Two our of three high-school students leave church after graduation. How can we reverse the trend?

Shannon was 13 when she cut herself for the first time, three years ago.

“No one knew I was depressed,” Shannon says. “I was the model youth group person. I smiled a lot. I answered the Bible study questions.”

And she left the group, week after week, month after month, without a clue about how faith affects life.

Also three years ago and 13 at the time, Levhi came to the same youth group by way of a friend.

“We were both kids whose parents forced us to go to youth group,” he says. “He was much more into smoking weed than he was into Jesus.”

Shannon and Levhi are two of the nearly 150 young people who attend the youth group at Journey Community Church in La Mesa, Calif., on any given weekend. That’s 150 similar stories: personal searches for identity, purpose and significance.

Journey’s youth pastor of high school ministry, Brian Berry, understands the urgency of reaching youth at this time in their lives. The statistics, as he recounts them, are sobering:

-- Two out of 3 high school students leave the church after graduation.

-- But 77 percent of Christians come to faith by the age of 21.

-- More than 40 percent of young people aged 16 to 29 are now outside the Christian faith, up from 27 percent during the previous generation.

Facing a daunting challenge, Berry, along with many youth leaders across the country, wrestles with difficult questions, like:

-- Is the church spending critical resources and energy trying to solve the wrong problem?

-- Do we misunderstand the relationship of the Church to the youth culture, and fail to provide a dialogue tapping into a shared spiritual hunger for significance and purpose?

-- In the context of an events-and-entertainment focus, are we stripping ministry of the necessary relationships rooted in the transforming power and love of God?

-- Can we see discipleship and outreach as not just related entities, but as intertwined parts of a meaningful Christian life?

-- How does the church best find the next generation and keep young believers in faith?

York Moore, author of Growing Your Faith By Giving It Away: Telling The Gospel Story With Grace And Passion (2005, IVP) and the director for regional evangelism in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s Great Lakes region, says he has seen within the young people he speaks to a deep longing  for an issue or reality they can live and die for. Increasingly, young people are drawn to service and significance. Participation in social justice issues, such as homelessness, AIDS, poverty and racial reconciliation, has fueled renewed movements of compassion and restoration.

Youth also need caring relationships to help point the way and they need a glimpse of what it means to serve.

Investing in others is essential. With teenagers, wrestling through a slew of identity issues, sorting their way toward Jesus is a slow process. Berry, as he led his small group, began to understand better the power of one life investing into another and what Jesus can mean in the mind and heart of an adolescent.

Although the youth culture embraces cause and the idea of giving one’s life for something larger than self, the current generation of young people exists in a largely isolated context.

“Despite the technology, the multiple layers of connections and the social networks, there is a growing isolation among our young people,” says Greg Stier, founder of Dare2Share Ministries. “They can be open and vulnerable with their Facebook friends, but not with their family or real friends.”

Paradoxically, the inability to deeply connect with others comes at a time and age when they increasingly search for something to anchor their lives to in an increasingly detached world. Effective youth outreach cries out for costly sacrifice, the pouring out of one life into another, and makes sense only with a kingdom calculation.

“What better investment than to pour yourself into the life of your kids or a small group of teenagers?” St. Clair says. “If we believe the health of the church rests in the next generation, it’s a powerful ministry.”

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Outreach magazine ran an in-depth article on this subject in the September/October 2009 issue.

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