8: Disengaged and Dropping Out
DISENGAGED AND DROPPING OUT
Understanding the Reasons People Choose to Leave Church Life
The fact that most unchurched adults fall in the de-churched camp rather than in the purely unchurched category means we need to try to understand people’s reasons for leaving church. Most faith communities place a high priority on the number of people involved in their ministry, viewing it as a gauge of success, so the “dropout problem” is quite meaningful (alarming!) to many churches. But the issue is more nuanced than many churchgoing Christians assume. The challenge is to understand the unique reasons people disconnect from churches on their spiritual journey. Some depart from church life due to a felt need for more extensive spiritual exploration; others to redefine the space where the culture and their faith intersect; still others in outright rejection of the Christian faith they once pursued. Effective outreach to these various groups cannot be one-size-fits-all.
No single reason explains why most currently unchurched people have left the church. Most of our significant life decisions are driven by a confluence of factors that combine to push us over the edge into a new behavior. Considering the fragmented lifestyles common to today’s culture, especially among young adults, the discovery that there are many reasons for leaving churches behind should not come as a shock.
Many of Barna Group’s resources and energies have been devoted to understanding the departure of young adults from church life when they leave home for college or enter the workforce after high school or college. Since the publication of You Lost Me in 2011,[11] we have heard from hundreds of people in older generations who saw themselves in one of the three typical dropout journeys David identified in that book: the nomads, the exiles, and the prodigals. While most of our research centered on young adults, we’ve discovered that much of it is accurate for older adults as well. Since each de-churched person’s reasons for dropping out are unique, understanding these different patterns can help us avoid pigeonholing dropouts of any age.
Of the three categories, nomads are the most common. Four out of every ten young adults who were church regulars as teens fall into this category. These are young adults who reflect the zeitgeist of their generation, trying on every worldview, lifestyle, and pathway that is open to them, majoring on experiences and relationships rather than on truth and restraint. They are flexing their independence in multiple dimensions of life and challenging the value and purpose of virtually every institution they encounter: church, family, government, civic organizations, and so forth. They still call themselves Christians and have generally positive views about the Christian faith, but their engagement level has dropped dramatically and their sense of belonging to a specific, organized faith community has all but evaporated.
Roughly one out of every five young adults is an exile who feels lost between church culture and the wider culture he or she feels called to inhabit and influence. Exiles are not anti-Christian or even necessarily anti-church; they are simply individuals who do not fit the typical molds that churches expect or support. They are characterized by wanting to follow Jesus while at the same time authentically connecting with their world. They do not want to make life an either/or scenario: either they march in lockstep with the church or they embrace everything the world has to offer at the expense of their faith. Exiles want to be obedient to God and be accepted and influential in the wider cultural marketplace. In their eyes, churches often make this exceptionally hard. Exiles tend to ask a lot of questions, as they try to figure out how to apply their faith in a changing, complex culture. In this regard, being an exile is not a negative reality for most of these young adults. They want their faith to matter in the world, and they won’t settle for platitudes or superficial expressions of spirituality.
The least common scenario —affecting one out of every nine young people with a Christian background —is the journey of the prodigals, those who drop out of the church because they no longer accept Christianity. Research indicates that a small minority of prodigals may return to the faith and to church life in the future, but it will likely be a matter of years, rather than weeks or months, before they consider returning to a community of Christian faith.
Churches and Young Adults
{Insert pie chart “Churches and Young Adults”}
For young people to drop out of church life is now normal, though it is not inevitable. Tens of millions of young Christians begin attending church during their preschool, elementary, or high school years and never lose their faith or drop out of church. (In the graphic above, these young people are labeled “Faithfuls,” because they have thus far stayed in the flow of congregational life.) Leaving church is always a possibility but never a forgone conclusion.
One of the interesting patterns in the data is a progression through each faith journey. Granted, as the wisdom of Jesus’ parable of the sower reveals (see Matthew 13 and Mark 4), people’s faith progresses in different ways and with divergent outcomes, depending on many factors that soften or harden their spirit toward God. But a common progression to becoming a prodigal happens like this:
The point is that prodigals often begin their progression away from Christianity as exiles —fervent followers of Christ who feel caught between church and culture. How can we do a better job of helping young exiles, who are at a crucial junction on their faith journey? A good place to start is by creating an honest and safe place for people to wrestle with doubts and questions, so they can discover for themselves —while still remaining connected to the Christian community —that historic Christianity offers compelling answers to life’s most important issues. It might mean admitting that we have too often given young people a simplistic version of the Good News, that at times we have reduced following Jesus to praying a prayer and joining a church.
