{"id":1732,"date":"2012-01-21T17:39:44","date_gmt":"2012-01-21T17:39:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/?p=1732"},"modified":"2012-01-21T17:39:44","modified_gmt":"2012-01-21T17:39:44","slug":"the_great_drop-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/?p=1732","title":{"rendered":"The Great Drop-Out"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Very interesting interview on NPR with Barna Research&#8217;s David Kinnaman on why so many young people are dropping out of the institutional Church. Give a listen!<\/p>\n<p><embed src=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/v2\/?i=145518098&amp;m=145518089&amp;t=audio\" wmode=\"opaque\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" base=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\" type=\"application\/x-shockwave-flash\" height=\"386\" width=\"400\"><\/p>\n<p>Here are a few paragraphs from the interview:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>MARTIN: What are the young people telling you about? Whether they&#8217;re taking a break, a temporary break or dropping out altogether, what are they telling you about why?<\/p>\n<p>KINNAMEN: What we really boil it down to &#8211; you know, each person that we interviewed had very specific experiences and challenges and the church was, in some way, inadequate in their mind to that. And yet, when we looked at it from a broad perspective, the way I would conclude this is that we&#8217;re living in a more complicated age, more complicated questions about marriage and the diversity of this generation, the technology used in social media<\/p>\n<p>And, in a nutshell, what we learned is that churches aren&#8217;t really giving them an answer to these complicated questions that they&#8217;re facing, these lifestyle issues and challenges that they&#8217;re facing. And it&#8217;s not really a deep or thoughtful or challenging response that most churches are providing to them.<\/p>\n<p>MARTIN:<br \/>\nAnd are you finding this phenomenon across what people consider liberal and conservative churches or do you find it concentrated in one side or the other?<\/p>\n<p>KINNAMEN: Well, one of the<br \/>\nsurprises for me was I figured that we would see some differences between young Catholics, for instance, and young Protestants and young mainline versus young evangelicals. But I think the overriding theme was that this generation, in so many ways, is post-institutional, regardless of their traditions. So many similarities in their reasons and their reactions to the church and to Christianity.<\/p>\n<p>Some of the things that were different was I think many churches that deal well with complexity didn&#8217;t give a sufficient amount of conviction or commitment required of the young people that they work with. And then,<br \/>\nconversely, those that had a strong degree of commitment and sort of emotional connection with the church didn&#8217;t deal well with the complexity. So it was sort of a double-edged sword for many of these churches.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Much of this is coming from this much viewed recent YouTube video:<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/1IAhDGYlpqY\" allowfullscreen=\"\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"360\" width=\"640\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Here are a some additional information &#8211;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.barna.org\/teens-next-gen-articles\/528-six-reasons-young-christians-leave-church?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+barna%2Fupdate+%28Barna+Update%29\">Six Reasons Young Christians Leave Church<\/a> (<a class=\"zem_slink\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Barna_Group\" title=\"The Barna Group\" rel=\"wikipedia\">The Barna Group<\/a>)<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.barna.org\/teens-next-gen-articles\/534-five-myths-about-young-adult-church-dropouts\">Five Myths about Young Adult Church Dropouts<\/a> (The Barna Group)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div style=\"margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;\" class=\"zemanta-pixie\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"border: medium none; float: right;\" class=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" alt=\"\" src=\"http:\/\/img.zemanta.com\/pixy.gif?x-id=065dde5e-0181-4c56-b3cf-aed40a30868b\" \/><\/div>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<div