How to Engage Young Adults: Report from Retention Summit to Adventist Leaders
By AT News Team, December 9, 2014: The student associations on the campuses of the Adventist colleges and universities across North America sent key leaders to a Summit on Young Adult Retention the weekend of October 23-25. Adventist Today reported the meeting as it convened and has obtained a copy of the report prepared by the participants and shared with denominational administrators in the annual meeting of the governing body of the denomination’s North American Division on November 13.
“Why are young adults leaving the church?” The report lists six reasons, including “often” they are “casualties of the church’s inability to portray God’s love,” and “feel as if they are not allowed to ask questions.”
Where young adults are staying in the Adventist Church it is because “there is a safe place to be real, ask questions and be [accepted when they are] broken.” Young adults are retained as church attenders when they “have seen Jesus at the center” of both “relationships and doctrine.” The report lists five factors that result in retention.
The value of this report is that it is the work of young adults themselves; young adults who are actively involved in pursuing a Christian higher education at an Adventist institution. It reflects both their personal experiences and what they have observed among others on their campus at the local churches they attend.
“What young adults need from the church” is, among other things to see the church welcome, “the prayer warriors, the doubters, the artists, the analytics, the musicians, the introverts,” the report states. “Any and all are needed and wanted in our church.” It also included a section on “what young adults are willing to give to the church.”
“It is our hope that this report will inform our church leaders as we continue to explore the topic of young adult retention and involvement in the church,” stated the 19 young leaders who signed the report. “We, as young adult leaders in our respective schools, will take the information gathered here and find practical ways to carry out the ideas expressed in this document.”
The 19 include Andrew Ashley, Dani Nobuhara and Keren Pagan from Southern Adventist University; Danielle Barnard and Ro Sang Puia from Washington Adventist University; Natalie Dorland and Katie Heinrich from Walla Walla University; Josh Estrada and Amanda Schultz from La Sierra University; Jessica Hall and Andrew Orpana from Canadian University College; Jaryn Hart and Justin Springfield from Pacific Union College; Conner Mason and Ashley Smit from Southwestern Adventist University; Debbie Pinto and Douglas Barahona representing Union College; Lindsey Pratt and Jason Schockey from Andrews University.
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Keeping the youth, and for that matter all the so called family of God engaged in the church is not a new problem. It started in the Garden and God has tried every strategy and program in the “Book” from:
Showing us how to protect our lost dignity and individuality by giving us our first set of clothes.
Expanding our diet to include plants, in addition to their fruits, and eventually just about anything that moved.
Showing us a shocking and dramatic way to alleviate our guilt through the killing of an innocent animal.
Promising that He would respect whatever way of life we chose and would therefore knock before visiting our most inner being, our “heart.”
Encouraging us to make “love” and grow a families.
Threatening to drown us if we didn’t shape up.
Gifting many families with a culture of law, order, smarts, wisdom, health and prosperity.
Taking responsibility for the bad things that happen.
Using thunder and lightening to get our attention.
Giving us a handwritten copy of His personal guide to success and happiness.
Air-conditioning our desert encampment.
Letting us reap the fruits of our “labors” while at the same time delaying the development of those fruits that could harm us.
Blessing us with sun and rain no matter our ingratitude.
Providing us with angel’s food, boring as it was.
Giving us a new and improved set of clothes and shoes that didn’t wear out.
Giving us water, “on the rocks”, in the middle of a desert .
Sending us prophets to remind us of the value of following His guide to success and happiness and to teach us how to apply its instructions.
Letting us visit our “wild”neighbors and allowing us to incorporate some of their “more” colorful and exciting customs, even when those customs might draw us away from the family.
Initiating revival after revival after revival.
Personally coming to our world to show us what happens when we follow His guide to success and happiness.
Performing miracles, even raising people from the dead.
Patiently defending us, even though most of our actions were indefensible.
Providing us with a mobile, wireless systems to communicate with Him (prayer) and with each other, (cellphone) even when He knew we would mostly misuse them.
This is in no way a complete list of all the ways God has attempted to keep us in His family. I think God believes that of all His strategies to keep us in His family the one that works the best is the one He demonstrated during His first advent when He personally showed us what happens when we follow His guide to success and happiness, even if at first the results appeared dismal.
I believe that we should take courage from the fact that God has tried everything in the “book”, to get us to come home, even when it placed His reputation in question. It confirms that God is wildly in love with us crazies and will do almost anything to get us to come home.
I believe that God desires that we would use His first advent strategy and follow the “golden rule,” in our attempts to reach out to our neighbors and friends. And, we all probably could use some training.
