Why are children in Christian families leaving the Church?

A few years ago, both the Barna Group and USA Today unearthed the same statistic, which, although in many ways shocking, strangely came as little surprise to anyone who had been paying attention: Three out of every four children from Christian homes in America walk away from the faith soon after they leave high school.

The biggest cause of this turning away from the faith was said to be intellectual skepticism. A child grows up learning and accepting something of the Christian faith within their family and church, only to ditch it when confronted by the juggernaut of secularism in the media and the universities a few years later. Given this primary assumption, it is perhaps not surprising that a quick search of the internet for responses to this statistic tend to emphasize sound Bible teaching and, in particular, good apologetics as the remedy.

However, though good Bible teaching and apologetics ought to form part of any cure, I think it may be a mistake to assume that they are necessarily the most important. There are a host of other reasons that lie behind the facade of intellectual skepticism, and what I want to do is to engage some of these reasons from two angles. This first piece will be somewhat negative, addressing some of the reasons why the Christian faith is just not surviving from generation to generation, and then, in next month’s piece, which will be rather more positive, I want to suggest some practical ways that this can be tackled.

Before continuing, it is necessary to clear up one misconception. The Barna and USA Today findings were certainly alarming, but it must be stressed that they were reflecting only what is going on in America and perhaps the rest of the West. We members of Western civilization often fall into the trap of looking only as far as our immediate surroundings and concluding falsely that Christianity as a whole is in decline. But this is not the case. The message of Jesus Christ and Him crucified, buried, and resurrected has lost none of its potency, and in many parts of the world, Christianity is thriving with the most powerful message the world has ever seen, still at work transforming lives and communities.

Nevertheless, in the West the faith is undoubtedly in decline and we must ask why this is. A whole list of reasons could be given, but I want to hone in on just five.

The subjective gospel

I recently asked a Christian friend to explain in a sentence or two what he understood to be the Gospel, and he responded by saying that it is “repentance towards God and accepting Jesus as your Lord and Savior.” Of course, this is just one person’s answer, yet having spoken to many Christians over the years I think this is probably fairly representative.

However, the answer given is not the Gospel, but is rather what our response to the Gospel should be. Our response is subjective, whereas the Gospel itself is an objective statement, a series of historical events.

In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul writes, “Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.”

The Gospel is also summarized well in the Nicene Creed: “(Jesus Christ) was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried, and the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father.”

Much of modern, Western Christianity emphasizes, to an unhealthy degree, our subjective response to the Gospel as if it were the Gospel. Furthermore, emotions and experience often seem to hold a higher place in the minds of many than the objective truth. One of the many examples of this type of thinking is the practice of giving testimonies—“how Jesus helped me”—as a means of evangelism.

Without wishing to disregard emotions or testimonies, this has sometimes sidelined the objective message of the Gospel: Christ the God/Man was really crucified and was really raised from the dead at a real point in history. In its place, the idea has been sown in many minds of the younger generation that Christianity is an entirely personal and relativistic belief. It is not difficult to then see why multitudes have turned away.

Failure to show our children how Christianity applies to all of life

Many children grow up hearing the message of “how to get to Heaven,” then when they go into the “real world” they discover that there is a huge mess that requires solutions. In the minds of many, Christianity becomes associated with escapism, while tackling real issues appears to be what the secularists are all about.

All of which is a travesty, firstly because secularist “solutions” cannot do anything but lead us into an even bigger mess, but also because it ignores massive chunks of Scripture and indeed the whole sweep of redemptive history. Yes, the Bible is concerned to let us know that this life is not all there is and that there is an eternity to come, but it is also concerned with the way we live now, containing the basic blueprint, laws, and ideas that should help humanity to deal with any and every situation that might arise.

Failure to see this worldview throughout the Bible and to pass it to our children is a sure way of teaching our children that God doesn’t much care about this world. In turn, this leads them into the arms of the secularists who apparently do care.

