According to research from the Barna Group, "Overall, about three out of ten young people who grow up with a Christian background stay faithful to church and to faith through their transitions from the teen years through their twenties." This translates to seven out of ten who are not faithful to churchgoing and their spiritual walk as they enter adulthood. They may well be children of faith, but churchgoing is not for them.
The question "Who will remain faithful?" is being asked by many Christian leaders and researchers today.
The Barna Group conducts ongoing studies into the state of the church, culture, technology, and young people. Barna Group president David Kinnaman cowrote the book unChristian several years ago to detail their findings form research among unchurched young people who held negative views of Christianity.
While writing that book, Kinnaman discovered a concurrent tide of negativity, Kinnamon wrote You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving the Church...and Rethinking Faith. I found it enlightening, insightful, surprising, and disturbing. I highly recommend it to anyone wanting a deeper understanding of the state of the church today and into the future.
What Kinnaman found is that, during their later teen years, when they start making their own decisions about priorities and values, Christian young adults are choosing to leave the church. Their reasons are varied.
Some feel under-served by faith.
Some see Christianity as as set of restrictive rules meant to thwart a person's independence, an institutionalized religious nanny enforcing an endless list of do's and don'ts.
Some have come to envision Jesus as an airbrushed figure with long wavy hair and kind blue eyes dressed in a flowing robe and patting the heads of small children or cradling lambs. Such a picture may appeal to children in Sunday school, but this inaccurate portrait fails to move young people to a deeper relationship with a living, vibrant, and powerful Savior who is relevant to their daily experience.
For faith to be relevant, boys and men need to see it as a part of their action-oriented heroic quest -- a whole-hearted, sold-out-to-Jesus continual submission of the will to on greater than self.
Boys seek a valiant spiritual quest, fraught with challenge and filled with purpose, sacrifice, achievement, and honor. Males want to connect with a God who is experiential, to have a personal encounter with Jesus that is so compelling they will grab hold of faith and hang on tight as their lives go forward. Through such faith they will find their true identity, not just as a man but as a Christian man.
The above is excerpted from Raising Boys By Design: What the Bible and and Brain Science Reveal About What Your Son Needs To Thrive by Gregory L. Jantz and Michael Gurian.