LITTLE ROCK — David Kinnaman knows statistics. As president of the research company the Barna Group he tracks trends in matters of faith. While conducting interviews for his 2007 book unChristian, co-authored with Gabe Lyons, Kinnaman was startled to find that many young Christians shared the same negative views of the church as their non churchgoing peers.
So he turned his attention to a problem common in many churches - young Christian adults missing from the pews.
For his book You Lost Me, Kinnaman scoured years of research and conducted interviews to find out why young Christians are leaving the church. He discovered that many see the church as repressive, exclusive and shallow, as well as anti-science and critical of modern culture.
“The book’s title reflects their disdain for one-sided communication and a formulaic faith disconnected from the real world,” Kinnaman says.
Members of this “mosaic” or millennial generation range in age from 18 to 29 and according to Kinnaman they constitute the “black hole of church attendance.” While many were active in church as teenagers, about 60 percent stopped going to church after high school, he said. In addition, 38 percent said they went through a period where they seriously doubted their faith and 32 percentsaid at times they felt like rejecting the faith of their parents.
That’s not to say they have completely turned their backs on Christianity or that they leave church for the same reasons.
“We expected to find a prominent pattern to the data and instead we found a lot of variation and we came to the conclusion that every story matters,” Kinnaman said. “We really looked at why people leave and the way they leave.”
The researchers found the young Christian adults missing from church fall into three categories - nomads, exiles and prodigals. Nomads, the most common group, are those who consider themselves Christian but are no longer involved in church. They often leave because they find the church shallow and disconnected from their lives, Kinnaman said.
“They feel at arm’s distance from the community of faith,” he said.
The second most common group are the exiles, those who struggle to reconcile their faith with the culture.
“They might feel called into a creative career or science or business and they feel the church is really disconnected and oppressive over issues of science and cultural engagement,” Kinnaman said. “They feel stuck between the faith of the parents and their vocation and calling.”
The rarest group are the prodigals who have lost their faith and no longer considerthemselves to be Christians.
“Issues of doubt and exclusivity become big for prodigals because they don’t know how to express their questions in church,” he said. “They do become confounded by these larger questions.”
Although each group is different, they do share some similarities, including a mistrust of institutions, Kinnaman said.
“Institutions have let them down and they band together to find a new form of community,” he said. “It’s not just you lost me from church, but from the workplace, the media, from politics and from capitalism. There’s a sense in which this generation feels disconnected and disillusioned by the system around them.”
The book features personal stories of young adultswho have drifted away from church and offers insight to church leaders and parents seeking to welcome them back to the faith. You Lost Me also includes 50 “Ideas to Find a Generation” contributed by theologians, scholars and Christian thinkers.
Kinnaman said there is no easy answer - no one-sizefits-all way to lure young adults back to church - but he does offer reason for hope.
“The notion of You Lost Me is not purely about a generation that is lost and forever gone,” he said. “It’s a notion of the dynamic problems of communicating and listening to the voice of a generation.”
Religion, Pages 14 on 11/26/2011