Why your kids will quit church and what you can do to stop it

For the past six months or so, I’ve been working directly with the teens in our church each Sunday morning and during our midweek service. What began as an exciting opportunity for my wife and has since become a bit of a burden, because…well, my goodness, the teens today!

I know that by saying that I sound like every other adult ever. Even Adam and Eve bemoaned the times of Cain, Abel, Seth, and their daughters with: “This is by far the worst generation yet!” You can find that verse somewhere in Genesis maybe.

It’s safe to blame the smartphones for why today’s generation is so miserably out of tune with reality, and why I feel they’re so much worse than kids “back in my day,” but it’s obviously more than that. Authors Ken Hamm and Britt Beemer target as the main culprit not the distractions of the world but their distraction from the Word. That’s what this entire book is about.

Book Summary

The main thesis of this book is that far too many teens who grew up in church eventually leave church because at some point along the line, they ceased believing that the Bible is true. The information comes from a survey of 1000 20-somethings who attended church while growing up, but who have since ceased attending church by choice. The conclusions drawn from the information are Ham’s and Beemer’s own, but the testimonies of the participants and outside research seem to verify what they’ve uncovered.

If you don’t know Ken Ham by name, you at least are likely aware of his organization, Answers in Genesis, or The Creation Museum and their life-size recreation of Noah’s Ark in Kentucky. Yeah, he’s that guy.

It should come as no surprise, then, where Ham sources the problem. It’s not just that kids don’t believe the Bible in general, but that they don’t believe the book of Genesis specifically. Ham targets their refusal to believe that God created the world in six, 24-hour days as a key starting point. If they can’t accept this primary account as literal, then the foundation of every account (from the flood, to Babel, to Abraham, to Joseph) is destroyed, leaving them with an ancient books of irrelevant myths…and who wants to waste their time on that?

The authors don’t just blame public education for the deterioration, though, but Christian families and churches that themselves treat these accounts as myths. How many of our Sunday Schools teach the same “Bible stories” to our kids over and over? Our kids can recite the “stories” of Jonah and Daniel (or at least the exciting parts) and can even name the strongest man in the Bible, but the more they’re told these tales and the spiritual lessons they supposedly convey, the further removed they get from believing that any of it really happened.

Ham’s recommendation ultimately is that our churches return to teaching our children the Bible (especially Genesis) as literal history in which God has intentionally revealed Himself. Only when they accept the Word as Truth will they recognize its relevance to their lives, and only when God and His Word are relevant will they have any reason to keep attending church when it suddenly becomes their choice to do so or not.

Interactions and Disagreements

While I agree with everything Big Picture that Ham writes in this book, I do disagree with him on some issues that he might consider very serious indeed. I absolutely believe in a literal interpretation of Scripture, yet I do not believe two particular points he emphasizes dealing with the age of the Earth. And I don’t need to say it, but I will: these are my opinions, and I could be wrong.

First, I do not believe that we can decipher from the biblical record that the Earth is just 6,000 years old. I look to Francis Schaeffer’s argument that the Bible was never intended to keep an exact record of human history down to the year, as we might anticipate a modern genealogy to do. It’s intended to reveal God and His historical relationship with mankind. There may very well have contained gaps in the genealogical records, gaps which neither make God a liar nor make Moses a poor historian. Simply gaps that were acceptable according to Ancient Near Eastern standards. To over-emphasize an exact year reads too deeply into the documents—as if they followed today’s rules of record-keeping. To read into the text what isn’t there frankly makes Christians look like idiots—which brings me to me second point.

I believe that it’s both reasonable and logical, according to the first chapter of Scripture, to allow for “millions of years of history” (a term Ham hates strongly and often) within our universe, though not necessarily involving plant or animal life. Let me clarify. I do not believe in Theistic Evolution. I do not believe in the Gap Theory. I do not believe in the Day Age Theory. I believe in a literal six, 24-hour-day Creation by a supernatural and almighty God roughly 10,000 years ago. So how do these beliefs mix?

The end of Genesis 1:16 has what’s almost a throwaway line that amazes me beyond measure. After God created the sun and moon, it tells us: “He made the stars also.” Consider that. In a word, God made the stars.

The star furthest from our Earth (that we’ve yet discovered) is something like 15-billion light years away. And we can see it. That means God created a universe with a history of at least 15 billion years. You don’t need to bend the meaning of the words or invent some theory of how He sped up light and time to make it happen—no, if God could create a universe that existed, then He certainly could have created a history for that universe that never existed. It’s common sense.

Adam wasn’t crafted as zygote but as a walking, talking man. Where’d he learn to walk and talk? Where’d he get his fingernails? That’s history that never happened, but which God created. Jesus worked the same kind of miracle when He turned water to wine—grapes that never before existed and a fermentation process that never happened, yet suddenly “the best wine” at the party. Amazing.

Everything on this planet had history, from the already-grown trees (which I’d argue had rings inside their trunks), to the chicken which came before the egg, to the mountains and rocks and everything else you could name. Science wants to tell me that this rock is 300 million years old? Fine. I won’t argue the point, because that star up there 500 million light years away. Same difference. God created a spinning planet in a moving galaxy in an expanding universe…and He did within the past 10,000 years or so. To me that’s not just reasonable and logical, but biblical. Heck, it’s even scientific, but that’s an argument for another day.

Conclusion

All in all, I totally agree with Ham that what our teens need is a solid trust in the validity and inerrancy of God’s Word. If they have that following their genuine faith in Christ, then they’ll not leave church in their 20s. They just won’t.

Of course, this does not guarantee that they won’t leave our church. Problems will come and relationships will break, because we’re still human. But how they react to unforeseen problems is part of the training, and if they leave our church for another, praise God they’re still maintaining unity in the body.

Training our teens to read the Bible is essential to making sure they stay the course. Training them to read into the Bible a particular opinion, though, oversteps our mandate and swings the pendulum the other direction—while they might not leave our church because they no longer believe the Word, they may ultimately leave the global Body of Christ because they think anyone who disagrees with their opinion is a heretic. I don’t want my teens to become either of these.

This was a good book and I do recommend it for youth leaders and parents. Just take note that this is another vehicle for Ken Ham’s hobby horse.

©2022 E.T.