"According to Rainer Research 70 percent of youth leave church by the time they are twenty-two years old. Barna Group estimates that 80 percent of those reared in the church will be ‘disengaged’ by the time they are twenty-nine years old." Drew Dycks, 'Generation Ex-Christian'
Finally a couple of stats to back up what we've been noticing for some time : churches age with their founders. So what do we do to reverse this?
1) Understand them. This 'lost' age group is not homogeneous. There are several reasons they leave. Check out this review of Dyck's book for a synopsis; http://tiny.cc/kspmc
2) Realize that devout parents have devout children. The best way to improve your kids spirituality may be to improve our own.
3) Be intentional about keeping your kids. Set up a group of people whose job it is to keep college kids connected: getting care packages at test time, emails/notes on the first day back, etc. Love spans generations like nothing else.
How (and how well) does your faith community pay attention to this age group?
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