The exile experience is not unique to Mosaics, the teens and twentysomethings of today. While leaving church has not always been the norm for young adults, it seems to have started in force with the Boomer generation, who put their unique stamp on the Christian journey as they came of age. Surveys from the first half of the 1900s indicate that young adults then were just as likely as their elders to attend church. In the 1960s, however, the generations began to diverge: Boomers, who changed everything about what was normal life in America, are the first generation to have abandoned church life upon reaching their “freedom years.” Influenced by a variety of world events and cultural factors, Boomers opened a Pandora’s box; subsequent generations have not only followed their lead but taken their novel behaviors further. The dropout problem we have today is the natural fruit of the seeds planted and nurtured by the Boomers as they came of age.
Combine access to information that challenges the development of a commonly accepted worldview; individual empowerment to embrace various lifestyles and relationships; alienation from institutions that have traditionally formed the foundation of society; and skepticism toward sources of authority —and you get the complex engine that is driving the dropout problem among young adults. The reasons twentysomethings offer for disconnecting from church are informed by these cultural realities, which are most pronounced among Mosaics. But they are also reasons that resonate with older believers as well, as we have discovered since You Lost Me was published. Let’s take a closer look at the perspectives on church offered by twentysomething dropouts, and use these as a lens through which to see de-churched adults more clearly.
Why Young Adults Drop Out
A majority of young Christians disconnect from church life as young adults, either permanently or for a prolonged period of time. These are the six main reasons young Christians give for leaving church.
1. Churches seem restrictive and overprotective.
Self-expression has become one of the foundations of our postmodern culture. There is less concern about truth than about freedom to express feelings, ideas, and experiences. The demand for expressive liberty has certainly threaded its way into the realm of spirituality, as well —which poses a problem for many churches, since many young adults say their experience of church feels stifling, fear-based, and risk-averse.
Among the previously churched, one out of four adults under thirty (23 percent) indicates that “Christians demonize everything outside of the church.” Similar statements are that churches ignore the problems of the real world (22 percent) and that the priorities of Christians are off base, with 18 percent specifically noting that their congregation was “too concerned that movies, music, and video games are harmful.” For a group of people who have replaced judgment with tolerance, the perception that the church restricts expression while turning a blind eye to real-world problems leads to a view of the church as, at best, an ineffective organization —and, at worst, a hypocritical one.
2. Christianity as practiced is too shallow.
Today’s young adults are the most overstimulated and widely educated generation in American history. They are constantly bombarded by information, images, sounds, and choices, and most are not content with a consistently ho-hum experience from church or anywhere else. For many, neither the local church as an institution nor the communal church as a relational entity is sufficiently unique or necessary to compel their involvement.
Millions of young dropouts agree that something was lacking in their church experience. One-third (31 percent) say “church is boring.” One-quarter (24 percent) note that “faith is not relevant to my career or interests,” showing their dissatisfaction with a non-integrated Christianity. One out of four (23 percent) chides the local church for inadequate teaching, claiming that “the Bible is not taught clearly or often enough.” Most concerning is the one-fifth (20 percent) of young dropouts who admit “God seems missing from my experience of church.” We’ll talk more about this perception —and how it affects the churchless —in the final chapter.
The disheartening reality of their disappointment is that these are not people clamoring for graduate-level theology or biblical studies. They are practical-minded young adults trying to make their way through the blizzard of life options and myriad worldviews they encounter. The competitive views offered in the marketplace of ideas are often communicated with more clarity, passion, and applicability than the teaching and worldview formation young people have received from their churches. Many feel as if they have no choice but to seek an alternative.
3. Churches seem antagonistic to science.
Christianity and science have been at loggerheads for centuries. The specific scientific discoveries and theories at issue these days may be new, but the tension between the two systems of explaining life is not. However, for many young adults the increased intensity of the conflict is counterproductive and a source of cognitive dissonance.
Many young dropouts are not science apologists as much as they are students seeking an honest conversation about reality. Consequently, more than one-third of twentysomething dropouts (35 percent) believe that “Christians are too confident they know all the answers.” Nearly as many (29 percent) contend that “churches are out of step with the scientific world we live in.” One out of four (25 percent) says that “Christianity is antiscience” and a similar proportion (23 percent) say they are “turned off by the creation-versus-evolution debate.” Our research also found that many science-minded young Christians are struggling to find ways of staying faithful to both their religious beliefs and their sense of professional calling into a science-related field.
