Jack Matthews
New Member
mjohnson7 said:At this year's Missouri Baptist Convention, one preacher cited many statistics of SBC youth never darkening the door of a church after they turn 18. What a tragedy!!! Know what his solution was?? Evangelize more!! I was shocked.....this "great pastor" has no clue. This is an area the IFBs are right on target with (i.e. abandoning public education in favor of home schooling) and the evidence is the large number of their youth that attend Bible college and serve the Lord.
The statistic he most likely cited was a composite figure from several studies, including one at Carson-Newman College in Tennessee, along with George Barna, which shows that 80% of the high school students who are active in their evangelical church youth group in high school drop out of church by the time they finish college.
The study did not exclusively single out Southern Baptists. This is a figure that runs across the board, and includes youth in independent, Fundamental Baptist churches. The Barna study showed a higher percentage of home schooled kids drop out of church than those Christian youth who attend public school.
I've got three teenage boys living in my house, and an 11 year old. In raising them, I've tried to model my own faith for them, but I've worked very, very hard to try to put them in a position where the faith that forms and develops in them is their own, and not just an imitation of mine. We've put them in a Christian school, simply because we want them in an environment where the content of the scripture is integrated into their other subject matter and can be seen as practical to their life, and relevant, but we've also agonized over whether having them there puts them in a sheltered environment that will make them take their faith for granted, or burn them out on it.
About a year and a half ago, our oldest, who was then 15, went to school one morning and found out that his best friend had run away from home. He left a note behind saying that he was basically tired of having Christianity crammed down his throat, and he didn't see that his parents restrictions on his activities, forcing him to go to Christian school, and their overall treatment of him was consistent with their claims of faith. That shook us up a bit, since the three oldest boys we are raising in our home are siblings, and not our own kids. We sat down and had a long tal, offering our love and support, our committment to their protection and to their future, and our reasoning as to why we believed faith was important, promised our guidance, and talked about why they were part of a church and why they went to Christian school. The hardest thing I've ever done in my life was to tell them that I thought they were old enough and mature enough to make those decisions based on their own faith, and that they had choices in those matters. I held my breath for a while. They're not just "participants" at church, they are involved in ministries that they've chosen to be part of and that's why they go. The oldest one has a good grasp on the benefits of his Christian education, enough to see that he needs to be there, and the other two will follow his lead.
When we first started investigating Christian schools, we visited an IFB church school not too far from where we live. The uniforms the kids had to wear were enough to convince us that we wouldn't put our boys there, but there was no joyfulness in that school. We heard elementary teachers yelling at kids, I sincerely can't remember that a single person even smiled at us, and I am sure we were being judged for clothing styles and where we attended church. The only kids from that school that would have gone to a "Bible College" would have had to have been forced to do so, it sure wouldn't have been a free will choice.
Frankly, I saw nothing there to indicate those people knew anything about grace, mercy, forgiveness and the love of Christ.