mainstream Theology or the church has convinced me (both are horrific disgraces), but because rather than discarding Christianity altogether when it didn't make sense, I studied my butt off, and now hold reformed Theology which I perceive to be perfectly coherent, even withstanding the toughest of philosophical attack.

Other deterrents include:

"fundie" teaching. Stuff like "Let us first discard our brain before we use our brain to ponder God."

Poor leadership examples. If the church as a whole, or people with influence inside the church act in such a way that makes Christianity look un appealing, I wouldn't feel inclined to stay. Paul radiated the love of God wherever he was. Scarcely do you see this anywhere, let alone the church.

The main problem (imo) is that Christianity just looks like a set of rules - nothing else. Children are dying every four seconds of hunger and the rarely does the individual church member give even a single s***. We're not loving our neighbor, we're not giving water to the thirsty, often times, we're not even preaching the Word. This is the appeal with the Jesus>Religion video: It makes Christianity look desirable. Like something that can change someone, like something that inspires them to be a better person. Mature church members can help the younger one (and nonbelievers) by following Christ.

kabas · 3 months

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2011/12/18/millennials-will-change-the-future-of-the-church/

Millennials will change the future of the church

By Fred Clark, December 18, 2011 4:34 pm

First let me tell you a story from almost 20 years ago. My buddy Dwight and I were arguing over what I was going to wear to a meeting.

“I’m not a catcher,” I told him. Catchers have to wear their baseball caps backwards because of the mask. But if you’re not a catcher and you’re not, say, riding a bike into a headwind, then it seemed to me that wearing a baseball cap backwards was unnecessary.

“Just turn it around,” he said. “They expect it.”

“And I don’t even own ripped jeans or a flannel shirt.”

“Get some. Play along, maybe they’ll listen.”

The meeting was with a bunch of older establishment types who previously wouldn’t have returned our phone calls. Dwight and I were putting out a magazine called “Prism,” dubbed “an alternative evangelical voice.” That “alternative” message focusing more on social justice was largely ignored. We were easy to ignore because we were unknown, unproven and underfunded, and mainly because we were too young. We were just in our 20s at that time, and to the old white guys who made up the evangelical establishment of “gatekeepers,” it was presumptuous for people our age to expect them to care what we had to say.

But then Douglas Coupland’s book came out and Kurt Cobain died and, briefly, talk of Generation X was all the rage. A steady stream of polls confirmed what those evangelical leaders would already have known if they had been paying any attention at all to younger people: Gen X-ers were leaving the church in droves and not coming back.

That got their attention. The future of attendance figures, tithes and offerings was at stake. Panic ensued. Seminars were organized. Conferences were convened. Books and articles were written.

And Dwight’s phone started ringing.

Many of the same old white guys who previously wouldn’t give us the time of day were now desperately turning to people our age for advice on “reaching Generation X.” (That was the name of many of those seminars, conferences, books and articles: “Reaching Generation X.”) We wound up having a string of meetings with panicky old white guys fearful that the mass exodus of Gen X-ers spelled doom for the future of the church.

So we went to those meetings, in costume, and we talked about our g-g-g-g-generation.

We explained that we hadn’t been elected the official spokespersons of our generation, but that we were happy to share whatever insights we had, for whatever that was worth. They took notes. We talked about participation and inclusiveness. We talked about music and worship styles. We used words like “authentic” and “wholistic.” We suggested, delicately but firmly, that the older generation’s preoccupation with a peculiar set of social issues seemed off-putting and weird to many people our age. (That’s usually about where they stopped taking notes.)

I don’t think that anything we said mattered much because I don’t think any of it was what they wanted to hear. What they wanted to hear was some secret trick that would enable them to bring Gen X-ers back to church as faithfully obedient spectators in the pews without the church having to make any changes to the way things have always been done. And emphatically without any change in who had always been in charge of doing it.

They didn’t really want to hear about how the way they had shaped the church might need to change in response to the new generation. Instead, they wanted to find some way of changing the new generation to make it conform to the way they had shaped the church.

And then, after about six months of that, the pollsters and the old white guys finally realized another essential truth about Generation X: It’s really small. Compared to either the Boomers who came before or the Millennials who came after, Generation X really didn’t amount to much.

Amanda Marcotte has some insightful thoughts about how this may have shaped X-ers’ tendency to “sit in the corner cracking jokes” instead of trying to change the world. It’s “a numbers game,” she writes. “There are simply far fewer of us than of them.”

So back in the 1990s, the old white guys in charge of evangelicalism eventually decided that they could write off the apostates of the baby bust. Maybe they’d allow some half-hearted “outreach” to X-ers by letting the praise band add drums, but they realized that the future of their church on their terms did not have to depend on passing the baton to Generation X. They decided, instead, to invest their hopes for the future in the much larger — and then still much younger and more impressionable — Millennial generation that followed.

Which brings us to today. Once again a steady stream of polls is telling evangelical leaders what they should already have realized had they been paying any attention: Millennials are leaving the church in droves and not coming back.

Once again panic is setting in as the now-even-older old white guys realize that the future of their church is at stake. Seminars are being organized. Conferences are being convened. Books and articles are being written.

