.
A 2011 study of young adults indicates that approximately 59 percent of young people with a Christian background report that they have dropped out of church (David Kinnaman and Aly Hawkins,
You Lost Me [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2011]).
According to a Gallup Poll, approximately 40 percent of eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds who attended church when they were sixteen or seventeen years old are no longer attending (George H. Gallup Jr., “The Religiosity Cycle,”
Gallup Poll, October 19, 2006; Frank Newport, “A Look at Religious Switching in America Today,”
Gallup Poll, 2006, October 19, 2006).
A 2007 survey by LifeWay Research of more than one thousand adults ages eighteen to thirty who spent a year or more in youth group during high school suggests that more than 65 percent of young adults who attend a Protestant church for at least a year in high school will stop attending church regularly for at least a year between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two.
In this study, respondents were not necessarily seniors who had graduated from youth group.
In addition, the research design did not factor in parachurch or on-campus faith communities in their definition of college “church” attendance.
Data from the National Study of Youth and Religion published in 2009 indicates approximately a 30 percent drop in frequent religious service attendance across multiple Protestant denominations (Christian Smith with Patricia Snell,
Souls in Transition:
The Religious and Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults [New York: Oxford Univ.
Press, 2009]).
FYI’s estimate that 40 – 50 percent of high school graduates will fail to stick with their faith is based on a compilation of data from these various studies.
.
When we use the phrase “fall away from the faith,” we don’t necessarily mean that students have lost their salvation, but rather we mean that they have fallen away from a faith that places Jesus at the center of all they are and do.
.
All names, and at times a few additional details, have been changed to preserve the privacy of the people we interviewed.
These changes are minor and do not affect the essence of the parents’ ideas or experiences.
.
Approximately
15 percent of the ideas in this book come from additional parents our team met during the course of our research.
While not officially included in the fifty we interviewed, in general these parents fit most, if not all, of the criteria used to select those fifty parents.
.
Christian Smith and Melissa Lundquist Denton,
Soul Searching (New York: Oxford Univ.
Press, 2005), 57.
The importance of parental example is confirmed in a number of studies, including Pam E. King and Ross A. Mueller, “Parental Influence on Adolescent Religiousness: Exploring the Roles of Spiritual Modeling and Social Capital,”
Marriage and Family: A Christian Journal 6, no. 3 (2003): 401 – 13.
.
W. N. Bao, D. H. Whitbeck, D. Hoyt, and R. C. Conger, “Perceived Parental Acceptance as a Moderator of Religious Transmission among Adolescent Boys and Girls,”
Journal of Marriage and the Family 61 (1999): 362 – 74.
L. Okagaki and C. Bevis, “Transmission of Religious Values: Relations between Parents’ and Daughters’ Beliefs,”
Journal of Genetic Psychology 160 (1999): 303 – 18.
.
Paul R. Amato and Alan Booth,
A Generation at Risk:
Growing Up in an Era of Family Upheaval (Cambridge: Harvard Univ.
Press, 1997), 139 – 42.
.
To take a free profile to identify your love language, visit
5lovelanguages.
com
.
.
Dallas Willard,
The Divine Conspiracy (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1998), 41.
.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 47.
.
Vern L. Bengtson, Norella M. Putney, and Susan Harris,
Families and Faith (New York: Oxford Univ.
Press, 2013).
This finding has been confirmed by multiple studies across a variety of faith traditions over the past three decades.
.
Ibid., 76 – 79.
.
Ibid., 74 – 76.
.
This is also a theme in Chap Clark,
Hurt 2.0:
Inside the World of Today’s Teenagers (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2011).
.
The Search Institute,
Insights and Evidence:
Finding the Student Spark 5, no. 1 (November 2010).
.
Reggie Joiner and Carey Nieuwhof,
Parenting beyond Your Capacity (Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 2010), 135.
.
Richard A. Swenson,
Margin (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1992), 91 – 92.
.
Vern L. Bengtson, Norella M. Putney, and Susan Harris,
Families and Faith (New York: Oxford Univ.
Press, 2013), 229 – 30.
.
Elizabeth Marquardt,
Between Two Worlds:
The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce (New York: Crown, 2005).
.
Developmental Assets
: A Profile of Your Youth (Minneapolis: Search Institute, 2005), unpublished report.
.
Scott McConnell, “LifeWay Research Finds Reasons 18- to 22-Year-Olds Drop out of Church” (August 7, 2007),
lifeway.com/Article/LifeWay-Research-finds-reasons-18-to-22-year-olds-drop-out-of-church.
.
Robert D. Putnam,
Bowling Alone:
The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 299.
.
William Damon,
The Youth Charter (New York: Free Press, 1997), 62.
.
Adapted from the definition of “functional family” in Diana R. Garland,
Family Ministry (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1999), 38.
.
Vern L. Bengtson, Norella M. Putney, and Susan Harris,
Families and Faith (New York: Oxford Univ.
Press, 2013), 100.
.
Ibid., 104 – 12.
.
Ibid., 101 – 4.
.
V. King and G. H. Elder Jr., “Are Religious Grandparents More Involved Grandparents?”
Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences
54: S317 – 28.
.
Walter Isaacson,
Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 14 – 15.
.
Developmental Assets
: A Profile of Your Youth (Minneapolis: Search Institute, 2005), 2003 weighted aggregate dataset, unpublished report.
