Sunday, March 24, 2013

Why are kids leaving church?

This is one of the reasons that I am most passionate about the ministry of Word and Sacrament.  I think these are painful truths.  This article was posted on a friend's Facebook page, and I clicked through and found that it resonated for me:

Top 10 Reasons our Kids Leave Church

Some painful truths from this article:

"we've taken a historic 2,000 year old faith, dressed it in plaid and skinny jeans and tried to sell it as 'cool' to our kids.  It's not cool.  It's not modern.  What we're packaging is a cheap knockoff of the world we're called to evangelize."

we don't offer the "full timeline of the Gospel for every season of life.  Instead we've dumbed down the message pumped up the volume, and are surprised when youth get smart"

"Rather than an external, objective, historical faith, we've given our youth an internal, subjective faith."

"Our kids are smart.  They picked up the message we unwittingly taught.  If church is simply a place to learn life-application principles to achieve a better life in community...you don't need a crucified Jesus for that."

Any thoughts?

1 comment:

Steve Luwig said...

Problem #1: As teen agers you treated them as kids, not people. Even the article calls them kids.