The dynamic is the same. The old guard is still looking for some trick to change the new generation to make it conform to their church on their terms. They’re still looking for some way to make sure that the church of the next century doesn’t look any different from the church of the last century.

But this time around they’re a little more desperate. They’ve squandered nearly 20 years, so now everything depends on the Millennials. And this generation is huge. It’s way too big to be passed over.

I want to discuss several different aspects of this subject — Millennials and the church — so I’ll be returning to this subject in several more posts. Here, though, I just want to stress that one point: For the aging generation that has been running the show in American evangelicalism, everything now depends on the Millennials.

That means that Millennials don’t have to settle for sitting in the corner cracking jokes. They might actually have a shot at changing the world.

SexWithTwins · 3 months

Because they can Google the facts for themselves where once they had to rely on the church to explain away certain questions.

jeblis · 3 months

My guess is it's the same reason people are watching less movies and tv: there's more choices for entertainment out there. Perhaps the best way to get people to stay would be to emulate the churches that are successful.

see0red · 3 months

Today's kids leave the church because they realize they have choices that yesterday's kids never knew they had.

river-wind · 3 months

Part of it is competition for time, like any other activity. I've worked on and off with the Boy Scout in the US for years, and it is facing much the same problem. 75 years ago, the choices for kids were school, work, church, or scouts. Now there are team sports, dance, academic after school programs, video games, tv....

If you ask a kid - "would you rather go play soccer, or dress in a uniform and learn about civic duty/scouting?" soccer wins. Similarly, if you ask "would you rather play soccer or go to church and read the bible" soccer wins. In both cases, if you ask kids to do other things that are part of the group but more active - "do you want to go hiking?" or "do you want to go volunteer to help feed the homeless, or build a habitat for humanity house?", you've got a better shot at grabbing some of their over-allocated time.

nyellin · 3 months

In an ideal world, the number of Christians who were born religious would be directly proportional to the percentage of religious Christians in the general population. That is, the percentage of people who are religious should be constant across all backgrounds. I call this ideal, because it would mean that people are choosing their faith based on what they truly believe in, and not what they were raised to believe in. (This assumes that everyone has had equal exposure to all religious and non-religious beliefs so they can choose for themselves, which is not the case. We'll get back to that.)

In practice, many people stick with the religion they were born into and don't decide about religion for themselves. They do what their parents do, which is likely what their grandparents did as well.

The 21st century has increased everyone's access to free information. For the first time, people can go online and read first-hand accounts of other religions that they never would have been exposed to a century ago. People can also independently research hard facts online, like various claims that the Church has made about evolution, and decide for themselves if those statements are correct instead of having to accept the Church's word.

As a result, youth today are exposed to more ideas and to more knowledge than ever before. Social trends have made it acceptable to become irreligious, so people who were previously quiet about their irreligious beliefs are becoming open. Furthermore, the internet has broken down geographic boundaries. Religious subreddits, for example, allow you to be part of an (ir)religious community that is different from the religious communities near your home.

So: The world may be experiencing the deflation of unnaturally high religious numbers due to a more honest redistribution of beliefs. There are actions which you can take to change that, but the morally acceptable ones (which don't attempt to limit people's access to information) are equally applicable to retaining the religious and to bringing non-believers closer.

keebiejeebie · 3 months

I was somebody who walked away from church. In some ways, it broke my heart because I knew that people would be hurt. Those people, the well-meaning wonderful church people that you're speaking of, probably felt guilty that they couldn't make me stay. The truth is, they didn't do anything wrong. They were (and are) wonderful people, and I felt lots of love and acceptance there, I just couldn't stay to "worship" around an ideology that I grew to understand was false. The things that they believed about the world didn't agree with reality, and no amount of catering to me and my other needs would change that. Unfortunately, that answer doesn't leave the churches with much they can change to lure people back. Nothing about church is tempting when you believe it's organized around a false world view. I do hope, however, that it makes those nice older church folks who I respect feel less personally responsible for the decline.

BarkingToad · 3 months

As someone who walked out of church at age 25, never to return, it came down to a very simple fact: I no longer had any faith left. I didn't even believe in a vague "something", I had finally come to accept the fact that everything I had been taught was a lie.

I had, in short, escaped the matrix. Still the best metaphor for the experience that I can think of.

A big factor was the ready availability of information from all points of view, facilitated by the internet. When you can see both sides of the argument, it's fairly obvious that the Christian (as I was) and generally, the theist, has no rational basis for his or her position.

Lunar_Sunrise · 3 months

If the youth doesn't want to go to church, why try to make them go?

Mofeux · 3 months

I'm betting I'll get downvoted for this, but I mean it as a true criticism. Why would anyone want to be a part of an isolationist and narrow minded organization that all but encourages its leading officials to be child predators?

TheRiff · 3 months

I think it's actually very simple: the generation that is now becoming our senior citizens are a generation that has many people that are very quick to insult people of differing opinions, very pushy about their own beliefs, and generally unbearable to be around.

