The church’s dropout problem
Two weeks ago I shared some thoughts from Steven Garber’s book The Fabric of Faithfulness about the importance of connecting belief and behavior, especially during the college years. Developing a coherent worldview that makes sense of life, finding a mentor, and participating in community, he says, are three key factors in preparing college graduates not just to get a job that “pays the bills” but to be prepared to live well.
Today I turn to a closely related book, You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church... And Rethinking Faith (Baker) by David Kinnaman, president of the Barna Group and co-author, with Gabe Lyons, of the much-talked about book unChristian.
Kinnaman states the problem clearly:
More than half of all Christian teens and twentysomethings leave active involvement in church.
Here's the book trailer:
When I was graduating high school and starting college I found myself at a crossroads. I looked around at our church of a couple hundred members and saw just about no young adults who had stuck around. Some had gone off to college elsewhere, but like many others I was staying in the area and would be commuting to a state university in the fall. I never did any formal research, but it seemed to me at the time that I had one of three options: (1) stay put and either join my parents in their Sunday school class or pretend I was still part of youth group; (2) find a new church; or (3) drop out altogether.
The third option didn’t appeal to me, and while staying put is a good move for some people, I decided it was best to find a new church. And I did. I found a large church in the area that had a young adult ministry, with some who had grown up in that church, others who hadn't really experienced church before, and others like me who transferred. I was part of that church for a decade -- for a while as part of the ministry staff -- until I moved away last fall.
I’m grateful to have found a church community that provided some stability and helped me and so many others to grow spiritually during the tumultuous twenties. I know that finding a church like that is far from inevitable, and I’m grateful.
Kinnaman is careful not to pinpoint the blame for the alarming drop-out rate on anyone in particular, but he does share what young adults have repeatedly said when his team interviewed them. Basically, this: you lost me.
We’re living in a time of “compressed social, cultural, and technological change,” he writes, and churches must do more to figure out how to adapt while remaining faithful to scripture and mission. Of course, in many cases, one’s decision to leave a church has more to do with that person than with the church, but all too often, the church has failed to give young people good reasons to stick around.
In Kinnaman’s research, the most common complaints are that churches are seen as overprotective, shallow, antiscience, repressive, exclusive and doubtless. He unpacks each of these themes chapter by chapter, and it seems to me he does so graciously and with nuance. And he suggests shifts churches can make to do their part not to lose this generation of church kids. The recommended shifts are good ones, I think, though not necessarily predictable at first glance.
Rather than seeking to protect teens and young adults from “the world,” churches can become communities of discernment. To counter the view that church is shallow, boring, or irrelevant to our lives, he suggests an emphasis on apprenticeship. For the many who struggle to reconcile science with faith, churches can draw upon the biblical theme of stewardship. Rather than simply focusing on repressing human desires, churches can affirm deep, healthy relationships. While some claims of Christianity are indeed exclusive, we’re called to love and embrace everyone as people made in the image of God. And finally, while airtight apologetics sometimes leave little room for those with doubts, there is something irreplaceable about becoming doers of the word together.
Young adults leaving church isn’t all new, and as always, many who leave may eventually wander back on their own, one way or another. But it would be a whole lot better if churches took seriously these factors that seem to be pushing church kids away, and do what we can to give them meaningful reasons to stick around.
I’m grateful for those who are giving a lot of attention to theologies of faith and work, and the importance of vocation. The Washington Institute for Faith, Vocation & Culture is one good example. For those wrestling through questions of science and faith, I think of The Colossian Forum. And for those frustrated that churches seem unwilling to grapple with tough questions and those with doubts, I’m encouraged by Antioch Church’s Redux, affirming that it is good to ask questions.
I know there are pastors, parents, church leaders, students, and all kinds of others all over the country and all around the world who are committed to young adults and their spiritual journeys. If that's you, thank you.
If you’re one who feels that the church has lost you, I'm sorry. But please don't give up. We need you.
Repaso: Byron Borger on Cockburn’s legacy; Ross Douthat on heresy; social entrepreneurship & faith; peacebuilding & the “war on drugs”; poverty & charity in the early church
1. Byron Borger talks Bruce Cockburn
You may recall that two months ago I posted a review of Brian Walsh's Kicking at the Darkness: Bruce Cockburn and the Christian Imagination (Brazos). Bookseller Byron Borger has been praising the book for some time (and wrote a blurb on the back cover), but he has just now posted some extended reflections on the importance of Cockburn as an artist who grapples honestly with matters of faith:
One does not have to like every Cockburn song or album, let alone agree with every view he seems to express, to appreciate his exceptional gift as songwriter and musician and to be aided by his observations, rendered in song. And one need not agree with every line in every Brian Walsh book to appreciate his preacherly gospel call to be faithful to the Biblical narrative, and to reject worldly accommodation to the idols of modernity.
