Why Youth Leave

There are times in my life when I ask myself "Do I truly believe in God?  Do I really believe in the Trinity?"  When I was a Baptist, I would find myself constantly struggling with these questions.  God's existence to me, was something I could say with certainty as offhand as "I breathe in air".  It was mind boggling to me that so many people around me would express their eternal fiery love of Christ, when I just accepted Him as a fact, to the point I wondered a lot if I truly believed, because I lacked that fire.

A big question in modern Christianity is why are the kids leaving the church?  Plenty of people who are more intelligent than me have asked that question and answered it in their own ways.  But let me answer it from the perspective of a nomad who church hopped for a long time.  We leave the church because we aren't getting anything real.  Pop Christianity has left Christ behind.

Indulge me a bit here as I give examples.  I remember when I was in high school, one week in Sunday School we discussed how we were Saved.  I was the only one in the room who had waited until high school to be baptized.  Almost uniformly, everyone who went forward at a young age hadn't understood what they were doing, just that they knew it was expected of them.  They knew the words to say, but they did not know Christ in their hearts.

I had always envied their capacity for such faith at a young age and found myself shocked.  Many of them said they only came because it was expected of them.  These people were highly involved with things like the Contemporary Worship Band and Contemporary Service.  They were champions of the idea that the leadership of our Baptist church was taking up that you need to be hip and relevant to capture the Youth.

This idea of being hip and relevant has spawned countless megachurches.  We don't want hip and relevant.  Because "relevant" isn't really relevant.  Jesus Christ is.  Don't water down the Gospel.  Tell us we're sinners.  Tell us that Jesus died for our sins.  Don't tell us God wants us to be rich.  Tell us that He calls for us to suffer and be persecuted for His name. 

I don't want to go to a church and find myself there only for some sort of "relevant" music extravaganza.  I don't want to go to a church and be told that Jesus wants me to be rich.  I don't want to go to a church and be told that Gospel is a morality tale, or that Jesus was a great teacher.  I want to walk into a church and be told that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and that He died for my sins.  I want to walk into a church and not be wowed by the audio-visual equipment, but wowed by the attitude of gratitude and reverence that the people there have.

Not only have we left behind Christ, but we have also left behind prayer.  People go to churches in Pop Christianity, and hear primarily Wish Lists.  This is how they're taught to pray.  Prayer is a conversation, it doesn't need to be asking, just speaking, maybe asking, maybe praising.  Once I was in a Baptist church where a man complained to the pastor's superiors that his prayers hadn't lasted long enough, nor petitioned enough, and soon empty words flowed for upwards of ten minutes.  At a Pentecostal church, people flopped around on the ground like they were having epileptic seizures, and I felt something was entirely off.  At another non-denominational gathering it was a hippie-ish "everyone hold hands while we pray".

For two examples of forsaking prayer almost entirely, let's go back to the church of my youth.  We had a prayer chapel installed off of the sanctuary and volunteers prayed there for intentions during the service.  My mother volunteered about once a month, and she was praying one day when people came in and told her to leave because "some of us have important things to do here".  The thing that was more important than prayer was to set up snacks for after the service.  Another example involving that prayer chapel was when I went in to pray one day and found the room packed with band equipment from our contemporary worship band.  Rather than dig it back out for practice between Sundays from downstairs, they decided it was a good place to store it.

Finally, if we're focused on Christ, it's not about the architecture.  Yes.  I love a beautiful church.  I could spend days at the Basilica in D.C. marveling at its glorious frescoes and statues.  I'd rather attend Mass in a beautiful church than an ugly one.  However, the most beautiful Mass I've ever attended was on a Thursday night in the student union.  We had been rained out of Mass on the Grass and 50 people had gathered.  No one was in that room out of obligation because it was Sunday.  50 people, ages 18-25 were there because they wanted to worship Jesus Christ and wanted to receive His Body in Holy Communion.  The walls were utterly bare, but the souls were anything but.

Youth leave the church because even if everything seems to be there, we know when it's not real.  You can have amazing sermons, you can have rocking worship bands or Gregorian chant, you can have people speaking in tongues, you can have all sorts of small groups for people to be involved in, you can do charity work in copious amounts, you can be decorated as beautifully or gaudily as you want...but we want Truth. We'll know Christ when we see Him.  That's why so many of us aren't there; we hear the words and songs, but we see people behave like the rest of the world or worse.

In closing, the Apostle Paul said in his first letter to the Corinthians a single sentence that sums up why we leave, "If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal."