Despite the Church’s efforts to distance its present from the past, is it working? Mark Sayers opines about how our less than perfect past is leading to young adults leaving the Church:
Many Christian young adults feel that they are living on the wrong side of Christian history. When they share their faith with their secular friends they are reminded of pedophile priests, fundamentalism and the Spanish inquisition. When they share their faith with their Muslim friends, inevitably the Crusades will enter the conversation. When they share their faith with their Jewish friends, old painful stories that have been past down for generations , memories of ghetto’s, pogroms and ’Christian’ Germany engineering the Holocaust, will be heard again.
And:
This sort of cultural intolerance around faith creates a great tension in the believer. I am constantly approached by young adults who are trying to reconcile their faith with the disquiet that they feel over Christianity’s disputed historical track record. While Christians and historians will debate this, it is still a daily issue for many young adults today who live, study, work and operate within secular culture.
For many young adults who are trying to find a place in the world, to operate and ‘fit in’ within culture, the dislocation felt becomes too much, faith is left behind as identity and belonging is looked for outside of church walls.
As he said, do you think people are looking for an identity “outside of the church walls?” What can we do to start being more relevant to the struggles that young adults are facing? Other thoughts?
[HT: Kouya Chronicle]
