It is clear to every pastor, church musician, and theologian that we lose young people after high school, when they entertain the notions of sin for a while, then finally finding a job, settling down, finding a spouse and getting married. When they have their first child, they start listening to their parents and find a church. So what happens in those 15 years in between?
I find myself in a region of the country that is, to my eyes, either atheist or fundamentalist, and much heavier in the former. I have no problem with fundamentalism, socially, either, I just don’t enjoy their patterns of worship as much as I enjoy the liturgy of my youth. I still love Setting 2 (in the Lutheran Book of Worship) the most. I grew up with it.
I see the only reason that the youth do not join churches, attend worship, or anything else in those 15 years, is that the church loses them in their youth. We teach them the wrong things! We teach them to value praise music with its empty theology and great beat, and when they first experience suffering, and when they outgrow their childhood faith, they find God and religion uncomfortably restricting, and they embrace the ‘reality’ of our new world on the internet, in chatrooms and in clubs…
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