2. CT’s interview with Ross Douthat
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has a new book out called Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (Free Press). In it he argues that Christianity in the U.S. has a heresy problem and that we need to return to more traditional beliefs and expressions of faith. I haven’t read the book yet, but it’s generating a lot of buzz. Here’s a snippet from Christianity Today’s interview:
[T]he nature of heresy is not that it takes a Christian teaching and gets it completely wrong. Instead, it takes a Christian teaching and emphasizes it to the exclusion of anything that might counterbalance it. It isn't wrong to suggest that there are biblical passages that state that God blesses his servants in this life as well as the next. There are biblical passages that suggest a link between a nation's morality, a nation's religious beliefs, and its historical fate. But Christian orthodoxy always counterbalances those emphases with other truths.
3. Social entrepreneurship and Christian faith
Though I wasn’t able to attend in person, I enjoyed watching a bit of the livestream of the Q DC event last week. I was especially inspired to see presentations from three Praxis Fellows -- social entrepreneurs building high-impact organizations as embodiments of the gospel in all spheres of life. Dave Blanchard and Josh Kwan of Praxis have a piece in the Washington Post about their work:
We are inspired by Jesus’s example, and we started Praxis to help other Christians who are trying to restore society and culture so that a hurting world may be whole again. Praxis is an accelerator program for social entrepreneurs and innovators compelled by their faith to create new ventures that advance the common good. Each year, we provide Praxis Fellows with the knowledge and networks needed to build world-class organizations that address key social issues.
4. Ten Stories from mewithoutYou
I’m really looking forward to the new album from mewithoutYou, due to release on May 15. I never cared for them as a band until last time with It's All Crazy! It's All False! It's All A Dream! It's Alright. We’ll see how this one feels, though, listening to it now on the other side of the country, far from the band’s native Pennsylvania.
5. Rhetoric and reality at the border
The Washington Office on Latin America has released a new report focused on security and migration at the border between the U.S. and Mexico, looking at the data rather than the partisan talking points. Here’s the executive summary and here’s the full report (both are PDFs).
6. Peacebuilding and the “war on drugs”
The MCC Latin America Advocacy Blog has a post on the connection between peacebuilding and the “war on drugs” and puts forward some good questions:
Addressing root causes; the need for a just peace, not just controlled peace; looking at the problem through a public health lens rather than a public security lens; doesn’t this sound like a discussion of conflict transformation and peacebuilding? Are there other contributions that a peacebuilding model can offer in this debate? An emphasis on human relationships and an analysis of power dynamics? Working simultaneously at multiple levels from the community to the nation state? Striving for justpeace, “an adaptive process-structure of human relationships characterized by high justice and low violence” (Lederach)?
7. Philadelphia’s homeless feeding ban
My friend Paul Burkhart, who lives in Philadelphia, has some interesting (provocative?) thoughts on the city’s new ban on giving food to homeless people in public areas. He shifts our attention from hunger (which he says isn’t the big issue here) to dignity:
All humanity has dignity because it is made in the image of God. We all are well-aware by now (hopefully) that when it comes to our choices, we so often want things that are not good for us. We frequently want to engage in things that in the end rob us of this dignity as the highest of God’s creatures. How does God honor our dignity? I propose that it’s less about letting us do what we want, and more about acting for our good, sometimes even in spite of our choices.
8. Poverty and charity in the early church
The Gospel Coalition has shared this video featuring John Dickson from the Centre for Public Christianity and Macquarie University, produced as part of The Faith Effect from World Vision Australia:
Repaso is intended as a thought-provoking compilation of news and commentary from the past week related to the intersections of faith, development, justice and peace. As always, I welcome your thoughts on any of the links and ideas in this roundup!
[Photo credit: UK Study Tour blog; "Stairs in Canterbury Cathedral, Worn from Pilgrims crawling to pay homage to the murdered Thomas Becket"]
Rene Padilla on evangelism, ethics and the “teeth” of the gospel (The Lausanne Series, Part 1)
Last week I introduced this new series on the Lausanne Movement and its contributions to a better understanding of the intersections of faith, development, justice and peace. As I mentioned in that post, I’m going to begin with a presentation from René Padilla titled “Evangelism and the World.” Padilla is originally from Ecuador, and along with Samuel Escobar (who we’ll turn to next week) he was a pioneer of what became known in Latin America as “integral mission.” He was also a leader of the Latin American Theological Fellowship and has written a number of books including Mission Between the Times: Essays on the Kingdom.
