This
blog post is about the current situation of 20-somethings leaving the church in
America. It is not meant to criticize the church, nor to target anyone. It is
based on our experience in churches before we were in full-time ministry and on the
experiences of other Christian individuals we’ve talked to that are our age. Many
posts have been written on reasons for individuals our age leaving the church,
most of them focus on hypocrisy and are clearly written out of bitterness. That
is not the intention of this post. (For more on hypocrisy see below.**)
We have talked with many leaders of churches who strongly
desire to have younger members active in their church, but don’t know where to
start. Our hope is to share our personal experience in order to share some
patterns we’ve seen in American churches. What
we’ve found as the largest struggles, as have many others we know, is finding a
church that is both spiritually mature (e.i. preaches the Word, and lives it
out), and is focused on building relationships. In the churches we visited, there
were no major problems regarding spiritual maturity that jumped out to us, but
consistently we found a lack of effort for people of the church to reach out
relationally. This seems to be a common theme in many churches we’ve visited.