If we ever come up with a more successful strategy, I’m sure God will be all ears. No one has struggled with this issue more than He nor has one been more disappointed.
No delegates from non-SdA universities? Why? Aren’t they valuable to the church? Or is it only SdA students?
But what did the young people have to say in specific methods that have not previously been used? Why they are leaving is what should be heard.
Bingo!
I applaud the church for its intent and concern, but I have to agree wit Elaine Nelson about the selection of “19 leaders.” Selecting them only from SDA colleges is a confirmation of the church’s myopic view of reality. (And where is the leader from Oakwood University??). If you want to know why young Adventists are leaving the church, why are you asking those who are IN the church to speak for them? Many of those you need to engage are enrolled in secular universities and many more of them don’t attend college at all, but are in the work force or serving in the military. Just go down the church rosters and contact those who are MIA. They’ll give us an earful. I look forward to reviewing the results, but lets’s make sure the demographic pool reflects reality!
Elaine’s comment “But what did the young people have to say in specific methods that have not previously been used?” is right on the ball.
Regardless of the analogies and symbolic language they used, there is nothing here that has not been expressed by every generation of this age group. It’s part of growing up and learning to make decent decisions. People in this age bracket leave the church because they choose their priorities, often because “fun and games” are more appealing than “church”. It’s not the fault of any church “system”.
It is true that there are always people in congregations who have trouble understanding, or “putting up with” this age group, and who all too often express unfortunate attitudes, but so do parents, teachers and just about anyone else, sometimes out of pure frustration!
Some of us at that age learned better decision-making skills because we got drafted into the military, a whole different experience that matures people very quickly.
I sure agree with your second paragraph, Zackgeo. College aged kids don’t “leave” the Church – at least not in the sense that they make a conscious deliberate break with it. They just gradually drift away – first from the religious trappings, and then, over time, from the subculture, to where it just doesn’t matter.
I noticed in looking at the names that I actually know a couple of these kids quite well. They are good kids from strong, though definitely not fundamentalist, Adventist families. While I don’t know their friends, it is my strong suspicion that they don’t know many kids who would say they have left the church they grew up in. Which leads me to wonder what data was gathered and how it was gathered. I will look forward to seeing the report to find out how the data was gathered that led to the conclusions. It would be nice to see a more in-depth news piece interviewing one of the principle investigators and asking probing questions about how the conclusions were reached. This new article suggests a lot of boilerplate conclusions that were listed on a greaseboard and then voted on. I’m sure more rigorous thought and work went into the report. I hope that this article does not do it justice.
So much I see appears to be ego driven and introspective. It’s like not what you can do for the church it’s what can the church do for you.
I and my spouse were once young in the church but neither we nor our peers at the time were on the “me” bandwagon.There may have been exceptions.
Sure we endured some boring sermons but twas ever thus.
We believed and still do that the SDA church has the true message for our day.
Maranatha
Have you thought about this problem being one that should be solved by individuals and not some program by the Church? We lose young adults because in their homes they have not been grounded in the benefits of being a Christian. We are told that we should be talking to children about the commandments when they rise up, when they lie down, morning, evening, noon, and night. Young people should be so indoctrinated in the home that they know the cost vs the benefit of being a believer.
When we wait until they are young adults – we have waited too long. Lazy parenting is why we lose our children to the bright lights.
Alan Yoder, Re: “We lose young adults because in their homes they have not been grounded in the benefits of being a Christian.”
If you are correct, should it not stand to reason that the parents don’t know how to produce the right results and a properly constructed program by the church could help them? Or do you assume that it is out of willful negligence.
I commend the church for its interest in retaining young adults. However, in addition to looking at what it is doing wrong it needs to look at the pockets in which it is doing it right and make a conscious attempt to replicate its success in other geographic locations. It should not be too hard to identify the churches with a disproportionately high percentage of young adults with respect to their geographic location.
With a group of churches that know how to retain their young in hand, the church can develop a theoretical model of how it should be done. The church can then identify a group of churches that would be a fertile environment for deploying their model and to see if they can replicate the success. Review the results update the model and repeat the process until success can be reliably reproduce.
For a few years I attended a church in southern Texas that had a relatively conservative style of worship. Most of the high school and college students were in public school, there was no Adventist hospital, college or institution of any kind nearby. Yet the church had an incredibly low median age. The young people would bring their non-Adventist friends from public school to events at the church.