Taking a look at the spectrum of Christian belief and practice at the time, Padilla saw two “extreme positions.” On the one hand, adherents of the social gospel in North America, and proponents of liberation theology throughout Latin America, understood salvation to be limited to the physical, political and social realm. Meanwhile, fundamentalists and evangelicals were reducing salvation to the future destiny of the soul. Both views of the gospel are incomplete, Padilla argued, saying that Christians must embrace “the whole Gospel for the whole man for the whole world.” He continued:
On the one hand, the Gospel cannot be reduced to social, economic and political categories, nor the church to an agency for human improvement... On the other hand, there is no biblical warrant to view the church as an other-worldly community dedicated to the salvation of souls, or to limit its mission to the preaching of man’s reconciliation to God through Jesus Christ.
In this presentation in 1974, I’m sure Padilla ruffled some feathers, though he believed that for the most part he had a sympathetic audience (he was, after all, speaking to a room full of people committed to the gospel and its global implications). Like Dietrich Bonhoeffer a generation or so before him, Padilla issued a devastating critique of superficial evangelism, what Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace.” Padilla argued that evangelism is about more than just getting people to believe a certain set of doctrines to ensure a future reward:
The aim of evangelization is... to lead man, not merely to a subjective experience of the future salvation of his soul, but to a radical reorientation of his life.
This radical reorientation of one’s life, he goes on to say, has unavoidable ethical and social implications. Padilla doesn’t deny the relationship between the gospel and personal holiness (and neither do I!), but knowing his audience, he was zeroing in on a huge blind spot. Evangelicals had all too often concentrated on “microethics” while tending to shy away from anything having to do with “macroethics.” People being shaped by the gospel ought to be concerned about both, he argued.
What’s more, he critiqued the pervasive problems of worldliness in the church, adapting the gospel to the “spirit of the times.” While evangelicals were quick to decry secularization, he said, they often failed to recognize the ways in which their understanding and practice of Christianity was shaped more by the prevailing culture than by the gospel. This isn’t a problem unique to North American Christians by any means, but given American Christianity’s influence around the world, confusing Jesus’s offer of abundant life with the American Dream presents a serious problem for Christians everywhere.
Recognizing our propensity to confuse the gospel with our culture’s understanding of “the good life” should lead us to a process of prayerful discernment, seeking to contextualize without becoming syncretistic, to use a couple of big missiological terms. When we fail to contextualize well, we either withdraw from the world we’re called to love, or we become no different from the world; both represent unfaithfulness to our Lord. In ethical and social terms,
When the church lets itself be squeezed into the mold of the world, it loses the capacity to see and, even more, to denounce, the social evils in its own situation... A Gospel that leaves untouched our life in the world -- in relationship to the world of men as well as in relationship to the world of creation -- is not the Christian Gospel, but culture Christianity, adjusted to the mood of the day. This kind of Gospel has no teeth.
By marching along in the world’s parade, favoring quantity to quality, and embracing technological efficiency in our churches and ministries without question, Padilla argued, we reduced the gospel to a “cheap product” and “turned the strategy for the evangelization of the world into a problem of technology.” Technology and efficiency have their place, he said, but "it is to this absolutization of efficiency, at the expense of the integrity of the Gospel, that I object.”
For those of us who would say we take the Bible seriously, we’d do well to examine our understanding of the gospel to see whether, in light of Scripture, these critiques have merit. What cultural values or norms have we absolutized at the expense of the integrity of the gospel? How have we adjusted the gospel to the mood of the day?
For those of us who are part of the church in the U.S., who can’t simply shake off our culture, we’d do well to ask how we can overcome the temptation to settle for cultural Christianity. At the same time, for those who are part of the church in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and elsewhere, the challenge is to be proactive, to avoid creating your own culturally-modified, toothless Christianity.
The gospel is to be incarnated in culture wherever we are, affirming what is good, resisting what is evil, and discerning, through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, where that distinction lies. I’m grateful to René Padilla for helping us begin that process of discernment.
I shared this video last September, but here René Padilla and Samuel Escobar, as Latin American leaders, reflect on the Lausanne Movement's accomplishments and shortcomings. Next week I'll take a look at Escobar's presentation at Lausanne in 1974.
[Photo credit: Latin America Mission]
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