Lack of adult repentance

There is nothing so geared to repulse our children than if we are constantly admonishing and rebuking them, telling them of their duties, their sinfulness, their faults, and their need for repentance, while steadfastly refusing to hold ourselves to a similar level of scrutiny and confessing to them when we mess up. Conversely, there is nothing so likely to turn the hearts of the children to the fathers as when those fathers humbly apologize to their children when they mess up, seeking their forgiveness as well as God’s.

If we have hurt someone in our sin, and we repent to God but refuse to seek the forgiveness of the neighbor we have hurt, this is not true repentance (Matthew 5:23,24). However, it is a great temptation to think that this sort of thing just doesn’t apply to our 4-year-old that we just yelled at. Yet it does. They are our neighbors, and if we have wronged them, we need to put things right with them, regardless of their age or our authority over them.

There is nothing more likely to convince a child that we really do believe in the power of God to forgive our sins than if we not only humble ourselves before God and confess what we have done to Him, but also confess to wrong we have done to them. Failure to do this, year after year, is one of the surest ways of storing up resentment in a child’s heart—a resentment which many take as a reason later on to reject Christianity, seeing it as a religion consisting of nothing more than mere hypocrisy.

Failure to love our children as God created them

Of all the reasons why the next generation is falling away, this may well be the biggest single factor. I came across a couple of testimonies recently of young women who had turned away from the faith, despite having been brought up in seemingly solid Christian families. Both families were hot on Biblical teaching and apologetics and to all appearances seemed to be the archetypal well-ordered Christian families. But in both cases the fathers forgot to love their children. They tried to fit their children into their grand cause—whether it was the cause of the “well-ordered” family, the Quiverfull, the apologetics, the evangelism, or whatever else—and failed to love them as human beings in their own right.

For many 20-somethings who walk away and cite intellectual skepticism as the reason, this reason probably lies at the heart of it all. The Gospel of Jesus Christ requires that we turn away from our sins, but it does not require that we lose our God-given characteristics. One of the biggest temptations we face as parents is to try and mold our children in ways which please us, but which are not required by God and are not in tune with His individual design of each of our children.

The consequence of this failing is children who go through their whole childhood feeling that their parents do not truly love them for who they are, but rather for what they think they can turn them into. But for the grace of God, it is almost inevitable that such children will reject Christianity, especially if they later on find a person or a group of people that does accept them with their God given personalities, traits, and talents.

Failure to involve children in the worship with the church

I recently did a quick survey of churches in my area and found that almost all of them had Children’s Church or Sunday School at the same time as the main worship service. This practice is so common in the modern church that multitudes of the children of believers may go through their entire childhood without ever worshipping God with the rest of the congregation.

There are certainly many dedicated teachers who make sacrificial efforts to teach children in these settings, and a lot of good is being done. But separating children from the main worship with the church may still inadvertently cause damage.

Yet this is far from the norm presented in Scripture. Just to take two examples:

“Meanwhile all Judah stood before the Lord, with their little ones, their wives, and their children” (2 Chronicles 20:13).

“Gather the people. Consecrate the congregation; assemble the elders; gather the children, even nursing infants” (Joel 2:16a).

In other words, when the people of God gathered for worship and to hear the Word of God, the children were present. The corporate worship of God is meant to be the highest thing we do, and also the thing that drives the rest of what we do. It should be for all ages, from the youngest to the oldest. Failure to involve them in the church’s main worship may serve to sow the seeds in their minds that this worship is largely irrelevant. It is then not a great leap to conclude that God must be irrelevant too.

Conclusion

If we have damaged our children in the ways mentioned above and more, we need to repent. In the second part of this article, next month, I will look at positive things we can do—through God’s grace—to get our children to not only love the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but to desire to pass it on to their children in their turn.

Rob Slane lives with his wife and five home-educated children in Salisbury, England. He is the author of The God Reality: A Critique of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, contributes to the Canadian magazine Reformed Perspective, and blogs on cultural issues from a Biblical perspective at www.theblogmire.com.