If the church is serious about retaining young people one of the things that they need to come to grips with is that young people who are actively involved with local church leadership or have friends that are involved in local church leadership are less likely to complain about the relevance of the church or its subculture, and more likely to fix the problems as best they can. Retaining young people is a complex problem and there is no silver bullet. However, the Bible does present a picture of God that is appealing to the young in the height of their idealism.
I googled “Young Adult Retention Summit” and found a more informative article posted by Justin Yang, entitled “Reflections on Young Adult Retention Summit…” It has quite a few very interesting statistics, including numbers on why young people leave the church. I suspect that the group of students assembled at Union College may have done no actual research, but simply reflected on statistics that had been compiled by others.
The report I saw indicated that the single biggest reason kids list for leaving the Church – 28% – is “No big issue – just drifted away.” The second biggest reason is “lack of compassion.” And there is nothing in the second reason indicating the the kids who leave for that reason are “casualties” of that perceived lack of compassion. So “lack of compassion may simply be the kids way of saying, “I left because the church isn’t doing what churches are supposed to do.” I strongly suspect “lack of compassion” is a disingenuous moralistic copout.
So why didn’t the Summit, as reported in this news article, mention or deal with the number one reason why kids say they leave the church – “just drifted away?” For the same reason that climate scientists and politicians don’t want to acknowledge or deal with the primary reasons for climate change – wind, solar activity, clouds, water vapor. They don’t understand these chaotic dynamic drivers as well as they understand CO2. So they’d rather pretend that the primary driver of climate change is something they can control – CO2. They’re like the drunk under the street lamp, crawling around on his knees, looking for his car keys. When asked where he lost his keys, he points across the street –
“Over there by the park bench.”
“So why are you looking here instead of around the park bench?”
“Oh, because the light’s much better here.”
As some commenters have alluded to, the problem can’t be addressed with top-down solutions. When I grew up, we went to church every week, as well as Friday night MV and other programs. Our family life was centered around Church life. It was unthinkable that we might skip church and go to the mountains or the beach for the weekend because we just felt like doing something fun for a change. Even when we went on vacation, we would look for a church to attend on Sabbath. In my own parenting, our kids went to church regularly, but we weren’t obsessive about it. There were no Friday night programs, no Ingathering, and we seldom bothered to go to Sabbath afternoon or Saturday night event sponsored by the Church. We just had better things to do. And it never occurred to us to interrupt a wonderful vacation by looking for an SDA Church to attend on Sabbath. The Church was important, but could be set aside for other things we wanted to do. Some of our five kids are active in church; some are not. Most who were not are becoming more active as they have families.
But I think to a large degree, we would should look to changes in baby boomer attitudes toward and relationships with the Church to understand the problems with retention. They are multi-factorial. I suspect that the reasons given in this article are way off base. Dying, liberal Protestant churches are great at creating places where it is safe to ask questions, where people feel loved and accepted, where doubters, musicians, and artists are made to feel welcome. We “enlightened baby boomers think we pass on and sustain deeply meaningful communal spiritual life without committing too strongly to the religious containers through which that life was birthed and sustained in us. I don’t want to disparage the Summit conclusions. But as reflected in this article, it sounds like it will have about as much effect on retention as climate change summits have on the climate.
It has become traditional to attend services on the seventh day. Yet if one followed the commandment, they would “rest in their tents.” There was nothing in the commandment about holding religious services on that day as it was simply to be a day free from work.
That is why it should be a day free from one’s normal work activities and a time when families could enjoy all sorts of activities together; i.e, there is nothing stronger than bonds built between parent and child than participating in sports and other recreational pursuits together. Couples could take a short drive to a scenic place and have time to reconnect from the week’s work pressures.
Attending church often alienates older children and teens; but establishing a family pattern of making the seventh day a time to spend together and listening to each other is far more a blessing than sitting in church or SS.
Growing up having to attend church each week is why most “drift away” and feel they’ve attended church all their lives and it was more than enough.
This would make the Sabbath a delight instead of a burden.
Sort of like practicing the piano, Elaine? Would you suggest that parents not subject their children to the discipline of music lessons because being forced to practice might alienate them from music. I never cared for school. Should my parents not have forced me to attend school, study, and get good grades? I know many accomplished musicians – one of whom now loves to play regularly with a community symphony orchestra – who hated practicing as children and teens, but are now grateful for the gift that was “forced” upon them. I hated practicing violin as a kid. But now I wish my mother had forced me to stick with it.