4. Churches are judgmental and rigid about sexuality.
These days we see little restraint when it comes to public displays of sexually charged content. Digital pornography, sexualized children and teenagers, the widespread acceptance of multiple sexual partners and orientations —these characterize our current era as one of sexual promiscuity, experimentation, and sharing. Growing up in such an environment has left young people struggling with how to live meaningful lives in terms of sex and sexuality.
Perhaps even more than young people, churches are flummoxed about how to respond. The traditional emphases on sexual purity and waiting for marriage to become sexually active seem increasingly outdated to the broader culture, but some in the Christian community are beginning to wonder if the problem has more to do with how churches express these positions than with the standards themselves. Interwoven with these issues are other cultural shifts such as delayed marriage, tens of millions of births outside marriage, and the relaxation of sexual regulations in the media. Many churches do not know how to respond with both truth and love to these sweeping changes.
Most Christian young adults are as sexually active as their non-Christian peers, even though they are more conservative in their attitudes about sexuality. One out of six young Christians say they “have made mistakes and feel judged in church because of them.” Sexual issues are especially important among young Catholics. Within that segment, two-fifths (40 percent) agree the Catholic church’s “teachings on sexuality and birth control are out of date.”
5. The exclusivity of Christianity is a turnoff.
A hallmark value of modern society is the ability to choose one’s beliefs in a manner that is personally satisfying and unique. Sociologists have hailed today’s young adults as the most eclectic generation in American history in terms of race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, technological tools, and sources of authority. Young adults typically embrace tolerance, open-mindedness, flexibility, and inclusiveness, and most want to find areas of common ground with each other, even if that requires minimizing real and critical differences.
In this context, Christianity’s claims that Jesus is the only way to salvation, that the Bible is the only reliable and authoritative word of God, and that Christianity is the only faith that connects people to the Creator and Ruler of the universe upset many young adults. Three out of ten (29 percent) young dropouts say “churches are afraid of the beliefs of other faiths,” and an identical proportion feel they are “forced to choose between my faith and my friends.” One-fifth (22 percent) say “church is like a country club, only for insiders.”
6. Churches are unfriendly to those who doubt.
Many young adults who formerly attended a Christian church feel that churches are not safe places to wrestle with doubts about the beliefs, teachings, or practices of Christianity. Admitting that some aspects of the Christian faith do not make sense to them puts them at risk of alienation from their faith community. Even when that doesn’t occur, many young dropouts feel the church’s responses to their doubt are superficial or even insulting to their intelligence.
More than one-third (36 percent) of young dropouts say they are unable “to ask my most pressing life questions in church” while one-quarter (23 percent) indicate they have “significant intellectual doubts about my faith.” Even when their doubts do not directly relate to faith issues, a significant number of young unchurched adults (18 percent) feel misunderstood and ignored in times of need because churches “do not help with depression or other emotional problems.”
The Necessity of a New Approach
Most churches divide their ministries into a series of lifestyle groups designed to address the needs of a particular demographic. Ministries cater to the needs of young suburban professionals, comfortably retired executives, struggling single moms, dual-income parents, upwardly mobile newly married thirtysomethings —identify any target group and you’ll find a church or ministry focused on reaching out to that segment.
Engaging the churchless population has traditionally been handled the same way: define a “typical” church dropout and develop a ministry solution for that crowd. However, the diversity within the cohort of young church dropouts poses a challenge to that tried-and-true method. Two decades ago you could identify a handful of common motives underlying the departure of young adults from church engagement. Today, however, the dropout population is far more individualized, making single-solution, one-size-fits-all ministry efforts less and less effective.
The issues young people face are myriad and challenging. Their lifestyles are incredibly diverse. Their religious beliefs and expectations are hard to nail down. Their support systems are hybrid and unpredictable. And their long-term plans either don’t exist or change with astonishing frequency. The life journeys of today’s young adult dropouts are being delayed, reordered, redefined, and sometimes upended altogether —and many churches that rely on traditional life-formation patterns are finding fewer people involved and less success transforming those lives. The traditional family path has been replaced by a new normal that is not normal at all by traditional standards, as we’ll explore in the next chapter. Trying to figure out and implement the best way to come alongside young adults with support and effective discipleship is like trying to hit a moving target.
