A five-year long Barna Group study lifts the lid on why three out of every five young Christians disconnect from their churches after the age of 15. The study points out six different reasons for this disconnection.
First, nearly one-fourth of the 18- to 29-year-olds interviewed felt that the church ignores real-world problems while 18 per cent said that their church was too concerned about the negative impact of culture on faith.
Second, many of the survey participants saw their experience of Christianity through the church as shallow. One-third felt that “church is boring,” while twenty per cent said that God appeared to be missing from their experience of church.
Third, the Barna study found that over one-third of young adults resented the church for appearing to be against science, saying that “Christians are too confident they know all the answers.”
Fourth, almost a fifth of young adults feel judged by the church when it comes to issues of sexuality, while two out of five young adult Catholics insisted the church's teachings on birth control and sex are “out of date”.
Fifth, a large proportion (twenty-nine percent) struggle with the exclusivity of Christianity saying that “churches are afraid of the beliefs of other faiths.”
The sixth and final reason the study gives for young people leaving the church is they have experienced it as “unfriendly to those who doubt”. Over a third of respondents felt that could not ask life's most pressing questions in church, while 23 per cent had “significant intellectual doubts” about their faith.
David Kinnaman, who serves as they Barna Group president and is also the author of the book on these findings, “You Lost Me: Why Young Christians are Leaving Church and Rethinking Church,” believes that the church does not understand young adults any more and focuses only on a limited and “traditional” understanding of them. But young adults have changed drastically as they are influenced by the major social, spiritual and technological changes that have occurred in the last quarter century.
“Most young adults no longer follow the typical path of leaving home, getting and education, finding a job, getting married and having kids – all before the age of 30,” he said. “These life events are being delayed, reordered, and sometimes pushed completely off the radar among today's young adults.”
Kinnaman believes churches should cultivate “intergenerational relationships” within their congregations rather than overreacting by creating ‘youth only’ churches.
“In many churches, this means changing the metaphor from simply passing the baton to the next generation to a more functional, biblical picture of a body – that is, the entire community of faith, across the entire lifespan, working together to fulfil God's purposes.”