Why Are Young People Leaving the Church?

A few years ago the George Barna research group conducted a series of studies aimed at answering a troubling question in Christianity today. Namely, why are young people leaving the church? The research found that 59% of young Christians disconnect either permanently or for an extended period of time from church life after age 15. Why? This is a question that no doubt haunts the minds of many Christian adults, in particular the parents of the kids who are within this 59^th percentile, some of whose children never return to the faith of their youth. Does scripture reveal any insight into this issue? I believe that it does.

But first, a caveat. I firmly believe that the answer to every question we ever raise among ourselves can be found by laying a foundation of biblical truth. However, in this particular case, after laying that foundation I believe the question at hand requires a certain amount of speculation, logic, and historical perspective to arrive at an answer. I believe this because on some level this question addresses issues unique to our time and culture which the bible does not specifically speak to. Make no mistake. I am not hinting that we turn to a source other than the word of God to seek answers to the questions of life. What I am saying is that sometimes, as in this case, the bible provides the root or nucleus of the issue or problem. It is then up to us as students of scripture to take that kernel of truth and extrapolate it out into specific application.

In answering this question I will be making an assumption. The assumption is that we are talking about a real renunciation of faith here. Although there could be tangential aspects of this issue such as someone leaving for a season of sin and then repenting and returning, which the Barna group admittedly included in their rather alarming statistic, I am intentionally avoiding such in my thoughts here. I am dealing strictly with the issue of a young person, raised in a Christian home, who becomes an adult and subsequently leaves the church, in the sense that he or she no longer professes Christ, if they ever did, and proceeds to live a lifestyle of carnality and worldliness alien to biblical Christianity for a prolonged period of time. With that being said, my response as to why this happens is actually very simple to state, although I will spend some time developing it with scripture. In short, I believe young people, or people of any age, who repudiate Christianity and leave the church always do so because they were never genuine believers in the first place. I will present my statement for this position as a series of interconnected building blocks which, when stacked atop each other, will serve to support the structure of my argument.

The first component, or building block, is the biblical doctrine of eternal security. This doctrine teaches that salvation is a free gift from God, and once granted to a believer, cannot be lost by any means. The scriptural support for this belief is overwhelming. Jesus, in John 10:27-29 refers to Himself as a shepherd with sheep who hear his voice, recognize Him as their shepherd, and follow Him. He goes on to teach that nothing can snatch His sheep out of His hand. Building on this concept we see first Paul in Ephesians 4:30 refer to Christians as sealed for the day of redemption, and then Jude in Jude 24 reveal that believers are kept from stumbling by God so that He can present us blameless to Himself. If it was possible to lose one's salvation then how could one be sealed until the day of redemption, which obviously refers to the end times when Christ will return and set up His kingdom and ultimately judge the nations of the world? If the capacity to lose one's salvation was in Paul's mind then he should have phrased it as “sealed until the day of rejection, or sinning, or falling away. Furthermore, who does the sealing? The implication is one of “being sealed” by something outside of ourselves rather than we being responsible for our own sealing, which just wouldn't make any logical sense. Jude reinforces this with his writing that it is God Himself who keeps us from stumbling, for His own purposes.

Paul slips in another facet of this idea of eternal security in his letter to the church at Philippi. In verse 6 of chapter 1 he tells the church that God, who had already begun a good work in them will bring that work to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. What is this work that God had begun in the Philippian church? It was to make them partners or participants in the gospel, as revealed in verse 5. Some would say that based on the context and various clues revealed throughout this letter that what Paul had in mind here was financial partnership. This may be so, but the question of exactly what form the partnership took is irrelevant for this discussion. The reason is that regardless of exactly what Paul had in view when he wrote those words, participation of any sort in the ministry of the gospel such that warrants praise from an Apostle of Jesus Christ indicates the presence of true believers and authentic disciples of Christ. Therefore, his statement that God would bring this work to completion clinches the Philippian church's ultimate success in staying true to Christ.

