Fourteen years ago I sat in a room with a handful of people as a sixth grader in my first night with the Student Ministry at Bayside. Many things have happened in the span of those years. My class was a decent size. Some of those I graduated with have moved away, a few joined different churches. With the exception of work schedules that don’t allow for Sundays off, the majority to my knowledge have seemingly disappeared. This is a huge problem. It doesn’t seem to be a new one, but it is one that at my age I’ve begun to take notice of its existence. The problem I speak of is lack of younger adults and high school students who don’t stay in Church beyond freshmen year. Most churches have large children’s ministries and sizeable student ministries but few have college ministries that have more than a few members. Even fewer have ministries geared to people like me, people who are caught in the stage of being older than college students (even though I’m actually going to school) but not married. Where do we fit in? Single. Twenty something young men and women who have so much to offer in the Body but few places to actually use the gifts we’ve been given. Bayside has started a ministry like this but there are very few in this city.
Alas, I’m getting ahead of myself. The portion of my class that I said has seemingly disappeared, to even get to the stage of life I’m in, they’d have needed to stay in Church. Most of them don’t. After this weekend it hit me that I’ve spent the last seven years with students that according to statistics will walk away from church. They just won’t care anymore. They hit an age where it just doesn’t matter. Mom and Dad aren’t bringing them or making sure that it is a priority; they are in college out of state and have the freedom to choose what they do on Sundays. The thing is I’ve seen it happen for years! It happened in my own class. People just drift away as if they were ghosts. I just don’t understand it. I can’t imagine not being involved in the Body on Sundays or on Wednesdays. I’ve spent more than half my life doing just that. So for me to pray with and for students or to see people I grew up with just decide that Church just doesn’t matter perplexes me and grieves me. How does your faith not matter?
How do we fix this? It needs to be fixed. If the Church doesn’t have young people it isn’t going to exist long. I’m not undermining the importance of learning from older people in the Body but to be frank, people don’t live forever. If we have a large chunk of members that are from the ages of forty- eighty and then thriving children’s ministry but no solid foundation of members from fifteen-thirty we have a problem. Granted, most of those children belong to someone in the age range of twenty-forty but if those children decide when they reach high school that church doesn’t matter or go off to college and don’t come back, where is the Church in thirty years? It doesn’t exist. We cannot equip and send out those who aren’t there.
We’ve come to the point that people my age and younger are deciding that Church doesn‘t matter or they don‘t belong there. Is it possible that they aren’t true followers? Yes. However, it is also possible that these very people are just tired of being in a place that they don’t feel valued or that they don’t belong. There is also the problem that so many churches do whatever they can to entertain so that what these students are seeing is nothing but fun. When the fun stops, when it isn’t games and light shows, why keep coming? They need Christ. Not gimmicks, Christ and Him alone. Give them a solid foundation. Give them what they need not something to keep them entertained for a few hours a week. It won’t stop everyone from leaving but at the very least while they are there they will hear the gospel. That being said, ten years from now when the current sixth graders have graduated college, God might call them to live in different cities or to different churches but I want to do everything possible to be sure that if they leave it’s because they are called to serve somewhere and not because they just don’t care anymore.
I’m thankful to be a part of a Body that sees us as important. A Body that invests in the lives of students and doesn’t just treat them as minds seeking to be entertained. I’m glad that the Young Professional’s exist and hope that we continue to grow so that Chattanooga sees that our generation matters, we have a voice and we do actually want use it.
This weekend I had the honor and privilege to lead six boys in a Multi-session Bible Study/Sleepover kind of weekend called Flood. These were not six strangers but boys that Haynes and I have spent just under a year with in Small Group as their leaders. In that year they haven’t talked as much as they did this weekend. I don’t think we’ve had a discussion better than the one we did Friday night. It was absolutely fantastic. It was also completely heart-breaking. The past seven years when our eighth graders move from middle school to high school Eric Dill has hammered a statistic into them that studies have shown that only a handful of them will still be involved in Church when they graduate High School. I can attest personally that even fewer will stay involved in college and that of students who don’t move out of state or the city. I looked around that circle of boys and wondered come six years from now when they graduate high school which of them would be left? It hurt to think about. It hurts to think about. These aren’t just a bunch of numbers; these are teenagers that I’ve formed relationships with that Lord willing will continue to grow over the next several years. One of the craziest things is seeing a bunch of kids that were in sixth grade when I started helping in the Middle School Ministry join the College Ministry. By the same token it is also rewarding to know that these young people are continuing to grow, they aren’t stopping because they graduated High School.
In ending, this weekend has been one that I won’t forget. I’ve grown closer with a group of hyper, hilarious, boys that like most teenage boys live by their stomachs, love video games, and inventing vaguely dangerous sports games on a trampoline, because why not throw a soccer ball on a trampoline and tackle each other to score a goal? I watched boys who don’t say much normally, open up like books and actually trust me enough to speak what God is putting on their hearts. There have been some embarrassing moments but they were moments teaching these boys that Church isn’t a building, it’s a group of people and when you do things together, you find out hard things get easier.
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