Survey: Churches Losing Youths Long Before College
June 30, 2009 by admin
Filed under Moral Decay
“The next generation of believers is draining from the churches, and it causes me great personal and professional concern,” said Ken Ham, founder and president of Answers in Genesis and a Young Earth creationist.
Hoping to shed light on what he believes is a monumental problem, Ham enlisted the services of America’s Research Group to study why young people were leaving. The results, published in Already Gone, will shake many churches to their very core, Ham states in the new book.
While previous surveys have shown that Christian students tend to quit church during their college years, the data collected by ARG found that most of them were already gone in middle school and high school.
According to ARG’s survey, 95 percent of 20- to 29-year-old evangelicals attended church regularly during their elementary and middle school years. Only 55 percent went to church during high school. And by college, only 11 percent were still attending church.
“They’re sitting in our churches right now … and they’re already gone,” Ham said during a “State of the Nation” address last week.
Delving deeper into some of the reasons for the exodus, the research group found that nearly 40 percent of the surveyed twentysomethings first had doubts about the Bible in middle school. Another 43.7 percent said they first doubted that all of the accounts and stories in the Bible are true during their high school years. Only around 10 percent said they first became doubtful about the Bible accounts during college.
Among those who said they do not believe all the biblical accounts are true, the top reasons they gave for doubting the scriptures were: “it was written by men” (24 percent), “it was not translated correctly” (18 percent), “the Bible contradicts itself” (15 percent), and “science shows the world is old” (14 percent).
