Two-thirds.
That’s the important figure at the heart of the 2009 book Already Gone: Why your kids will quit church and what you can do to stop it, co-authored by Ken Ham and Britt Beemer (Master Books, 2009). Already Gone claims that of all the children sitting around you in the pews on Sunday, 60-plus percent of them will abandon their place there within an alarmingly short amount of time. Based on a survey of 1,000 formerly and currently church-going twenty-somethings, one of the main points put forth is the bitter irony that Sunday school itself is the reason that the kids are leaving the church. The children tend already to leave the church, metaphorically, somewhere in the time between elementary and high school.
Cf. article by Jim Chliboyko, The Canadian Lutheran, January/February 2010, “Where are our young people?” See why the youth are calving off the berg of the church in this good review. What are we doing to our young?
According to the National Study of Youth and Religion, the LCMS is categorized as a church body that retains 85% of its youth through high school. That’s the good news. The bad news is that we experience the same dramatic drop off and drop out when young adults graduate from high school. Truth also is that there are fewer young people in our churches – largely because we, like most denominations, are an aging institutions. When your average age is in the late 50’s, not a lot of those people are having babies. And having babies has traditionally been the way we do child and youth recruitment. In 2008, LCMS congregations confirmed 21,000 juniors. The frightening reality is, however, that 13 years earlier, about the time those juniors would have been baptized as babies, our congregations reported baptizing 47,000. Somewhere along the way we lost 26,000 children . . . That’s families not taking care of their children’s spiritual needs. That’s grandparents not watching over their grandchildren. And perhaps most disturbing, it is congregations not meeting their pledge to care for and support these children and their families as they promise at the end of the baptismal liturgy. There has never been a time like now, when children, family, youth and young adult ministry should be at the top of every congregation’s vision for their ministry in the coming years.
What Terry Dittmer comments is exceedingly significant, and I believe it could motivate us to revisit the congregation we serve in the Lord’s Name and put ministry to children, family, youth, and young adult as a top priority. I would like to hear from others what they might be doing in revisiting this vision!