For decades, church leaders, demographers and pollsters have known the path beyond high school is the most treacherous in the religious landscape. Those are the years when a significant percentage of people who grew up attending church drop out, move on, drift away.
Now, a new survey documents that trend among the younger Millennials—basically, adults younger than age 29 and also known as "Generation Y." And the pace of prodigality is escalating.
Twenty-five percent of Americans age 18 to 24 identify themselves as religiously unaffiliated, according to a survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown University.
More disturbing, 55 percent of the young unaffiliated were involved with a religious group when they were younger. Not only did they fall away from faith, but they no longer even see themselves as related to any faith group.
You can read the Washington Post story here. And see the PRRI report here. See the Berkley Center website here, and the PRRI website here.
Across all faith groups, the only cohort that saw an increase from childhood to adulthood was the unaffiliated, which grew from 11 percent of children to 25 percent of young adults.
This illustrates why we have founded FaithVillage.com, a new social network that provides faith experiences for teens and young adults.
We have pulled together a vast range of faith resources—from spiritual formation, to marriage and family, to Bible study, to missions and ministry, to following Christ in the "real world." FaithVillage.com not only features articles, but also videos, podcasts, blogs and webinars.
And it's built on a social networking platform, so that participants have their own profile pages, from which they can build and form all kinds of groups.
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Also, it's free to churches, so they can communicate with their teens and young adults—all grouped together but also in all the varieties of groups that form within congregations. Plus, all this communication takes place among resources that otherwise would only be available on dozens of separate websites.
If you haven't dropped in, please visit FaithVillage.com. Better yet, encourage teens and young adults you know to participate. Urge your church to join and use FaithVillage to strengthen teens and young adults.
The research shows they can use all the help they can get.
We seek to connect God’s story and God’s people around the world. To learn more about God’s story, click here.
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