Byline Leaving a Church Letter Made Easy

Byline leaving a church letter

lots of teenagers go off to college and abandon their faith I was one of those teenagers I went off to college very eager to leave Christianity behind there are lots of reasons why teenagers do this I think sometimes it's because of just the deep attraction of the world they and that was me I mean I wanted to be a part of the world I wanted the pleasures of the world I wanted that the benefits of being a part of the world I think other times teenagers abandoned the faith and when they go off to college because the faith that they've been given has been thin maybe we should say moralistic not well grounded in the truth of Scripture not well grounded in the storyline of Scripture and they get to college and they meet that first professor or those friends that ask some hard questions and moralism just doesn't answer those questions and they begin to think well maybe it's not true perhaps another reason teenagers lead the church when they go up to college is they were never really there in the first place but they were there for the fun youth group they were there for the events they were there for their friends but they were not there for their faith even if they've been baptized as a kid so what can we do to help address that as churches well I think we need to address teenagers in our youth groups like the emerging adults that they are we need to call them to repentance and faith we need to call them to a life of discipleship we need to be willing to answer hard questions in high school long before they ever get to college we we need to be giving them a worldview a whole storyline of scripture that makes sense of their lives not just a list of do's and don'ts and this is what a good Christian looks like so that when they get to college when they're confronted with alternative worldviews when they're confronted with hard questions they actually have the resources to begin to answer them and deal with them but I think most importantly what we what we need to do is not entertained our teenagers we need to treat them seriously we need to call them to the faith and then integrate them into the life of the church as a whole and not just a youth group the youth group is a lot of fun but it's not the real world it's not the rest of the adult life I think we need to begin to integrate our teenagers into the real life of the church so that when they go off to school and they don't have a youth group to be a part of but there is good local church down the road they know how to be a part of that they know how to benefit from it participate in it and Center their life there