Why Students Are Leaving The Church
To purchase the entire Summit Lecture Series, Vol. 2 on DVD, visit summit.org.
I’m going to pass by C.S. Lewis here real quick. He has a long quote where he says, “Basically, once you become a Christian, you’ve got to maintenance your beliefs.” That’s what prayer, church attendance, and reading your Bible’s all about. It’s about maintenancing your beliefs because these beliefs don’t stay fresh in your mind, right? I’m a Christian, now I’m done. What does that even mean? You have to constantly remind yourself. Like language, right? I had Spanish and French. I was almost fluent in them in high school. Can’t speak a lick 20 years later, right? It doesn’t remain alive in the mind unless you constantly remind yourself, unless you use it.
What apologetics seeks to do is build an offense for and a defense of the Christian beliefs. In an offense, we build a positive case for what we believe. I hope you tell people this. It’s very difficult to believe something that one takes to be absurd or with very little intellectual support, right? We need to build a positive case. This is why I believe it’s true. This is the evidence. And then we are building a defense. We respond to the challenges of our day. Tomorrow, you’re going to get pro-life training, right? At the end of the week, I was mentioning Jim Wallace, he’s going to tell you about how you can trust the Gospel writers. Why should you trust them? Didn’t they have false motives? Weren’t they liars? He’s going to answer those questions.
What apologetics does is it helps us recognize that Christianity is a coherent and rational worldview. In fact, it actually makes the most sense of the reality of the universe in which we live. That was me before I studied my beliefs, hoping that nobody would ask me to support my beliefs. I’d wear my Jesus T-shirt. I’d have my Jesus bling on, a little cross. That was my witness. Now, I would go out and do evangelism pushes. If you threw me out and did street witnessing, I loved it. You could tell, right? I loved it. Let’s talk about Jesus. Then I’d go home and I was a different person. Go to the grocery store, I hope nobody talks to me about Jesus. On the plane, I don’t really want to get into a conversation. That has completely changed because of knowing what I believe and why I believe it.
I am ready to talk to anybody at any time. What it did was knowing what I believed and why I believed it built up my confidence, and I was allowing God… I was putting trust in God. “God, give me that person on the plane. Give them to me. I’ll tell you in the next session some of the conversations I’ve had. “Give me those people at the grocery store. I want to make a snarky comment.” I love it, right? What happened was apologetics changed my life. I’ll do this really fast. I’ll give you one story on it. There’s so many ways that apologetics can change your life, but I want to share with you how it did mine. I said I do apologetics because of personal transformation, because transforming myself ends up transforming people around me as well, right?
That can happen. That’s an outworking of it. When I was a band director, my daughter was in my school district. She used to bound into my room after school with, “La dee da, I want to tell my mommy about all my day. I want to tell her what I learned in English because yay, English!” I’d been around about 160 kids, sometimes up to 400 kids that day, and I was just like, “Yeah, I don’t want to hear from kids anymore.” At the end of the day, she would get in trouble a lot. Come in my office. She’d get in trouble. Be quiet. Stupid kid. I don’t want to deal with you right now. I just want to go home. I’m tired. She told me one day, “Mom, get in trouble for a lot of things that aren’t really that important. Why am I getting trouble for this?”
I guess apparently I was kind of mean too. I told her I would try to change. Yeah, nothing really happened. I was still the same old person, tired, whatever, treating her the same way. Then I got into studying my degree in apologetics at Biola. I saw that shirt. And not only was I studying about my beliefs, my professors there forced me to defend them. They gave me homework assignments, right? Defend like the resurrection against an atheist. That was a homework assignment. Like, oh my gosh, really? Once I started to defend my beliefs, once I started getting in there and having to show people why I believe God was real, the effect was I was believing God was real, right? It wasn’t just something I was doing anymore.
What was happening was that I came to the understanding that there was a real God who created this universe to whom I’m morally accountable to right back to my salvation story, right? One day my daughter comes back into my room after I’ve been studying apologetics for a while and she says, “Mom, I want to talk to you.” I’m thinking, oh man, I’m still doing the same stuff probably. She said, “You know what? It seems like you got some things figured out, like what’s important.” She said, “You’re not petty anymore.” Petty. This preteen, I didn’t know she knew what petty meant, first of all. She thought I was petty, guys. I was the music minister’s wife. Well, youth and music minister’s wife. Same guy. Not two guys. He is a little worried.
He’s got the Dr. Pepper shirt on. You an individual. It’s okay. Be a pepper. It’s all good, right? I was a youth and music minister’s wife. I was counseling students at camp. I was writing discipleship studies. I was a leader in the band world. In my community, I was one of the leaders in the community of band directors. That’s who I was. I was this person that’s supposed to have it all together, yet my daughter thought I was petty. Can you imagine what view of God I was communicating to her? She was seeing me as this leader in the community on the outside. But on the inside, she was seeing I wasn’t okay, and that maybe I didn’t really believe it, right? Because I’m professing to believe a God who can create a universe who lives inside of me and gives me boldness, who gives me love, who loves me first.
That’s how I love. I’m professing that and I’m not living like it at all or very little that she can see. I had no idea that I was communicating a petty faith to her. You see, I think the reason that so many students are leaving the church is not that they don’t have answers. I don’t think it’s just that we don’t have answers. I think students are leaving the church after high school is they don’t have models of disciples of Christ. Parents aren’t living it. They’re not disciples. Disciple means that you have to be a lifelong learner of Jesus, right? Because Jesus is the greatest teacher who ever lived. You couple shallow Christianity with not being a person who loves to learn, what kind of model do you have? I think there’s a twofold problem going on.
I don’t have stats on that, but I think if we don’t model the life, people will reject it, right? They don’t see in you what you’re professing. All right. Personal transformation, my daughter had seen it in me first. I didn’t even know what was going on. But I had come to understand that if there was a guy that created the universe I was morally accountable to, then I have to treat my sister in Christ right before me with that accountability. I have to treat her as my sister in Christ in accordance with John 17, great love for her. Not my stupid teenage daughter who wants to talk Jabber, Jabber, Jabber and I’m just tired. I’m morally accountable to God for how I interact with her. It changed everything. It changed my marriage.
It changed how people interacted with me. It changed my band directing and everything. Personal transformation that led to community transformation with me and people around me. And then the final reason is inspiration towards maturity in Christ. I got to wrap it up. The three reasons: answering doubt, which builds confidence and then can change people’s lives. That’s why we need to know what we believe and why we believe it. Folks, that has huge potential for impacting our lives. It’s through you, every single one of you, that we’re going to change culture. But first, you have to be changed. You can’t go out and change culture with an untransformed life yourself or not transforming yourself. It starts with you. That’s how culture changed because you are the culture makers. All right.
Follow Christian Podcast Central on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to see our ongoing discussion with Dr. Jeff Myers regarding worldviews.
(This podcast is by Summit Ministries. Discovered by Christian Podcast Central and our community — copyright is owned by the publisher, not Christian Podcast Central.)