If there was still any doubt about the veracity of this doctrine, Romans 8:38-39 soundly trounces any and all objections:

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Paul is blatantly covering all of his bases here in making sure that nothing is left out as a potential antagonist who can separate us from the inheritance that we have in Jesus. He gives an exhaustive list of things temporal and spiritual. But then, as if to anticipate and silence objections, he follows his list with the phrase “nor any other created thing”. It's as if he's saying, in effect, “My list is quite complete, but just in case some of you want to try to poke holes in it, allow me to seal the deal by including a blanket statement which covers anything I might have missed.” And since everything apart from God falls under the category of a created thing, Paul is literally saying “everything”. Now, if nothing that exists can come between us and the love of God, why would we imagine that our pitiful sinful attempts to divorce ourselves from our Lord could possibly ever work?

Now then, this teaching on eternal security must be accompanied by an additional point. This will serve as the second building block of my overall argument for why young people leave the church. Namely, if eternal security is true then why does the bible warn so adamantly against apostasy? Doesn't the fact that apostatizing is even brought up an evidence for the fact that we can in fact lose our salvation? Before I answer that, we need to define the word so that we are clear on its meaning. Apostasy simply means the abandonment or renunciation of a religious or political belief. It is the theological term for exactly what we are discussing here, that of walking away from or abandoning Christianity.

An example of a passage of scripture which might cause us to scratch our heads would be 1 Corinthians 15:1-2:

Now I make known to you, brethren, the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received, in which also you stand, by which also you are saved, if you hold fast the word which I preached to you, unless you believed in vain.

Contrary to what opponents of eternal security might endorse, this passage does not teach that Christians can lose their salvation. If it does then Paul was insane and didn't even know his own mind. Furthermore, since according to 2 Peter 1:20-21, the authors of scripture were empowered by the Holy Spirit and wrote in such a way that it was breathed out by God (2 Timothy 3:16), then in addition to Paul being off his rocker so is God. Because you can't say in one passage that nothing can separate us from the love of God and then turn around in another letter and say that “oh, by the way, you are capable of doing it yourself.” That simply doesn't hold logical water. Furthermore, the statement that Paul makes here in 1 Corinthians is quite correct. If one was to stop holding fast to the word of God, and by implication separate themselves from their relationship with Him, then yes they would in fact have believed in vain. But a philosophical statement that is technically accurate does not necessarily make it a fact. I can state that if I was to leap off of a bridge and provide enough aerodynamic lift to my body then I would be able to fly without that statement having any basis in reality.

And besides, I don't believe that Paul was actually making the statement that if it were possible to fall away from Christ then belief would have been in vain. I think Paul was getting at another angle. Namely that there were those in the Corinthian church he was writing to who had made professions of faith but were not authentic disciples of Christ. We see this reality evidenced in Jesus's Earthly ministry when, in John chapter 6 He taught the Jews about His deity represented in a reference to Himself as the bread which came down out of heaven. In response to this teaching the scripture says in verse 66 “As a result of this many of His disciples withdrew and were not walking with Him any more.” There is very clearly a possibility of people expressing faith in Christ that is not genuine and eventually revealing their true colors when the proverbial push comes to shove. The Apostle John makes this even more blunt in 1 John 2:19 where he says the following:

They went out from us, but they were not really of us; for if they had been of us they would have remained with us; but they went out, so that it would be shown that they all are not of us.

This verse requires no explanation. You can't really state this point any clearer than John did in his epistle. And I haven't even touched on the example of Judas Iscariot, perhaps the ultimate example of how apostasy works. It is no less than a biblical reality that sometimes people who profess to be Christians are really not and prove it by walking away from the church.

In addition to this apostatizing that goes on, there is another element we see in scripture of this type of false Christianity. That is the teaching of the visible and invisible church. This pattern of thought has its roots as far back as the writings of Augustine in the 4^th century A.D. but it was brought into full prominence in the reformation, principally due to the efforts of John Calvin to express it. The idea is that there is a visible church, comprised of the formal institution on Earth which preaches the gospel. There is also the invisible church, which is made up of the elect, who are known only to God. All who are in the invisible church are in the visible church. But not all who are a part of the visible church are also members of the invisible church. Augustine and later Calvin didn't just make this stuff up out of their heads. They got it right from the teachings of Jesus Himself.

