The Rise and Flight of the Adultescent

Some things are just obvious: Never wear sneakers to the beach and always wear waterproof mascara to a Nicholas Sparks movie. Orange juice tastes terrible after you brush your teeth and brother-hugs aren't any fun when you have a sunburn. And young adults are leaving the Church in record numbers.

By now, every Evangelical has heard the horror stories and witnessed the gruesome statistics of the dwindling church attendance among young adults. Although it's impossible to get an exact number, intensive studies have proven that this nightmare is no apparition; it’s an absolute reality.

Some older findings—such as the 2002 estimation of The Southern Baptist Convention that "88 percent of the children raised in evangelical homes leave church at the age of 18, never to return"—garnered skepticism, but more recent research has not been very encouraging, either. In 2007, LifeWay Research found that 70% of college-aged kids raised in Protestant churches will stop attending, with only about half of them ever returning. Similar studies by the Barna Group (2006) and Assemblies of God confirm that the percentage is at least over 60%.

We don't know the precise statistic, but we do know what’s happening: Once teens and twenty-somethings are no longer dragged into pews by Mom and Dad, they bolt for the exits and many never come back. Surprisingly, over 80% of these interviewed "church dropouts" admit that while still in high school, they had wholeheartedly planned on regularly attending services throughout college and beyond. Their church cessation surprised even themselves.

The question, then, is not WHAT is happening, but WHY it's happening, and what we can do to counteract it.

Survey respondents listed around a dozen main reasons for their drop in attendance, citing everything from doctrinal disagreements to work schedules. These "reasons," though, are merely excuses to conceal the truth: they simply don't want to go anymore. They have better, more important things to do.

Those of us born in the 1980's and early 90's have been attributed all sorts of nicknames—Generation Y, iGen, the Millenial Generation—but I prefer to call us the "Gratification Generation." We are spoiled, entitled, and individualistic. Our parents were Baby Boomers who fell into debt by buying us cars and taking us to Disney World, and we got jobs not to pay the bills but to buy movie tickets and Abercrombie jeans. We had parents to chauffeur us to club soccer games and concerts, cell phones and computers to keep us constantly connected to our best friends, and credit cards to max out on Call of Duty and Appatow DVDs.

Our childhoods were so enjoyable, in fact, that we have been dubbed "The Peter Pan Generation." We never want to grow up! We don't want to get married and have kids and full-time jobs; we're having too much fun!

This immature, responsibility-resistant mindset has directly led to the rise of the "adultescent"—a term coined by Do Hard Things authors Alex and Brett Harris in a 2006 article. These adolescent-adult hybrids (think Matthew McConaughey in Failure to Launch) can often be found sleeping on the same pillow that the Tooth Fairy once slipped a quarter under when they were in first grade. They have an X-box, an iPhone, and a nicer car than their parents, mainly because their folks are still paying for their electricity, car insurance, and cell phone coverage (not to mention washing their clothes and cooking their dinner). Most have graduated from high school, and even college, and have decent jobs. They have enough money to go to bars and concerts and buy clothes and video games, because, really, what else do they have to pay for? 

(Disclaimer: film and clip are rated PG-13)

Most of today’s young adults are single, living in a temporary apartment or at home—according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 59% of men and 50% of women ages 18-24 live with their parents—and free from the responsibilities of adulthood. They frequent bars and clubs on the weekends, have random hook-ups and disposable relationships, and even throw house parties when their parents go away to New Hampshire for the weekend. Shouldn’t somebody tell them they aren't in high school anymore?

When my grandfather was 25, he was married with two kids, owned a home, and had already served in the military. When my father was 25, he was married, in seminary, working full-time, and also acting as head youth pastor at his church. They were adults and acted like it.

So what does the development of adultescence have to do with the decline in church attendance among teens and young adults?

Well, everything.

Our youth culture reeks of inhalation and intoxication, and the pains of hypersexualization and experimentation are leaving us broken. The lies that we believe are leading to the personal and cultural degeneration of our morals and standards. Maybe that's what we should be called: the "Degeneration Generation," or simply the “De-generation.”

Christians my age are obsessed with the world. We want what the world has to offer us, and we'll maybe take a helping of Jesus on the side. We want to be rich, we want to be sexy, and we want to be cool. And what is cool in our culture? Just take a look at our pop culture preferences: Jersey Shore, Lil Wayne, The Hangover, Rihanna. All glamorize getting rich, high, wasted, and laid.

