Church experience failing to retain next generation

Church, we have a problem. We’re in a place where we achieve successful re-entry into society, reclaiming our place as salt and light of the earth, or risk being incinerated by the atmosphere of our culture and ultimately seen as obsolete and irrelevant. Most people I speak with minimize the issues downplaying their severity.

It’s like someone’s given them a sleeping pill and they’re half awake.

Other generations have undergone similar cultural re-entries and navigated very volatile experiences.

During World War II. Dietrich Bonhoeffer headed an illegal seminary for the Confessing Church, a congregation of believers who refused to sign an oath of allegiance to Hitler and the Nazi Party, and ultimately would be martyred for his faith.

Concerning the condition of the culture and the church of his time, he said, “And yet the cultured cannot go along wholly with the Confessing Church in an honest way because of their spiritual traditions. In their isolation, their doubts, their external temporizing and their internal loss of foundation, they are the sacrifice of Cultural-Protestantism.”

And today, not much has changed.

“Cultural-Protestantism” cannot go along with the truth, honestly, because of their spiritual traditions.

What’s the result of this re-entry meltdown pervasively reshaping the foundations of modern church experience? A mass exodus from the traditional church.

Think the case for modern “Cultural Protestantism” is being overstated?

Then consider these facts:

• A majority of 20-somethings — 61 percent of today’s young adults — had been churchgoers at one point during their teen years, but they now are spiritually disengaged, according to researcher George Barna.

• Another survey from Answers in Genesis of 1,000 20- to 29-year-olds found 95 percent attended church regularly during their elementary and middle school years and 55 percent attended church regularly during high school. But of the 1,000 surveyed, only 11 percent still were going to church during their early college years.

The two-thirds problem was confirmed by Barna and USA Today, which found 70 to 75 percent of Christian youth leave the church after high school.

From the inside looking out, having the privilege to talk with young people in crisis, I have some findings of my own.

Young people don’t feel safe asking questions that challenge the status quo. If you cast doubts about certain fundamental doctrines or denominational traditions, you could be ostracized. Questions don’t feel safe and having doubts doesn’t seem allowed.

The 20-somethings I talk with say some pastors seem overly dogmatic and controlling. Some issues of faith always will be cut and dried, but what about the gray areas where pastors and leadership pressure you to conform?

These are such things as healthy boundaries and diversity, but telling parishioners how to think and believe about non-essentials of the faith, run their financial affairs, or where and how long to be away on vacation seems to be an overreach.

Research for the book “Unchristian” found 87 percent of Americans label Christians as judgmental.

Many have left the church because of others acting as judge and jury over trivial matters. Often, attempts to judge end up being misjudgments at best and alienate others from the faith all because they’re not just like you.

The more insecure people are, the more they fear others who are different. That fear, and not faith, drives them to convert others into proselytes who look and act just like them.

People who have passed through my office have expressed a deep desire to feel included and not lectured. If there are inner circles in churches where favoritism is shown to certain families or groups, people began to feel alienated and disenfranchised from the community of faith.

Insiders often don’t see these established inner groups, but visitors pick up on them very easily.

According to Barna, only 44 percent of people who attend church every week say they experience God at church.

People want a relevant community of believers to share meaningful relationships. They don’t want to feel like a pawn on a church chessboard that’s manipulated around to be a sacrifice for “Cultural-Protestantism.”

Church, we have a problem.

Absenteeism is growing on Sundays in America because people don’t want pontification. Rather, they want to personally participate in the process of re-entry, avoiding being incinerated to death by the same worn platitudes.

People want participatory experiences contributing to meaningful relationships, where they share in the process of being salt and light in ways that reshape themselves and transforms “Cultural-Protestantism” into a community of faith experiences far more meaningful than any one-way, Sunday-morning conversation ever could be.

Let us be the saints or we will become the aints. Let us be the confessing church or let us perish.