What 18-29 year olds want from churches: less judgment, doctrine; more social justice, gay acceptance

This study is based on in-­‐depth interviews with 25 young adults (age18 to 29), who are involved in social justice work and who are connected to a place of worship in the greater New York City area.

Doesn’t seem to be a very objective study especially with such a narrow sampling………..

Seriously? 25?

Not only so, but having your whole sample come from people who are “involved in social justice work” radically skews the result. Try repeating the process and asking 18-29 year olds who are all “involved in military combat work” or who are all “involved in Christian missions work” and I daresay you’d get radically different results. This is why studies need to choose representative samples, not just samples.

Why would we need an objective and representative survey group when there’s a narrative that needs to be pushed to an unsuspecting audience? Everyone knows that those Christians are bigots anyway.

/snark

What 18-29 year olds want from churches: less judgment, sound doctrine; more social justice, gay acceptance false teaching

Fixed

Already Gone, by K. Ham and B. Beemer, included a more extensive sampling and research (1000, I believe), specifically looking at why young people (20’s) leave the church, using a 70+ question survey. And they only interviewed conservative-minded young adults who had grown up regularly attending good churches. Sure, they had reasons such as seeing people as hypocritical, judgmental, and so on, but when the research was boiled down, it came down to what they were taught about the authority of God’s Word from an apologetic standpoint. That is, church teachers would not discuss science, history, geology, anthropology, etc. from a Biblical basis or worldview, but would simply teach Creation, the Flood and so on as true stories, but then never sought to connect them to the real world with real evidence, or with real critical thinking. The results (percentage of those kids “already gone”come primarily from the fact that the church has left those topics to the secular world, and when these young adults begin to think for themselves, they begin to doubt the authority of the Word, because nobody from church was willing to defend it, either. My teenager recommended every dad and pastor consider reading this book.

I read that book, and am now re-reading with a handful of Post-It Notes and a magnifying glass. There is some GREAT stuff there. One of the things that resonated with me is how very frivolous most Sunday School curriculum and children’s programs are. They are shallow, cartoony, disorganized, and about as deep as a flea’s swimming pool. I was looking over some ‘great’ curriculum awhile back, and one week it’s teaching on Isaac and Rebekah, the next it’s the Woman at the Well, and the next is the resurrection because if you abide by the curriculum calendar, it should be Easter. What kid could make heads or tales of such an arrangement unless they were already well-grounded in Bible chronology? I got car sick just looking at the Table of Contents.

I wish someone could tell me what is wrong with expecting kids to pay attention to and grasp challenging material that doesn’t involve talking vegetables. My dh and I have been using material from Answers in Genesis in Sunday School and Junior Church, discussing geological layers and DNA and taxonomy, and they are eating it up with a spoon.

Probe.org http://www.probe.org/site/c.fdKEIMNsEoG/b.4213839/k.AF17/Probe_Ministri… Probe ministries conducted a more meaningful survey. Click on ‘watch the webcast’ - it’s their first attempt at a webcast but it is worth checking out.