We pretend that the songs we listen to and the movies we watch don't affect us, but they absolutely do! The more we hear Usher crooning about falling in love on the dance floor and the more we watch the guys from the Wolfpack run drunk around Las Vegas, the more comfortable we are with the behaviors they are promoting. Our culture is so sex-saturated and party-focused that even the "good Christian kids" are falling victim to the lies that the culture presents us.

And so we fully immerse ourselves in the world but don't want to completely give up on Jesus. We are, as the Apostle John says, "lukewarm" Christians trying to reconcile what we have been taught about God with what the world is teaching us. We get stuck in this dangerous middle ground, not merely stagnant but actually regressing. A speaker once described our spiritual journeys as a climb up an icy glacier; if we aren't moving forward, then we're backsliding. 

This double-dipping hypocrisy has become the status quo for my generation of Christians. When we look up front during the chapel services at Christian colleges, we see that our worship is being led by a singer who got drunk on Friday and a guitarist who has a reputation for sleeping around. 

Look, I grew up in a Christian school; I graduated from a Christian school; I go to a Christian college. I know what it’s like to be caught up in this double-life. Nobody wants to be known as “too-Christian.” That’s, like, social suicide—as Christian kids, we constantly feel the need to be accepted by our peers and to show that we aren’t different or weird.

When I was in tenth grade, my school kicked off the year with a fall retreat. I was talking with two new girls, when one of them hesitantly asked me, “Are you allowed to listen to. . . uhh. . . secular music?”

I laughed and assured her that I loved Jack’s Mannequin and Eminem, that I wasn’t one of those crazy religious people who only listen to Christian music. She looked relieved that I was “normal.”

Nobody wants to be that one person who refuses to watch Superbad, or who tries to stop everyone when we get out of hand telling “I like my men like I like my [insert object]” jokes or making fun of that weird girl we work with. We don’t want to be different. We just want to fit in.

But, of course, we are different. 

Which is why we have iPods full of Matt Redman and Lil’ Wayne, reading lists of Crazy Love and Cosmopolitan, and DVD collections of Fireproof and Pineapple Express. It’s why our Facebook profiles are print paradoxes of status updates from I Corinthians and The Hangover. It’s why our profile pictures alternate between ones of us posing with that cute little kid we met on a missions trip and ones of us posing with one of those wonderful red Solo cups from the last party we went to. It’s why our religion says “Christian” but our interests and activities don’t.

We talk a lot about how hypocritical Christians are, how we stopped going to church because we can't bear how judgmental the congregation is. For some people, I'm sure that's true. They've probably had bad experiences with self-proclaimed “Christians” who care more about forcing people to fit certain standards than they do about showing the love of Jesus. Others may believe that Christianity and science are mutually exclusive. Those are valid reasons.

But I don't think that's the case for most of us. From what I've seen, our generation just doesn't want to live like Christ—it's too much work and not enough fun. We've been raised in a culture that revolves around us. We've been free to act like little kids for so long that we aren't equipped to transition into adulthood. 

So we remain kidults, old enough to be adults but immature enough to act like kids. We get to live the way we want: drinking, clubbing, hooking up, playing video games. We don't want responsibilities or someone telling us how to carry out our lives.

We think that Christianity is just a set of restrictions trying to keep us from having fun, just trying to impose rules on us. In reality, though, it has nothing to do with the hypocrisy of the generations of Christians that came before us, and everything to do with the hypocrisy of our own generation.

Why is the youth culture leaving the Church in drastic numbers? Because following Christ is hard and we don't want to put in the work. Once we lose sight of what Christianity truly is—a vibrant, loving relationship with Jesus—then it becomes a list of chores, or a set of rules telling us what we can and can't do. At first, we try to fit Sunday morning services into our lifestyles, but eventually that just becomes pointless. If the rest of our life has nothing to do with Jesus, then why would we skip sleeping in or working time-and-a-half on Sundays just so we could yawn through sermons and praise songs that we don’t really care about?

We can make all the excuses we want, but until we make Jesus Christ our priority—until we realize that the world revolves around Him and not around us—then we'll just continue driving around the same sad rotary, not going anywhere. 

Why aren't we following Christ? Because it’s hard.

Matthew 7 says, "Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it."

I mean, is it really shocking that we’re leaving the Church? It’s not easy to follow Jesus; in today’s society, it’s the most radical, rebellious, counterculture thing a young person can do.

Let’s be honest: we’ve spent our entire lives just trying to fit in and prove that we’re the same as everybody else. We’ve been trained to take the easy route. 

And that is why we’re leaving the Church.