How Faith Reconfigures in Young Adulthood
Barna Group has just released some research that confirms what most of us already know - many people make faith commitments (and also church involvements) in their teens, that then dissolve in young adulthood (news of this report came various soruces, including planet telex).
Interestingly, 61% of young adults in the US, according to the survey, had been churched in their teens. That is quite an impressive figure and says a lot of the ability of churches to attract youth to their programmes. However, come mid-twenties, many are disengaging from church at least, if not from the faith as a whole.
2 comments:
Maybe one of the ways that we can start to make church more "user friendly" to youth and even to other is in the structure. Instead of having the set format that we are used to we could start treating it in a similar fashion to a Uni tutorial. After the Sermon or Lesson we could grab a cuppa and actually get a discusion going on the relevant topic and make sure that we all really understand what it is we're being told. At the moment, when we finish that service, we have a cuppa and talk about the footy, or the weather or something while we kill time pretending to be concerned for our church family.
Thanks for that mate - that kind of leads on to my "Question 2" in the "Growing Christ Centred Youth" thread above.
I think it is great if we can get young people to start thinking and discussing things of depth but how do we interest them in the first place? Is this too great an expectation on our youth?
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