Why Young People Stay in Church

According to LifeWay research, the most common reasons young people keep attending churches are:

	Church is vital to a relationship with God (65%)
	They want church guidance in everyday life decisions (58%)
	It helps them become a better person (50%)
	They are committed to the purpose and work of the church (42%)

Two-thirds of the teens who stay in church as young adults describe the church as “a vital part of my relationship with God”–demonstrating the importance of each teen having a strong relationship with God, as well as the importance of church attendance, said Ed Stetzer, director of LifeWay Research.

Investing time in young people “can help connect the dots to help a teen integrate their faith into their life,” Ed says. “And it gives the teens a connection to church after graduation when many of their peers are no longer around.”

The Fatherless Child

It is a unique cultural moment for the church to act like a family.

It’s not remarkable to say our culture is confused when it comes to family. But the results of the recent Pew Research Center study on marriage and children are remarkable nonetheless.

The survey confirms that Christian notions about marriage and family are still an American ideal. The growth in births to unwed mothers is a “big problem,” say 71 percent of Americans. They agree (69 percent) that children need both a mother and a father. Even as rates of births to unwed mothers have skyrocketed, this strong disapproval has held steady.

But the survey also notes that Americans are less able to live up to their ideals: Roughly 37 percent of births are to unwed mothers, and nearly half (47 percent) of adults have lived in cohabitating relationships.

“Marriage exerts less influence over how adults organize their lives and how children are born and raised than at any time in the nation’s history,” the survey says. Between 1960 and 2005, the rate of unwed childbearing increased sevenfold, from 5.3 percent of all births to 36.8 percent. The survey finds that the average unwed mother “is more likely to be white than black, and more likely to be an adult than a teenager. …” The survey attributes this “sharp increase in non-marital births” to “an ever greater percentage of women in the 20s, 30s, and older … delaying or forgoing marriage but having children.”

We can be thankful that the public still disapproves of out-of-wedlock births in general. But more Americans than ever naively think they alone can make single-parenting work.

Day-to-day realities slowly undermine this optimism. Single parents who have been at it awhile know better than anyone how less than ideal their situation is. That’s one reason we can expect to see more and more single parents looking for outside support. Single mothers (to take the typical example), often long for a strong, caring male to enter their children’s lives. So it nearly goes without saying: The church has a unique opportunity at this cultural moment.

For years, we have been preaching the supremacy of the two-parent family, offering classes and seminars for young couples and families. But the church is also caught up in an individualistic, ambitious culture, and we find it difficult to carve out time to offer ongoing, concrete help to single-parent families. We pray for them. We urge the parent to find a mate. But, to take the case above, it’s hard to find a church that intentionally helps men of the church connect regularly with the children of single mothers. Would a “father program,” on the order of Big Brothers and Sisters, be something the “family of God” might institute?

A single mother at Christianity Today International adopted two African American boys. Though she’s given them extraordinary care and discipline, she has long felt that they desperately needed adult males in their lives. She says plainly that her church let her and her boys down in this regard. Only after one of the boys ended up in prison did the church’s men rally around and enter this young man’s life.

A dramatic example, but boys without father figures and girls without mother figures have a strike against them. The latest national study shows that more children than ever are entering the world with such strikes. It’s an unprecedented cultural moment for Christians, to see if we can act less like individual consumers of spirituality and more like the family of God.

A Christianity Today editorial. 

Domestic violence: Not Always One Sided

Mention of domestic violence immediately brings to mind an intimidating male batterer. But a 2007 article shows that the problem — also called intimate partner violence — is often more complicated and may involve both women and men as perpetrators.Nearly 11,000 men and women, a representative sample of the American population ages 18 to 28, participated in a national survey. They were asked the following questions about their most important recent sexual or romantic relationship:

1. How often in the past year have you threatened your partner with violence, pushed him or her, or thrown something at him or her that could hurt, and how often has your partner done that to you?
2. How often in the past year have you hit, slapped, or kicked your partner, and how often has your partner done that to you?
3. If there has been any violence in your relationship, how often has either partner suffered an injury, such as a sprain, bruise, or cut?

Almost 25% of the people surveyed — 28% of women and 19% of men — said there was some violence in their relationship. Women admitted perpetrating more violence (25% versus 11%) as well as being victimized more by violence (19% versus 16%) than men did. According to both men and women, 50% of this violence was reciprocal, that is, involved both parties, and in those cases the woman was more likely to have been the first to strike.

Violence was more frequent when both partners were involved, and so was injury — to either partner. In these relationships, men were more likely than women to inflict injury (29% versus 19%).

When the violence was one-sided, both women and men said that women were the perpetrators about 70% of the time. Men were more likely to be injured in reciprocally violent relationships (25%) than were women when the violence was one-sided (20%).

That means both men and women agreed that men were not more responsible than women for intimate partner violence. The findings cannot be explained by men’s being ashamed to admit hitting women, because women agreed with men on this point.

The authors say they have no intention of minimizing the very real problem of serious domestic violence — the classic male batterer. The survey did not cover the use of knives, guns, choking, or burning, and it was not concerned with the kind of situation that can drive a woman to seek shelter outside the home. The view of the authors is that most intimate partner violence should not be equated with severe battering. Domestic disputes that turn physical because of retaliation and escalation do not have the same causes or the same consequences as male battering. Couples counseling is generally regarded as ineffective for batterers, but if the violence is moderate and the injuries are minor, both partners are involved, and they want to stay together, it makes sense for a therapist to work with both of them.

Whitaker DJ, et al. “Differences in Frequency of Violence and Reported Injury between Relationships with Reciprocal and Nonreciprocal Intimate Partner Violence,” American Journal of Public Health (May 2007): Vol. 97, No. 5, pp. 941–47.