The parable of the tares among the wheat found in Matthew 13:24-30 presents a reality that is exactly what the doctrine of the visible and invisible church is intended to convey. Namely, that there are unbelievers, or tares, mixed in among the believers, or the wheat in this context. These unbelievers are left in place by God so that His children will not be disrupted. Then at the judgment God will separate the tares from the wheat, the unbelievers from the believers, the visible church from the invisible church. Again, this is exactly the point that Paul was making back in 1 Corinthians when he referred to vain belief. And it's the same point that John was expounding in 1 John. There is a remarkable symmetry to the teaching found on this topic throughout scripture. And it should make us realize that, in the words of Bilbo Baggins, “not all that glitters is gold”.

With these points being made and building off of each other a picture is emerging of young people, raised in Christian homes, perhaps making expressions of faith as children, who then grow up and abandon the religion of their parents as adults in a classic modern day example of biblical apostasy. But why does it seem so prevalent at this point in American history that it is occurring in such large numbers? Why aren't these young tares just staying in among the wheat as in the parable? I believe to answer that we need to go back in time and take a brief look at the culture in which the United States was founded.

Peruse the writings of almost any of our founding fathers, their personal letters, their newspaper articles, their political documents, etc. and you will notice an overwhelming trend. Repeatedly, the men who founded this country echoed a similar sentiment; that we have a creator and that the Christian religion in its focus on worshiping Him is the only source of a moral society. Furthermore, such a moral society is absolutely necessary for the pursuit of liberty to succeed in a nation. Said another way, these men, by and large, believed that religion and morality were the two fundamental foundations upon which they sought to build a country. Even the ones who were not followers of Christ, such as Benjamin Franklin, still held the bible in high regard as the only source of absolute truth. Franklin himself, who some historical revisionists would claim was a staunch Atheist, in an address before the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, urged the congress of this young nation to institute a policy of public prayer each morning before they began their work for the day for the express purpose of asking for God's help, a practice which is still in effect to this day over two hundred years later. And this was one of the least religious of the founding fathers making this request. It was this cultural mindset they took when approaching the daunting task of drafting a Constitution for the governance of the United States. Although the Constitution itself does not overtly reference God or Christianity, they form the warp and the woof of its essence. And make no mistake, these men were by no means aberrations. They represented the thread of common thought in the populace of the colonies at that time.

This was so because of the men and women who were the forefathers of our founding fathers; the Pilgrims and Puritans. These were groups of people who were deeply committed Christians with a comprehensive biblical world view which informed every area of their lives. While by no means being perfect, they were true believers and followers of Jesus who saw as their mission in life the laying of a framework of religious belief in this country that their descendants could use to pursue lives of religious freedom which would honor God. These pioneers saw themselves as stepping stones upon whose backs future generations could walk to glory. In the opening of the Mayflower Compact, the first political document enacted in North America, they penned the following words...

In the name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, defender of the Faith, etc. Having undertaken, for the Glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the Northern parts of Virginia...

These were people who were serious indeed about their religion. So serious in fact, that they endured the death of about half their population during their first winter in the new world. In the words of William Bradford, the governor of the Plymouth colony of Pilgrims for 30 years...

“...they cherished a great hope and inward zeal of laying good foundations, or at least of making some way towards it, for the propagation and advance of the gospel of the kingdom of Christ in the remote parts of the world, even though they should be but stepping stones to others in the performance of so great a work.”

It was because of this intense devotion and single minded zeal for the increase of the glory of God that the colonies which would come to be known as the United States of America were steeped in that high regard for biblical truth, morality, and ethics as well as the creator God who fashioned them that the founding fathers, as mentioned earlier, espoused in their writings and speeches. This resulted in an interesting situation in which Christianity became normative. And not legislated morality or enforced state religion such as the Roman Catholic church practiced. Rather, it was a normative Christianity born of internal morality and desire. This sounds rather idyllic doesn't it? There's just one glaring problem. It doesn't sync with the biblical record at all.

You see, the Bible paints a picture of a small number of true believers who are mixed in among a populace of those who are opposed to God. This was so even in Israel, a nation with a theocratic government which enjoyed having their system of religion interwoven into their governmental structure. Isaiah 10:20-22 refers to a faithful remnant who would return to the land and rely on the Lord. And when Elijah was feeling depressed because of the opposition he was experiencing from Jezebel the Lord told him the following: “Yet I will leave 7,000 in Israel, all the knees that have not bowed to Baal and every mouth that has not kissed him.” Jesus told of this same principle of remnants, small numbers, and exclusivity in Matthew 7:13-14: “Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it.” The Bible never discusses those whom God saves as being the majority, except for future fulfillment prophecies of the time when He will restore the fortunes of the nation of Israel as a whole. So, it simply does not fit with the biblical precedent that suddenly, in America, things would be radically different just because the country was founded upon biblical standards. It follows then that the only logical conclusion is that throughout the history of the United States there were many who claimed to be in the invisible church but who were in reality solely members of the visible church.

