by J.D. Neal
This article is about our youth group at St. Matthias, I promise. Stick with me for a minute.
Let's start with some numbers. For most of the last two decades, anywhere from 60-70% of young Christians have left the church after graduating from high school — that's roughly two-thirds. Why do they leave? When asked, most of these young folks described the church as 'childish,' 'arrogant,' 'narrow-minded,' as the place where they were treated like children.
During the latter half of the twentieth century, evangelical and mainline churches got really good at getting young folks to show up to church. Youth groups boomed, middle and high school ministries became their own industry, and churches started spending a lot of energy making themselves look and feel like whatever was 'cool' at the time. And it worked. Thousands and thousands of young folks started coming to church who wouldn't have otherwise. It still works, in fact.
So why don't they keep coming?
Starting around middle school, we stop being children and become... something else. A fourteen year-old isn't usually a mature adult, but they're not a kid anymore either. We enter into a strange state I'm going to call 'youth' — the transition between childhood and adulthood. During this time, we begin to explore our world, acquire and exercise new liberties, feel the first burdens of responsibility, and encounter the rich complexities of romance, grief, and mystery. In short, we start getting a taste of the wonders and depths of mature, human life, and we start forming the attachments that shape our adult identity. The things that we love and identify with during this time hold a special place in our hearts because they become a part of who we are for the rest of our lives. I remember the songs on the radio in high school much more clearly than whatever has been popular on Spotify the past few months.
Our young people stop coming to church because church has become just a part of their childhood. The youth group that got them to show up by playing to whatever they thought was cool at 13 or 14 isn't relevant when they're encountering rich, mature beauty elsewhere in their newly forming adult lives. Simple answers and explanations they got in Sunday school and had reinforced in high school don't stand up to the test of their mature questions and fall apart in the face of real grief.
If we want our youth to stick with us, the way of Jesus has to become a part of their forming adult identities. If we want our youth to become wise, good, vivacious Christian adults, then we have to show them that Jesus can handle their deepest questions, that he can sit with them in the sharpest griefs, and that the fullness of life in Christ is abundant and eternal.
So, what's going on at St. Matthias with our youth on Sunday morning?
Photo by Kelly Lacy from Pexels
Each week, we pray and read the gospel together. Each week, Sam & I ask a question about the passage — a real question, that we're actually curious about — and we lead them in a discussion where they do their best to answer the question using our text. We do this because a good question is one of the best ways to take the Bible out of Sunday school and lead students into the strange, new world of the Scriptures. When they are the ones thinking hard, asking difficult questions, discovering truth in the Scriptures, then the truths that they find and the One they encounter there are far more likely to stick with them as a part of their adulthood.
This is a slow process, where victories are small and there's plenty of awkward silence. It feels counterproductive at times to not just give them an answer — answers are good, after all. Sam and I know, however, that in this way our youth might catch a glimpse of a faith that is bigger and more beautiful than they knew and a God who they just might want to follow into adulthood.