Some in the church protest that young people will return to church life “just like they always do” —when they have kids. Having children, they say, is one of the surest ways for young Americans to be introduced to the value of a local faith community. However, recent sociological trends give us good reason to doubt the reliability of this assumption. Mosaics are less likely to marry than previous generations, and those who do marry head to the altar an average of six years later than the Boomers and Busters who preceded them. They are more likely to have children outside of a marital relationship, and those who have children tend to start their family later in life. This group of young people is eight times more likely than young people raised in the 1960s to come from homes where their biological parents were never married.
Even if young adults are driven back to church by marriage and family —and that assumption is highly questionable —they will return in a much different life space than prior generations were when they came back to the fold. They are likely to be older, if and when they return. They will come back with different emotional, financial, spiritual, and relational needs due to a wealth of experiences that have no parallel in prior generations. They will practice family in new ways. How will churches support and disciple the “new normal” family?
And that’s if they return. According to our studies, fully half of today’s young parents report that having children did not influence their desire or effort to connect to a church. (This perspective is most common among skeptic parents who are atheists or agnostics; nine out of ten say becoming a parent had no influence on their likelihood to connect with a faith community.) Even among parents who are born-again Christians, nearly half (47 percent) say that having children did not impact their churchgoing habits.
We cannot expect to be effective by merely “modernizing” the approaches churches have long relied on to attract and retain young families.
Reflections on Dropouts
While real generational differences exist between Mosaic and older adult dropouts, twentysomethings’ reasons for disconnecting from church life cross generational lines. Churches that are unwelcoming to young adults’ doubts and questions are equally unwelcoming to older adults’ doubts and questions —and many have both! Likewise, many older adults, like Mosaics, find their church experience to be shallow and disconnected from their everyday lives. We have heard again and again from Buster, Boomer, and even Elder adults who see themselves reflected in the nomad, exile, or prodigal faith journeys, and who struggle to determine what church involvement means for them.
These new times require new strategies for making faith real in people’s lives. Nothing drives home the need for such innovation as attempting to connect (or reconnect) with the de-churched. Their dismissal of Christian churches is not mean-spirited; it simply reflects the firsthand experiences that led them to conclude churches are ill-equipped to support the flourishing life they hope for.
Among most dropouts, honesty and authenticity are hallmarks of this hoped-for life. Yet if we are honest with ourselves, authenticity is not always a characteristic of church life. How well do we teach, disciple, and counsel with kindness, honest self-disclosure, and a willingness to speak truth without condemnation? We approach others out of self-righteousness rather than out of an honest admission that we, too, need a Savior. Let’s listen with open minds to the criticisms offered by dropouts of every age. We may discover how we have missed the mark in our attempts to serve God and expand his Kingdom, and thus change and grow into the church God intends for us to be.
Waiting patiently for dropouts to arrive at some magical life event that will bring them back to church is a fool’s game. While parenthood, midlife crises, job loss, financial difficulty, and retirement are all seasons that can clarify and enhance spiritual pursuits, there is no guarantee that any of these inevitably lead to church engagement. It is up to faith communities to communicate with dropouts and other unchurched folks about how church involvement can meet their felt spiritual needs and imbue their lives with meaning and significance. Life transitions alone will not be enough to convince them.
Likewise, effectively incorporating a diversity of people into congregational life will demand greater flexibility and creativity on the part of faith communities. Ministry strategies and discipleship programs that were successful in the past may need to be reimagined or even scrapped for something new. Rather than spawning ever-more-segmented ministries that further silo various demographics, what would it look like if churches started with the premise that godly relationships nurtured over the long haul can transcend the science of demography? What if churches prioritized seeking and finding God together over activities and events designed to appeal to ever-shrinking slices of their constituency?
Because, more than anything else, churches have to deliver the goods. One thing we hear from churchless and churched people alike is that they intensely desire the local church to provide what no other group can offer: an experience of the presence of God. Why should they go to a church if there’s no evidence God is there? When former church regulars say they are more likely to return to church if they have reason to believe God is present and active in a congregation, we can assume they couldn’t find him when they used to attend. Can you blame these folks for not showing up when the Guest of Honor is not ushered into the hall?
Forward Thinking
• Have you encountered dropouts whose spiritual journeys track with the patterns of nomads, exiles, or prodigals? In your experience, what do these folks have in common? What experiences or attitudes make their journeys unique?
• Which of the six perspectives on church offered by young dropouts seems most likely to be true of your faith community? Why and in what ways?
• Which of your ministry strategies or discipleship programs is most in need of reevaluation in light of new cultural realities facing the church? How will you address the challenges?