How does this relate to the issue at hand today of young Christians walking away from the faith? I believe the numbers of authentic disciples of Jesus were not substantially different two hundred years ago than they are today. Obviously, there is no way to quantify this. But I believe the evidence from God's word supports this notion. The difference today is that, starting with the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859, moving to the secularization of American universities in the late 19^th century, continuing on into the 20^th with Nietzsche's notion of “killing God”, proceeding from there into the removal of prayer from public schools, and culminating in the legalization of abortion and same sex marriage in some states, our country has systematically dismantled the notion of normative Christianity that we once had. And the removal of that idea, flawed though the idea may have been, has removed whatever social stigma that may have existed in our past over the notion of abandoning the Christian religion. Said more bluntly, nowadays no one cares about dropping their faith like a bad habit. On the surface this appears particularly alarming to those who are truly born again, clinging to godly principles in a country gone mad with sin and depravity. But it's really just the removing of the veil of falsehood and of the visible church that once draped our country.

Some may take this argument of mine and become depressed by it. I choose to take a different view. I believe that rather than being a cause for alarm we can take solace in the fact that God is still on His throne, He is still sovereign, and He is still graciously saving just as many people today as ever. It may seem like less. But we have been living in shades of gray for the past two hundred plus years. It was these murky areas on the borders of black and white that caused Jonathan Edwards, even in the midst of the so called Great Awakening in the mid 1700s, to utter these scathing words in his first sermon to his church in Northampton, Massachusetts:

There have been few places that have enjoyed such eminent powerful means of grace as you of this place have enjoyed. You have lived all your days under a most clear, convincing dispensation of God's word. The whole land is full of gospel light, but this place has been distinguishingly blessed of God with excellent means for a long time under your now deceased minister.

And it argues a dismal degree of obduracy and blindness, that persons could stand it out under such a ministry. In what a clear and awakening manner have you hundreds of times had your danger and misery in a natural condition set before you! How clearly have you had the way of salvation shown to you, and how movingly have you had the encouragements of the gospel offered to you!

Such as can live all their days under such means of awakening and of conversion, and have stood it out and have been proof against such preaching, are undoubtedly of exceeding hard hearts. They that are still unawakened, doubtless their hearts are much harder than if they had not lived under such great advantages. Powerful preaching, if it don't awaken, it hardens more than other preaching.

Those means are now gone; you'll have them no more. You have stood it out until the bellows are burnt. You had the preaching, the calls and warnings of your eminent deceased minister till he was worn out in calling and warning and exhorting of you. God was so gracious, and so loathe that you should perish, that he continued his ability of preaching to wonderment. But the founder melted in vain as to you. He did not cease blowing till the bellows were worn out, as it were burnt out, in vain, trying if he could not extract some true silver from amongst the lead. He was very loathe to give you over till he had persuaded, and God seemed loathe to give you over by continuing of him so long to call upon you and warn you. But how many wicked are there that are not yet plucked away?

And lest anyone think that this was only the condition of his congregation prior to the Great Awakening of the 1730s, Edwards had this to say a short time after that great spiritual upswing:

In the latter part of May, it began to be very sensible that the Spirit of God was gradually withdrawing from us, and after this time Satan seemed to be more let loose, and raged in a dreadful manner.

The face of nominal Christianity, or Christianity in name only, was one that Jonathan Edwards was well familiar with. And it is the same face that rears its ugly head once again in the early days of the 21^st century. It is a face that, at this point in history is clearing away those shades of gray that had Edwards and other pastors of his era preaching to churches full of carnal, spiritually dead sinners. It is now revealing in ever greater numbers the true face of Christianity, as the faithful remain while the pretenders fall away. It is this reason more than any other superficial socio-political issues which the problem may be ascribed to by studies and researchers that is causing our young people to walk away from the church in numbers greater than we have ever seen.