Alarming amounts of young people leave active Christianity when they leave the youth group.
Experts give many reasons for this: parents who do not live the faith, hypocrisy in the church, lack of mentors, to name a few. While I believe the reversal of all these is vital, I also believe it to be insufficient.
The teaching of youth must inculcate an adult faith albeit on their level. The transition from children to youth must include an appropriately elevated teaching of Scripture. They must be taught the difficult questions and the answers to those difficult questions. The teaching needs to train them how to think biblically and build in them confidence about the Bible’s sufficiency, and this by experience rather than merely claiming it to be so.
The church must be the place where they have seen authentic Christianity and heard the tough questions answered. This will provide them with the confidence that Christianity has the answers when they are faced with the array of sardonic assaults they will experience in college.
I have seen this many times. Often, without sophisticated answers for their faith equaling the sophistication of the attacks on their faith, students recoil out of embarrassment. They view their faith as childish. However, when they are given more than “just have faith,” they actually become stronger in their faith.
To wit, a young person’s faith is not weakened by the attacks he hears, but rather the paplike responses to those attacks.