class=\"storytitle\">\n<h1><font style=\"font-size: 0.8em;\">&#8216;You Lost Me&#8217;: Young Christians Rethink Faith<\/font><\/h1>\n<\/div>\n<p><span class=\"date\"><br \/>January 20, 2012<\/span><\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<p>Nationwide, many 20-somethings are leaving their<br \/>\nchurches behind. David Kinnaman and his staff at the research company,<br \/>\nThe Barna Group, interviewed more than 5,000 Christians, and he says the<br \/>\ndropout issue is real and urgent. Host Michel Martin speaks with<br \/>\nKinnaman about his book <em>You Lost Me<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p><i>Copyright \u00a9 2012 National Public Radio\u00ae. For personal, noncommercial use<br \/>\nonly. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.<\/i><\/p>\n<p><font style=\"font-size: 1.25em;\"><b>TRANSCRIPT:<\/b><\/font><\/p>\n<p>MICHEL MARTIN, HOST: <\/p>\n<p>We want to talk more<br \/>\nabout faith and spirituality now, and now we want to focus on why so<br \/>\nmany young Christians seem to be leaving the church and you might not<br \/>\nsee it if you look at the sold out Christian rock or gospel concerts or<br \/>\npacked pews at Christmas, but then how do you explain this popular new<br \/>\nvideo? In the last 10 days, Jefferson Bethke&#8217;s spoken word poem has<br \/>\ngotten more than 15 million views on YouTube. We&#8217;ll play just a short<br \/>\nclip of it.<\/p>\n<p>(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO, &#8220;WHY I HATE RELIGION, BUT LOVE JESUS&#8221;)<\/p>\n<p>JEFFERSON<br \/>\nBETHKE: See, the problem with religion is it never gets to the core.<br \/>\nIt&#8217;s just behavior modification, like a long list of chores. Like, let&#8217;s<br \/>\ndress up the outside, make it look nice and neat, but it&#8217;s funny.<br \/>\nThat&#8217;s what they used to do to mummies while the corpse rots underneath.<br \/>\nNow, I ain&#8217;t judging. I&#8217;m just saying we&#8217;re putting on a fake look<br \/>\nbecause there&#8217;s a problem if people only know that you&#8217;re a Christian by<br \/>\nyour Facebook.<\/p>\n<p>MARTIN: Our next guest says<br \/>\nthe so-called dropout problem in American Christianity is real. He&#8217;s<br \/>\nwritten a new book about it. It&#8217;s called &#8220;You Lost Me: Why Young<br \/>\nChristians Are Leaving Church and Rethinking Faith.&#8221; David Kinnamen is<br \/>\nthe author of the book. He&#8217;s also the president of the Barna Group.<br \/>\nThat&#8217;s a private, nonpartisan research group that conducted a lot of the<br \/>\nresearch that informed the book.<\/p>\n<p>And David Kinnamen is with us now. Welcome. Thanks so much for joining us.<\/p>\n<p>DAVID KINNAMEN: Thank you, Michel. My pleasure.<\/p>\n<p>MARTIN:<br \/>\nSo the money issue &#8211; the money bite here is that more than half of all<br \/>\nChristian teens and 20-somethings leave active involvement in the<br \/>\nchurch?<\/p>\n<p>KINNAMEN: Correct. Yes. So 59 percent<br \/>\nof people who were 18 to 29 who were churched as a teenager said they<br \/>\nhad dropped out after attending some time regularly. What&#8217;s so<br \/>\nfascinating is 57 percent said that they&#8217;re less active in church, but<br \/>\nonly 29 percent said they&#8217;re less spiritual.<\/p>\n<p>So<br \/>\nit&#8217;s interesting because they&#8217;re less churched. They&#8217;re rejecting<br \/>\ninstitutional forms of church, but they&#8217;re not necessarily rejecting<br \/>\nspirituality.<\/p>\n<p>MARTIN: Now, you say in the<br \/>\nbook that the ages 18 to 29 are the black hole of church attendance.<br \/>\nThis age segment is missing in action from most congregations and that&#8217;s<br \/>\nnot because these young folks weren&#8217;t raised in the church or had some<br \/>\nexperience with church. It&#8217;s just that something&#8217;s happened at a certain<br \/>\npoint where they decide to leave.<\/p>\n<p>Isn&#8217;t that<br \/>\nkind of dropping out, changing your lifestyle, something that every<br \/>\ngeneration goes through? I guess I&#8217;m asking you, why do you think it is<br \/>\nthere&#8217;s something particularly dramatic about what&#8217;s happening with this<br \/>\ngroup?