Zeal For Truth

Last week USA Today published an article about the fact that many young adults leave church. This is nothing new; young adults have left churches in droves for a long time. What is new in the last few decades is that more and more of these young adults are not coming back when the get married and have kids.

In fact this article may be good news, in the way that the bad news being less bad than expected can be good news. 35% of young adult church drop-outs return to their church attendance by the age of 30, and an additional 30% attend sporadically.

What I really want to discuss however is a quote in the article by Ed Stetzer. The article quotes him as saying “Too many youth groups are holding tanks with pizza. There’s no life transformation taking place. People are looking for a faith that can change them and to be a part of changing the world.”

I realize that not all youth groups are like that; however there does seem to be a large number of youth groups that are more intent on entertaining their teens than developing them spiritually. I believe a part of this is most churches’ focus on numbers. Churches are happy to be able to say they have a large youth group. If the group is doing the teens any good is often a lesser concern (or it’s simply assumed that it is having a beneficial impact on the teens), and admittedly, is not as easy to know.

I also think that churches often expect to little from their teens. All that many churches expect from their teens is that they show up to church and/or youth group and that they avoid certain things such as drinking alcohol and having pre-marital sex. I wonder what would happen if we expected more than that from our teens.

I also wonder just how much this phenomenon is true for the not-so-young adults as well. For this age group, are churches merely holding tanks with singing and preacher-watching?