It's not limited to religion, it's seen in the political divide as well, and probably many other areas. There are plenty of exceptions, after all it is an entire generation, but those exceptions don't make it any easier to deal with the others.

bibs · 3 months

I was attending and quite involved in a church for a while, but I left that specific church because I came to see more and more that it was almost solely driven by the vision of two leaders- over time, neither proved themselves to have much integrity.

Secondly, I'm very much a believer that the church should be actively making a difference in the world (and I don't mean spending every waking hour trying to convert people to your point of view, but helping those who need it, sharing our possessions, fighting anything that takes away people's humanity) and I just never found anywhere that helped me do this. Church made me so busy/tired that I didn't have time to do anything else, so I cut it out in aid to see if I could do better without it.

backstab · 3 months

I never really believed in a god, but went to catholic school. The only church/mass I went to was during school.

simonphoenix · 3 months

For a lot of people, church services are boring. I think if your church wants to retain youth, it should offer a variety of options to worship. I'm not a churchgoer anymore but Bible study (or anything of a social nature) would be something that I'd gravitate towards. I'd rather interact with other people for an hour instead of sitting in a pew singing silly songs and listening to some dude drone on and on.

bceedub · 3 months

so I'm a 19-year old, raised in church (mostly black churches with long services), and I've continued going to church through college, even though I'm far away from home. my mom used to make me go to service when I didn't want to, and I lived in a predominately atheist city (Seattle). I go to a school that is pretty liberal and pretty atheist (Columbia University), so I've got a good view of what sends people away from both church and the faith altogether. I'll speak from a Christian perspective, since that's all I've got.

first and foremost is the faith. for a lot of people, college is the first time they've had the opportunity to look at the Bible in an academic setting. in classes, you look at books like Genesis and talk about the difficult passages in the Bible for even those strong in the faith -- the conversation between God and Satan regarding Job, for instance. the question always comes up of why God would do such a thing to a blameless man. and the answer "because He's God and can do whatever He wants" that I was given as a child doesn't fly (especially if a kid is taking a logic class which proves that appeals to authority are logically fallacious). If there hasn't been sufficient teaching on those difficult subjects, eloquent and persuasive classmates will provide other explanations for God's behavior, or reduce the text to something other than a religious text -- and their persuasiveness will prevail. if the church in their community isn't giving satisfactory, logically sound answers to these questions, they'll just stop going.
second is the lack of time. high school and college students are busy. high school students are busy doing all kinds of extracurriculars so that they can be competitive in the college application process. college counselors will tell kids left, right, and center NOT to talk about their religious activities in their college applications because they fear it will be a deterrent to admissions offices (although I disagree -- I listed my church as my most important commitment in my application and I go to an Ivy League school, so that's not really true). when kids get to college, a lot of them are struggling to find a new set of friends, become accustomed to taking care of themselves for the first time in their lives, and deal with more schoolwork than they've ever had in their lives. they are immersed -- living, socializing, and studying -- in a demographic which, in general, is very liberal, very atheist, and very time consuming. by the time Sunday morning comes around, they're scrambling to finish all the homework due for Monday and church has dropped in their list of priorities. Furthermore, the lack of time also means they don't get a chance to do very much self-reflection. they don't see the emotional toll that not going to church (if they were raised in that environment) is taking on them. they don't have the time, inclination, or the means to examine their spirituality, so they just don't.

If churches and families can do a better job of combating this over-busy culture -- and a better job of preparing kids for what they face if/when they leave the church they've attended all their lives -- I firmly believe things will change.

greim · 3 months

Traditional religion isn't able to evolve as rapidly as youth culture is changing nowadays due to technology. I think most of these kids will come back to religion someday, but it may not be a religion that would be palatable to the older generation.

Smallpaul · 3 months

I wish I could say that it is because Christian churches ask young adults to believe impossible things, but the truth is that UU churches have the same problem. Youth go away to college and do not bother to find a church nearby. Just busy and distracted I guess. More focused on building their lives. Some come back in their 30s and when they have kids.

Kuranator · 3 months

Well children grow up and realize that when an older respected person doesn't have an answer and simply says god did it, or it's god magic, they believe it and then when they say it to person with any type of intellience they get ridiculed and decide that an education is a better way of life instead of saying god did it for everything you don't understand.... GOD MADE THEM LEAVE IT'S PART OF HIS PLAN that he won't tell any about..

CuntSmellersLLP · 3 months

Because the internet exists. For every claim the church makes, a rebuttal is a click away. Easy access to contrary information is why the youth are leaving. For the most part, the only ones who are staying are intellectually isolated by overbearing parents who prevent research outside of approved channels, or don't really care about truth and just want "a relationship with Jesus" for emotional reasons.

lordgloom · 3 months

Old people are more afraid of death; hence, they linger in locales that remind them of an affirmative notion of the afterlife.

evil_twin · 3 months

Maybe they need their own church instead of just going to the church that their parents go to.

skopp · 3 months

Youth are confused. Let them leave. Remember the old adage "if you love something, let it go..."? I would remix it thus: if you want them to be in the church, let them go. If they return, it was of theirown volition not because they were forced

Edit: don't know why the hate, all im saying is that kids are naughty and rebelliouw by nature. I was. Then I matured. I think...

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