<\/p>\n<p>KINNAMEN: Well, you know, doing this<br \/>\nresearch, it&#8217;s interesting that you started with the story of that video<br \/>\nbecause we try to capture the voice of this generation through all the<br \/>\ninterviews that we had done. We did more than 5,000 interviews with<br \/>\nteens and 20-somethings and pastors and parents. This is something old,<br \/>\nbut it&#8217;s also something new.<\/p>\n<p>And, as you put<br \/>\nit, it&#8217;s every generation goes through its own spiritual formation<br \/>\nprocess, but what&#8217;s different now is that this generation is living in a<br \/>\nmuch more complicated time, and because of that, I think this dropout<br \/>\nproblem is all the more urgent and we have to pay attention to it and<br \/>\nits new nuances.<\/p>\n<p>MARTIN: What are the young<br \/>\npeople telling you about? Whether they&#8217;re taking a break, a temporary<br \/>\nbreak or dropping out altogether, what are they telling you about why?<\/p>\n<p>KINNAMEN:<br \/>\nWhat we really boil it down to &#8211; you know, each person that we<br \/>\ninterviewed had very specific experiences and challenges and the church<br \/>\nwas, in some way, inadequate in their mind to that. And yet, when we<br \/>\nlooked at it from a broad perspective, the way I would conclude this is<br \/>\nthat we&#8217;re living in a more complicated age, more complicated questions<br \/>\nabout marriage and the diversity of this generation, the technology used<br \/>\nin social media.<\/p>\n<p>And, in a nutshell, what we<br \/>\nlearned is that churches aren&#8217;t really giving them an answer to these<br \/>\ncomplicated questions that they&#8217;re facing, these lifestyle issues and<br \/>\nchallenges that they&#8217;re facing. And it&#8217;s not really a deep or thoughtful<br \/>\nor challenging response that most churches are providing to them.<\/p>\n<p>MARTIN:<br \/>\nAnd are you finding this phenomenon across what people consider liberal<br \/>\nand conservative churches or do you find it concentrated in one side or<br \/>\nthe other?<\/p>\n<p>KINNAMEN: Well, one of the<br \/>\nsurprises for me was I figured that we would see some differences<br \/>\nbetween young Catholics, for instance, and young Protestants and young<br \/>\nmainline versus young evangelicals. But I think the overriding theme was<br \/>\nthat this generation, in so many ways, is post-institutional,<br \/>\nregardless of their traditions. So many similarities in their reasons<br \/>\nand their reactions to the church and to Christianity.<\/p>\n<p>Some<br \/>\nof the things that were different was I think many churches that deal<br \/>\nwell with complexity didn&#8217;t give a sufficient amount of conviction or<br \/>\ncommitment required of the young people that they work with. And then,<br \/>\nconversely, those that had a strong degree of commitment and sort of<br \/>\nemotional connection with the church didn&#8217;t deal well with the<br \/>\ncomplexity. So it was sort of a double-edged sword for many of these<br \/>\nchurches.<\/p>\n<p>MARTIN: Well, give me an example. Can you just kind of describe one of those conversations that captured this for us?<\/p>\n<p>KINNAMEN:<br \/>\nSure. Well, I think one of them is a conversation that we had. I mean, I<br \/>\nhave talked to a young person, Colleen(ph), who was asking her youth<br \/>\npastor whether she should sell her eggs for college. And this is, you<br \/>\nknow, right at the center of the complexity of today&#8217;s ties because they<br \/>\nhave instant access to any kind of information available about any kind<br \/>\nof thing, you know, theology, religion, faith, human sexuality,<br \/>\nreproduction choices, college, education. They have these huge<br \/>\naspirations to make a difference in the world, to be educated.<\/p>\n<p>MARTIN: Well, what did he say? I mean, what was his answer?<\/p>\n<p>KINNAMEN:<br \/>\nYeah. He said, you know, I don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s one Christian response<br \/>\nto that. But he walked her through a process of trying to say, you know,<br \/>\nis it necessary for you to go to college? And, if so, let&#8217;s find a way<br \/>\nthat the church can support you in getting that education.<\/p>\n<p>MARTIN: Well, what&#8217;s wrong with that, though? I mean, that seems like a loving and both intelligent and affirming response.