Last week I did a blog titled ‘Resisting Being Cutting Edge‘ and included a link to another blog titled ‘Top 10 Reasons Our Kids Leave Church‘ Today I’m going to interact a little with that article. This article says the 10 reasons are:

10. The Church is “Relevant”

9. They never attended church to begin with

8. They get smart

7. You sent them out unarmed

6. You gave them hand me downs

5. Community

4. They found better feelings

3. They got tired of pretending

2. They know the truth

1. They don’t need it

It’s worth reading the explanations in the article, but the thing I don’t see on here is family upbringing. I think this is the key to all these other issues. We have professionals who take care of every need we have. There are teachers who are professional educators, doctors who are professional health care providers, shouldn’t we have professional Christians too? I hate to break it to you, but there is only one professional Christian who we can read about in the Bible. His name is Jesus. Ultimately we need to trust that God is going to work in the students lives as we do our best to instruct them, but I think it’s almost completely up to the parents. The parents are the ones who have the option of spending the most time with their kids, and the ones who the kids will most often imitate.

Proverbs 22:6 says, “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” This is not a universal truth, but it is a general trend. Ultimately children have their own minds and identities, but in the grace of God those who are raised in Bible believing and God fearing homes will grow to be the same. Parents need to start stepping up and setting an example for their children as they grow to be more Christ like in their lives. If the parents are nominal Christians the students will be that AT BEST, and most often will completely fall out of church.

The other issue I see with these top 10 reasons is that we NEED community in the church. We all have these spiritual blind spots and sin issues in our lives that we aren’t aware of until someone else points them out in our lives. Were it not for the church people would follow their own thinking and reasoning right into sin. Community may be a buzz word in the Christian circle today (just as “Gospel” is), but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t value it. The call to Christianity is a call to community. We need the body around us to support encourage and hold us accountable.