The notion that the pathway to excellence, joy and fulfillment in anything does not require discipline – doing what we don’t necessarily feel like doing – is so puerile and tedious! We spend the overwhelming portion of our lives as adults – not children. Don’t we want children to grow into self-disciplined, self-sufficient, responsible adults? Yes, I found religious disciplines tedious and boring as a child, and they are not always my first choice as an adult. I agree with you that the Bible does not make church attendance a religious duty. So What? I now find deep joy and meaning in the rituals and traditions that I used to chafe at.
Elaine, you can’t seem to reconcile yourself to a god that makes any religious demands today, or who might be calling us to any kind of communal obedience, except the god who speaks through the diktats of secular political morality. You seem to derive great joy and satisfaction in a command and control state that bends, coerces, and disciplines its populace to projections of “God’s” will that resonate with you. But you can’t get your mind around the possibility that learning, hearing, and doing God’s will through voluntary religious containers, passed on from generation to generation, may actually produce a remarkable number of well-rounded, loving adults, despite the reality that some will become alienated and leave the faith community.
You argue that having to attend church each week is why most “drift away.” But isn’t that also an integral part of the reasons why many stay? It certainly was with me. Most kids who have to practice a musical instrument every day don’t stick with it. Would you therefore conclude that parents are doing their children a disservice if they subject them to the disciplines which produce the beauty created by symphony orchestras?
“Why are young adults leaving the church?” — Because once they understand that they have been LIED to about EGW, the ‘Clear Word,’ about the forensic atonement, about executive hospital salaries, etc. … they simply LEAVE, whoosh, gone!
Horst, is that what you would like to believe is the reason? Or do you actually have some persuasive evidence? I think you may be about 40 years behind the times in your assumptions about the role Ellen White plays in the religious education of SDA youth – especially those who leave the church.
Methinks thou dost project too much.
Yes Nathan… 40 years or more, including your weird, unscriptural views on the Trinity and the person and work of Jesus Christ, the “Great Controversy” theme and the Investigative Judgment, and the incredible amount of material that Ellen White simply made up, Adventism…
• confuses law and gospel,
• denies the biblical doctrine of hell,
• claims that Satan is a sin-bearer for Christians,
• denies that human beings possess an immaterial soul or spirit, and
• employs its very own, deceptive Clear Word version of the Bible.
C. S. Lewis reminds us, (in The Great Divorce, Ch. 9) that there are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done”, and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it.
Be well in the love and joy of Jesus Christ alone, my friend.
You’re really funny, Horst. How many Adventist young people who leave the Church could give you a consistent, coherent notion of what Ellen White or the Church teach regarding the issues you have identified? The Church I, and probably you, grew up in did a much better job, with all its non-Biblical baggage, of keeping young people in the Church than the church of our children and grandchildren, which is pretty non-doctrinal and ecumenical in its outlook.
I’m not suggesting that we go back to that non-Biblical baggage. I’m simply arguing that the emotional/intellectual baggage, which apparently makes you love to hate the caricature by which you want to define Adventism, is seldom, if ever a factor, much less the reason, when young people who were raised in the Church don’t stay. Do you have evidence to the contrary? BTW, I like your C.S. Lewis quote.
Learning to separate all that “non-Biblical baggage” from the real Biblical teachings was a real, difficult and painful challenge for me after my son left the church. But God led me through it, so I know it can be done and people can have a solid, doctrinal faith in God based entirely on scripture that is surprisingly similar to SDA teachings. There is no need for anyone to get caught in the caricatured fear of the church becoming detached from doctrines when we extract Ellen White from the equation. If anything, I have a much more solid foundation for my faith because she has been removed from it.
Folks it’s a real challenge keeping the youth at our church. I’m a newly baptized SDA and have the fire in my belly to serve – as we are called do be and do. For 3 1/2 yrs I’ve watched our youth run from church to church entertaining themselves. They refuse to take part of the real work involved in the day to day operations of the church. They are a no show at every program the adults do unless it’s praise related (singing). I honestly do not understand it as I have not had much exposure to the church family for 20+ years. They don’t tithe, they are not professional – they are late for everything and yet are the most educated and have professional jobs in our congregation. When one tries to get an answer as to why their absenteeism keeps growing we get nothing concrete. Yes the old folks are boring, yes we don’t share power, yes we do the same thing over and over. I mean it’s church – God’s work is outside. We get training to go get His sheeps to come in. Am I off? or just too new? I’m 50 yrs old and just am always looking at what we can do better and writing 1 page plans. Plans I do not have $ to implement but hopefully will. I just can’t sit and watch our congregation dwindle. Thoughts please.. Thanks in advance for your negative and positive replies.