<\/p>\n<p>KINNAMEN:<br \/>\nIt&#8217;s a great response. The big challenge is that most pastors, most<br \/>\nfamilies in churches &#8211; they&#8217;re not prepared for those kinds of<br \/>\nquestions. I think this young youth pastor did a great job, but I think a<br \/>\nlot of questions, as we learn from our research &#8211; they&#8217;re not being<br \/>\nasked. In fact, one of the major reasons young people said that they<br \/>\nwere leaving churches was that they felt like they couldn&#8217;t ask their<br \/>\nmost pressing life questions in church.<\/p>\n<p>So we<br \/>\nheard the question from Colleen, but many of these young people feel<br \/>\nlike they&#8217;re so disconnected. They&#8217;re so entirely disparate worlds, they<br \/>\ncan&#8217;t really ask these pressing life questions in church.<\/p>\n<p>MARTIN:<br \/>\nDo you have some specific suggestions for faith leaders who are seeing<br \/>\nthis in their own congregations and want to address it?<\/p>\n<p>KINNAMEN:<br \/>\nWe do. I mean, first of all, every congregation is different and I<br \/>\nthink there needs to be very customized and thoughtful and deep<br \/>\nresponses to that. We don&#8217;t want a one size fits all response, but one<br \/>\nof the things I thought was a great concept that we uncovered through<br \/>\nthe research was this reverse mentoring idea. This generation has the<br \/>\nability to help an older generation, an established generation. Many of<br \/>\nthese traditionalist churches deal effectively with issues of science<br \/>\nand social media and gender roles and yet, at the same time, these young<br \/>\npeople need the input and wisdom of today&#8217;s older generation.<\/p>\n<p>And<br \/>\nwhat&#8217;s so beautiful about this next generation is they actually really<br \/>\nwant the wisdom of today&#8217;s grandparents and elders and they&#8217;re facing<br \/>\nhuge questions, as every generation does, but they&#8217;re very open to the<br \/>\ninput of older adults and the wisdom that they could offer.<\/p>\n<p>So<br \/>\nthis idea of reverse mentoring &#8211; we need young people to help enliven<br \/>\nand invigorate our congregations and we also need older adults to give<br \/>\ngood life coaching in the midst of these very different and complicated<br \/>\ntimes that young people are facing.<\/p>\n<p>MARTIN:<br \/>\nDavid Kinnamen is the author of the book, &#8220;You Lost Me: Why Young<br \/>\nChristians Are Leaving Church and Rethinking Faith.&#8221; And he was kind<br \/>\nenough to join us from NPR West in Culver City, California.<\/p>\n<p>David Kinnamen, thanks so much for speaking with us.<\/p>\n<p>KINNAMEN: It&#8217;s my pleasure. Thanks again for having me.<\/p>\n<p class=\"disclaimer\"><i>Copyright<br \/>\n\u00a9 2012 National Public Radio\u00ae. All rights reserved. No quotes from the<br \/>\nmaterials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution<br \/>\nto National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal,<br \/>\nnoncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use<br \/>\nrequires NPR&#8217;s prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further<br \/>\ninformation.<\/i><\/p>\n<p><i>                     <\/i><\/p>\n<p class=\"disclaimer\"><i>NPR<br \/>\ntranscripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and<br \/>\naccuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final<br \/>\nform and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that<br \/>\nthe authoritative record of NPR&#8217;s programming is the audio.<\/i><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"editor-content.html?cs=UTF-8\" name=\"transcript\"><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Very interesting interview on NPR with Barna Research&#8217;s David Kinnaman on why so many young people are dropping out of the institutional Church. Give a listen! Here are a few paragraphs from the interview: MARTIN: What are the young people &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/?p=1732\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27,9,24,26,6,20,10,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christianity","category-faith","category-generations","category-imagodei","category-politicsculture","category-post-modern","category-quotes","category-research"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1732\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hypersync.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}