Why Young Adults Leave Church

OneNewsNow has an article about a LifeWay study on young adults leaving the church.

A new study from LifeWay Research shows that more than two-thirds of young adults who attend a Protestant church in high school will drop out of church for at least a year before their 22nd birthday.

The study says about 2/3 do come back eventually, at least in some capacity:

Many of those who drop out do eventually return. Among church dropouts who are now ages 23-30, 35 percent currently attend church twice a month or more. Another 30 percent attend church more sporadically. Thus, about two-thirds of those who leave do return at some level.

If you're only attending church a couple of times a month, I have to doubt whether it's doing much good, but I suppose it's better than nothing.
Why do some leave the church?

For example, 27 percent of those individuals said they left church because they wanted "a break from church."

Other reasons cited for keeping them from attending church included: the transition to college (25%), increased work responsibilities (23%), "too busy, though still wanted to attend" (22%), moved too far away from the church they had been attending (22%), and wanted to spend more time with friends from outside the church (17%).

I think if we did a better job as parents, and the church did it's job to be relevant, this percentage would be much lower.

Many Christian parents have either become too busy, or have bought into the world's wisdom that you can just let a child figure out right and wrong for itself. If you do that, they'll pick the world over the church almost every time. Why? The church offers a life of commitment, discipline, striving for selflessness and sacrifice, and hard work...while the world offers a life of no commitment, doing what you want with no guilt, affirms selfishness, a me-centered worldview, little discipline, and the pursuit of whatever you can justify in your own eyes.

Many churches also do a lousy job of demonstrating that they're relevant to everyday life. Either they're too afraid to call for a committed walk with Christ from their young people, or they've sold out to the world's values of sexual permissiveness and non-judgmentalism no standards. If you're a young person and you can choose (1) a life that pretends some level of virtue while holding no real standards, and (2) a life that doesn't hypocritically pretend some standard, while allowing full permissiveness and acceptance of all behaviors...you'd almost be a fool not to choose #2, if you saw those as your only choices.

I came from a background not unlike this, and I walked away from the church for several years after getting out on my own. During that time, I made a wreck of my life and brought more pain on myself than I care to think long about. I'm here to tell you, you don't want to rob your young person of a solid foundation and leave them on track for that kind of destruction.

Parents and churches should decide TODAY: are you serious about the faith you say you hold and do you want your young people to be serious about it...or do you want to continue a life of hypocrisy that your young people can see through from a mile away?

 

South Dakota voters fickle when it comes to Senate longevity

By Gordon Garnos

AT ISSUE: Will Senator Tim Johnson's battle of the blood hemorrhage spell his retirement. His staff has said he is expected to return to his office next month. While they continue to issue glowing reports of his recovery, few South Dakotans are fully aware of what his actual health issues are. We have been told that he still is getting physical and speech therapy. However, no one that we know of has heard him speak since that near-death stroke last December. Will he be fully capable of resuming his duties as before? If not who may be lurking in the wings for a chance at his job? (Full Article)

Editor: Edwards is a 'Big Phony'

Seems the editorial page editor of The State, South Carolina's largest newspaper, isn't buying John Edwards' presidential act. In fact, Brad Warthen calls Edwards a "big phony."

Here's one example why, at a 2003 campaign event:

His face was impassive, slack, bored: Another crowd, another show. Nothing wrong with that — just a professional at work.

But then, I saw the thing that stuck with me: As his introduction reached its climax, he straightened, and turned on a thousand-watt smile as easily and artificially as flipping a switch. He assumed the look of a man who had just, quite unexpectedly, run into a long-lost best friend.

Here's another example from 2004. Edwards did lots of smiling, glad-handing and "It's an honor for me to meet you" type stuff with the common folk where it could make an impression. But where it didn't matter?

he utterly ignored the folks in our customer service department and others who had hoped for a handshake or a word from the Great Man. He had saved all his amiability, all his professionally entertaining energy and talent, for the folks upstairs who would have a say in the paper’s endorsement.

This stuff reminds me of the clip of Bill Clinton at Ron Brown's funeral. He's walking along, joking and laughing with someone and when he sees the camera on him, his face instantly morphs into a mask of grief and somber reflection and he looks down as he is struck with on-cue remorse.

It was a rarely-seen (for the public) and perfect example of what best characterizes liberalism:

symbolism over substance.

Soviet Playbook Re-opened for Iraq

Now here's someone who isn't afraid to call out the Left for what all of it's divisive, pseudo-pacifist Bush-hating is: aiding the enemy.

That someone has a column at the WSJ Opinion Journal today on the subject, and that someone should know what he's talking about: Romanian Lt. Gen. Pacepa is the highest-ranking intelligence official ever to have defected from the Soviet bloc.

Commenting on last week's positive statement by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown about President Bush's leadership in the war on terrorism, Pacepa says

Mr. Brown's statements elicited anger from many of Mr. Bush's domestic detractors, who claim the president concocted the war on terror for personal gain. But as someone who escaped from communist Romania--with two death sentences on his head--in order to become a citizen of this great country, I have a hard time understanding why some of our top political leaders can dare in a time of war to call our commander in chief a "liar," a "deceiver" and a "fraud."

I spent decades scrutinizing the U.S. from Europe, and I learned that international respect for America is directly proportional to America's own respect for its president.

So how does this fit in with our enemy's goals?

Sowing the seeds of anti-Americanism by discrediting the American president was one of the main tasks of the Soviet-bloc intelligence community during the years I worked at its top levels. This same strategy is at work today, but it is regarded as bad manners to point out the Soviet parallels.

And how does this connect to my earlier comments about George McGovern's actions and how they undermined our country?

