Shooting Ourselves in our Ecclesiastical Foot

Young people aren't coming to church. That's the revolutionary finding of a recent survey by LifeWay Research. According to the report, seven in ten Protestants ages 18-30 who went to church regularly in high school say they quit attending by age 23 and over a third of those dropouts had still not found their way back to the sanctuary by the time they turned 30. What has turned them off? The people they experienced there -- and, of course, the pastors. According to the survey, the dropouts found us "judgmental, hypocritical or insincere." Ouch! That hurts, but it isn't that surprising. It is something of a job description for teenagers to view older adults as judgmental "sell-outs" who have lost track of their ideals and dreams and basic integrity in order to make a buck and get along. I'm not sure that adults in the church are any worse in those categories than others -- but then perhaps our teenagers and young adults are simply disappointed to observe that we are not better.

What really caught my attention in the report was the 52% of respondents who "had religious, ethical or political reasons for quitting." Religious reasons for leaving the church? Ethical reasons? I recognize that it is dangerous to read too much into simple statistics, but the notion that a critical mass of people find the church to be detrimental to their faith experience ought to give us "church folk" cause to pause. Find us irritating. Find us disappointing. Even find us to be failures in our quest to be effective and faithful disciples, but God forbid that someone find us detrimental, counter-productive and ultimately destructive to the cause of Christ.

If I understand at all the mission of Christ's followers, it is to function as a sign, foretaste, and instrument of God's coming reign. We are to be, as the Apostle Paul characterized it, "letters of Christ, prepared by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts" (2 Corinthians 3:3). If the results of the survey are to be believed, we are functioning more like junk mail than letters of recommendation.

I stay awake at night imagining the kind of church from which people could not bear to stay away. Some people are sure that church has everything to do with programmatic, theatrical flame, sizzle and fizz, but I am more and more convinced that it has to do with a manifest integrity between word and work; with passion for and depth of commitment to the God who has found and embraced them; and determined hospitality.

But then the prophet Micah already said that --
"God has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" (6:8)

Now, if we could only do it more consistently, more transparently, more joyfully.