“We lose more kids transitioning between Sunday School and Youth Programs than from teenagers to young adult status, sometimes because that is when parents give them freedom to choose whether or not they go to church. They’ve never been in the service, we’ve spent years teaching them that there is nothing going on of interest to them upstairs during the service, then they age out of Sunday school, so why would they suddenly be interested in what we are doing?”

The above quote comes from an article about a recent Canadian study on the loss of youth and young adults from churches throughout the nation. The report is called Hemorrhaging Faith and the article is here:

http://www.theEFC.ca/whytheyreleaving

By young adulthood 60 percent of evangelical attendees have left the church. The whole issue of youth leaving the church has been a soap box of mine for a while. I have been convinced that we are boring them away from Christ at a rapid pace for the reasons mentioned in the above quote and more.

We rationalize that to adapt our services to changing cultural norms of teaching, technology and learning would be to compromise the faith while at the same time we design Sunday school programs focused on mixed media delivery and interactive involvement for just such reasons. There is a clear hypocrisy going on here.

Andy Stanley, a phenomenal pastor and speaker out of Atlanta speaks of churches understanding the distinction between theology and methodology. That the way we deliver the gospel is our methodology and this should always be keeping pace with culture and the norms of delivery…doing this does not compromise theology.

I think it would be an interesting exercise for youth pastors and churches everywhere to bring their youth into two or three Sunday services and have them act like focus groups. Let them come in with the purpose of taking notes on the experience. What held their attention? What didn’t? Why? What could be done differently to keep them focused and interested throughout the service?

It is not the gospel that bores them…it is not the gospel that they feel is irrelevant…it is us. It is our delivery and our setting.

We have no right to accuse them of being childish and shallow in their desire for a more exciting delivery of the gospel when we are the ones who designed exciting programs for them from ages 3-12 or 3-17 and then expect them to transition into a lecture hall of sitting and standing to largely irrelevant tunes and then sit and listen to one person drone for 30-45 minutes. After all they used to be involved, they used to create the gospel message in art, drama, film and action.

For those who claim being contextual with the gospel is being worldly I would simply quote the following verse from scripture:

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” – John 1:14

There is nothing more contextual than a holy transcendent God humiliating the Godhead by willingly taking on human flesh for the sake of communicating the gospel. If God is willing to condescend to humanity surely we must be willing to meet our youth where they are. Who knows – in the process we may even learn something.