I found the article linked below, and I thought some of you who read my blog might be interested in reading it. I only am including here the main reasons the article lists for young adults leaving their churches. Feel free to read the article and excerpt other things for discussion - or simply to discuss any or all of the reasons below.
"Six Reasons Young Christians Leave Church"
Reason #1 – Churches seem overprotective.
Reason #2 – Teens’ and twenty-somethings’ experience of Christianity is shallow.
Reason #3 – Churches come across as antagonistic to science.
Reason #4 – Young Christians’ church experiences related to sexuality are often simplistic, judgmental.
Reason #5 – They wrestle with the exclusive nature of Christianity.
Reason #6 – The church feels unfriendly to those who doubt.
Charmed
4 days ago
5 comments:
That is there problem, not the Churches. If the Churches "die out" because of these reasons, then so be it. Change the churches and their teachings to accommodate the world of the young and they still die out in a different way. Personally, I think the statistics of the young leaving churches is flawed and lower than the secularist Easterners who do these kinds of studies think.
When I served for the first time on the High Council, our Stake President asked a profound question one day in the Stake PEC Meeting:
"Without sacrificing our core doctrine or theology, what would we have to change to have 50% of the people who attend our meetings be non-members?"
We need to ask the same question about how to serve our youth and young adults better - and simply blaming them and not taking responsibility ourselves is not a valid option for me.
There are attitudes that can be changed and policies that can be updated without affecting doctrine. The slow snail like pace that this gets done sometimes alarms me. No flashy sales pitches, just worship that makes sense and resembling further enlightened times.
In my opinion it is not about the doctrine, it is about the doing. As a young adult I left the church because there was nothing to do as a young adult that kept me living the doctrine, so I went and did other things. The focus is on going on missions or getting to the temple and a lot less focus on being a Christian and serving/helping others and doing the things that keep the doctrine alive. Perhaps we need to work on our programs.
How about really awesome service projects like building houses for housing hope, or painting houses? little stuff is fine. we can find that in our own time and way. How about real music that we can relate to. fewer stupid rules like no guitars. How about less judgin people to be sinful just because they want to dye their hair blue?
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