During the Vietnam War we spread vitriolic stories around the world, pretending that America's presidents sent Genghis Khan-style barbarian soldiers to Vietnam who raped at random, taped electrical wires to human genitals, cut off limbs, blew up bodies and razed entire villages. Those weren't facts. They were our tales, but some seven million Americans ended up being convinced their own president, not communism, was the enemy. As Yuri Andropov, who conceived this dezinformatsiya war against the U.S., used to tell me, people are more willing to believe smut than holiness.

The final goal of our anti-American offensive was to discourage the U.S. from protecting the world against communist terrorism and expansion. Sadly, we succeeded. After U.S. forces precipitously pulled out of Vietnam, the victorious communists massacred some two million people in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Another million tried to escape, but many died in the attempt. This tragedy also created a credibility gap between America and the rest of the world, damaged the cohesion of American foreign policy, and poisoned domestic debate in the U.S.

Unfortunately, partisans today have taken a page from the old Soviet playbook.

Remember, this isn't some Right-wing Republican Christian zealot saying this; this is a former communist officer.

Pacepa then shoves today's pseudo-pacifists noses into the stinking pile of truth they'd love to ignore:

Now we are again at war. It is not the president's war. It is America's war, authorized by 296 House members and 76 senators. I do not intend to join the armchair experts on the Iraq war. I do not know how we should handle this war, and they don't know either. But I do know that if America's political leaders, Democrat and Republican, join together as they did during World War II, America will win. Otherwise, terrorism will win. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi predicted just before being killed: "We fight today in Iraq, tomorrow in the land of the Holy Places, and after there in the West."

We should never follow our leaders blindly. Such a mindset is not what gave birth to America, and it's not what brought her to greatness.

But to zealously and baselessly undermine our president in wartime for political gain, or to allow ourselves to be duped into joining such an exercise, is irresponsible and unpatriotic.

Thank God for voices of experience and understanding like Pacepa's. Those who loathe our country won't listen to it, however, and neither will those who desire political points more than the good of their country.

But will you?

HT to the World Magazine blog.

Military Service Isn't a Free Pass.

I served 10 years in the military, stateside and overseas, so I appreciate the sacrifices and dedication of the men and women in our armed forces.

However, military service is NOT a free pass for irresponsible behavior that undermines our country or our nations security--even when the irresponsible person "means well" or the behavior is "sincere." Military service does not place a person or their actions above scrutiny or criticism when those actions warrant it.

As Todd Epp points out at SD Watch, George McGovern fought in World War II, flying bombing missions over German targets. I'm grateful for McGovern's military service and his defense of our country and of freedom. But do past acts of service to ones country mean that everything someone does is patriotic? Or even in the best interest of the country?

Benedict Arnold, Aldridge Ames, and Robert Hanssen, to name a few, were all men who served their country and worked in the agencies responsible for defending her. Yet they are not known for all that they did for America, but for what they did against her.

I'm not saying McGovern's actions are on a par with the treason of these men. I'm making the comparison that they all served their country, but it was revealed that some of their actions undermined their country. Should we give them a pass on undermining the country because at some point they served the country? Of course not.

There are any number of people who, for whatever reason, served their country and then ended up going wrong: George McGovern, John Kerry, and even John McCain to a degree.

Where McGovern has gone wrong is in many of the things that Sibby recently pointed out: a host of socialist policies that not only undermine the health and productivity of our nation, they violate both the spirit of the American way (self-determination, freedom, independence and personal responsibility) and the limited-government and limited-power Constitution that is the highest law of our land.

McGovern was also wrong to undermine his country in the war in Vietnam. I understand that socialism is a close-cousin to communism, but the enemy we fought there was brutal, ruthless, and bent on world domination ("We will bury you"). It was not a stupid war, but a war fought to protect our ally from communist bloodshed and oppression, and to stop the communist machine of domination that was rolling over country after country. It was a war America lost not because our military lacked strength or valor, but because weak-willed self-loathers like McGovern put their Leftist agenda ahead of what was right and ahead of our country (just as many are now doing with Iraq). It was fought in a thoroughly screwed-up manner (overly restrained, micro-managed, LBJ's "graduated response" as opposed to our bomb-them-until-they-surrender approach in WWII, without the will to clearly win), but it was a war for the right reasons that needed to be fought--and should have been won.

In the early '70's, McGovern called for reducing our military budget by over 1/3 during a war, and literally giving the taxpayers money away to people. He called for a "guaranteed minimum wage" (which is outright Marxist wealth redistribution of the highest order) and the unnecessary and socially destructive Equal Rights Amendment.

As for his social work against hunger, I suppose you could give him points for intent. But the best way to reduce hunger would be working to set people free from the oppression of totalitarian governments, Marxism and unproductive socialism. The only thing is, since WWII McGovern never wants to tackle totalitarian governments, and works to promote Marxist socialist policies everywhere he goes. So he's fostering what he claims to be fighting.

No wonder that in his 1972 bid for the presidency, McGovern only got 17 electoral votes from the two most liberal enclaves in the country: Massachusetts and Washington D.C. Even his home state of South Dakota rejected his pacifist, socialist agenda.

McGovern's military service is to be respected. But it doesn't give him a free pass for undermining his country during wartime (sorry about my blatant patriotism; I'm just old fashioned like that) and undermining his country by advocating greed, class envy and policies that weaken what has made America great.

Patriotism is an everyday kind of thing. You don't do something once to earn the mantle. You have to keep on loving your country, defending her against all enemies foreign and domestic, and upholding the laws and values that make America the unique wonder she is in order to maintain the title of patriot.