.
Those two datasets are the National Study of Youth and Religion and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Mark D. Regnerus,
Forbidden Fruit [New York: Oxford Univ.
Press, 2007], 60 – 73).
.
D. C. Dollahite and J. Y. Thatcher, “Talking about Religion: How Religious Youth and Parents Discuss Their Faith,”
Journal of Adolescent Research 23 (2008): 611 – 41.
.
A. Desrosiers, B. S. Kelly, and L. Miller, “Parent and Peer Relationships and Relational Spirituality in Adolescents and Young Adults,”
Psychology of Religion and Spirituality 3 (2011): 39 – 54.
.
Pew Research Center,
Pew Internet and American Life Project (June 28, 2012),
http://pewinternet.org/Infographics/2012/A-Closer-Look-at-Gadget-Ownership.aspx.
.
Pew Research Center,
Pew Internet and American Life Project (July 11, 2011),
http://pewinternet.org/Infographics/2011/Smartphones.aspx.
.
Pew
Research Center,
Pew Internet and American Life Project (August 5, 2013),
http://pewinternet.org/Commentary/2012/March/Pew-Internet-Social-Networking-full-detail.aspx.
.
Pew Research Center,
Pew Internet and American Life Project (October 19, 2008),
http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2008/Networked-Families.aspx.
.
Bradley Howell, “Using Social Media to Strengthen Family Bonds,”
FYI E-Journal (July 8, 2013),
http://fulleryouthinstitute.org/articles/using-social-media-to-strengthen-family-bonds.
.
Kelly Musick and Ann Meier, “Assessing Causality and Persistence in Associations between Family Dinners and Adolescent Well-Being,”
Journal of Marriage and Family 74 (June 2012): 476 – 93.
.
By justice, we mean the restoration of God’s
shalom, which includes peace with God, with other humans, with nature, and with oneself.
One simple way we often describe this restoration to teenagers is as the “righting of wrongs.”
See Chap Clark and Kara E. Powell,
Deep Justice in a Broken World (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2007).
.
Kurt Ver Beek, “The Impact of Short-Term Missions: A Case Study of House Construction in Honduras after Hurricane Mitch,”
Missiology 34, no. 4 (October 2006): 485.
.
Robert J. Priest, Terry Dischinger, Steve Rasmussen, and C. M. Brown, “Researching the Short-Term Mission Movement,”
Missiology 34, no. 4 (October 2006): 431 – 50.
.
The following section is adapted from an article by Kara Powell, Dave Livermore, Terry Linhart, and Brad Griffin titled “If We Send Them, They Will Grow . . . Maybe,” available at
fulleryouthinstitute.org.
.
This model was originally proposed by Laura Joplin and later modified and tested by Dr. Terry Linhart on youth mission trips.
See Laura Joplin, “On Defining Experiential Education,” in K. Warren, M. Sakofs, and J. S. Hunt Jr., eds.,
The Theory of Experiential Education (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt, 1995), 15 – 22, and Terrence D. Linhart, “Planting Seeds: The Curricular Hope of Short-Term Mission Experiences in Youth Ministry,”
Christian Education Journal series 3 (2005): 256 – 72.
Some of the terminology in the model has been modified.
.
This model is fully explained in Kara Powell and Brad Griffin,
Deep Justice Journeys (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2009), which provides fifty before/during/after learning activities to help teenagers move from mission trips to missional living.
.
The phrase “emerging adult” was coined by Jeffrey J. Arnett in 2001 and has gained great acceptance since then.
Arnett used the term to include roughly the ages eighteen to twenty-five and believes that this age group is characterized by iden
tity exploration, instability, self-focus, feeling in between, and believing in great possibilities.
See Jeffrey J. Arnett,
Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2001), 8.
.
Michael D. Berzonsky et al., “Parental Psychological Control and Dimensions of Identity Formation in Emerging Adulthood,”
Journal of Family Psychology 21, no. 3 (2007): 546 – 50.
.
Hara Estroff Marano,
A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting (New York: Random House, 2008), 31.
For more on the effects of helicopter parenting, see Stephenie Lievense, “The Proper Care and Feeding of Emerging Adults: Parenting Strategies for Launching Kids into Adulthood” (two parts),
FYI E-Journal,
http://fulleryouthinstitute.org/articles/the-proper-care-and-feeding-of-emerging-adults#fn-7-a and
http://fulleryouthinstitute.org/articles/the-proper-care-and-feeding-of-emerging-adults2.
.
Tim Clydesdale,
The First Year Out (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2007).
.
This is higher than the average GPA for college-bound seniors nationwide, which was reported in 2006 as 3.28 (“Nation’s Report Card,” 2006).
.
D. R. Hoge, “A Validated Intrinsic Religious Motivation Scale,”
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 11 (1972): 369 – 76.
.
P. L. Benson, M. J. Donahue, and J. A. Erickson, “The Faith Maturity Scale: Conceptualization, Measurement, and Empirical Validation,”
Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion 5 (1993): 1 – 26.
.
William E. Fiala, Jeffrey P. Bjorck, and Richard Gorsuch, “The Religious Support Scale: Construction, Validation, and Cross-Validation,”
American Journal of Community Psychology 30 (2002): 761 – 86.
.
Hoge, “Validated Intrinsic Religious Motivation Scale.”
