|
Sadly, there's at least one Millennial-related headline we can't leave in the last decade: Millennials are killing churches.
According to Pew Research, four in ten Americans between the ages of 23 and 38 now say they are religiously unaffiliated. This is the biggest drop in religiosity between generations ever recorded.
While part of the hemorrhaging is explained by the forty-year decline in mainline Protestant bodies, evangelicals are not off the hook. We cannot say that conservative theology, in and of itself, is enough to shrink-proof your church. The Southern Baptist Convention, for example, America's largest evangelical denomination, just hit a 30-year membership low.
Young people have left evangelical churches and are still leaving, and new data can fix some of our wrong thinking about it.
For instance, I've heard for years that young people who leave church in their college years will come back, as if nothing can or should be done about it. Let's set aside for a moment what should be obvious, that we should never be okay with anyone ever rejecting Christ or His church.
According to a study by the American Enterprise Institute, Millennials who drop out of church often end up staying away permanently. Maybe in the past, young adults who wandered away tended to become religious again when they got married and had kids. But things have changed, and there seems to be three main differences.
First, many young adults today who leave the church never had strong religious ties to begin with. Whether their parents didn't attend services regularly or they were passed back and forth between homes with different beliefs, many young adults weren't raised with God or His people at the center of their lives.
Second, those who drop out and have gotten married tend to have a spouse who is also not religious. For obvious reasons, this makes them less likely to go through the effort of making it to Sunday services or raising their families in the faith.
| 
_
10% Offer on gourmet sweets for New Year | Use WELCOME24
Posts
------------------------------------------
.jpg?x-oss-process=image/auto-orient,1/quality,q_70/resize,m_mfit,w_350,h_350/format,webp)
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
No comments:
Post a Comment