Reflecting on a disturbing statistic

There has been quite a bit of buz concerning the latest stats about the number of young people raised in the church who abandon the church and even the faith once they graduate from high school. In light of these trends Kimberly Wagner over at True Woman has posted some thoughts for the church to consider.

• • 69–94 percent of Christian youth forsake their faith after leaving high school.
  • An additional 64 percent loss after college graduation.
  • 75 percent loss of students from The Assemblies of God churches within one year of high school graduation.
  • 88 percent loss of students from churches within the Southern Baptist Convention.
  • 94 percent fallout within two years of high school graduation was reported by Josh McDowell Ministries.1

• What is the problem?

  A heavy burden for the next generation of Christian leaders caused my husband to spend an extended period seeking God’s guidance and direction for insight into this growing trend. What he came away with resulted in (for us) a completely new approach toward ministry.

  We grew up in the “program-driven model” of doing church. That’s all we’d ever known or experienced. My husband surrendered to ministry when only 13 years old and was asked to preach a message at youth camp the very next evening! He was called to pastor his first church when he was barely 18, before he even started college. We kind of “slid into” the pattern of “doing ministry” the only way we knew how. But after seeking the Lord on His view of the church, my husband came to a few different conclusions than what we’d practiced most of our lives.

  We noticed our young families were spending more evenings attending church activities than they spent at home, often dragging young ones through the church door, rushing them into some childcare program, dashing down a hall to slip into an adult Bible study class without even having time to eat an evening meal until possibly 9:00 at night! We started counting up how many hours that our church was dividing up the family in order to have “spiritual activities.” We were alarmed by what we discovered.

• Read the entire article HERE.

What should be the church’s response to this trend?

Do you think these stats are acurate? Are there any “qualifiers” for these stats? For instance, those young people who depart for only a season but return.