Popular doom and gloom media reports also do not make a distinction between young people leaving the church and young people simply converting to other churches. Young adults who are merely moving from one faith tradition to another, such as from Lutheran to Presbyterian, or Anglican to Catholic, are simply counted among the “leaving.”

Both the mainstream and Christian press have reported that youth are fleeing Protestant Christian churches, and rapidly. Not true. In fact, young people are not leaving the church—or at least some churches. The Pew Forum commented in their U.S. Religious Landscape Survey that the “proportion of the population identifying with large mainline Protestant denominations has declined significantly in recent decades, while the proportion of Protestants identifying with the large evangelical denominations has increased.”

The numbers show a considerable 2.20 percent decline for the mainlines and a fractional 0.60 percent increase for Evangelical churches. These shifts in real numbers are quite notable, enough to strike real concern in some church leaders and hearty alleluias in others. It suggests that young people respond positively to a call to substantive discipleship and scriptural study. They are looking for something that calls them to be radically different.

There’s also a critical difference when considering the nature of those who areleaving the church altogether. It’s not surprising how this shakes out, but really quite simple. When considering those who do leave the faith in young adulthood as a category, only 11 percent said they had a strong, meaningful faith as a child. A whopping 89 percent said they did not. Therefore, two conclusions:

1) One doesn’t typically hang onto what they never really had.
2) Parents who are teaching and practicing for their children a meaningful, part-of-everyday-life faith are not wasting their time.

Popular doom and gloom media reports also do not make a distinction between young people leaving the church and young people simply converting to other churches. Young adults who are merely moving from one faith tradition to another, such as from Lutheran to Presbyterian, or Anglican to Catholic, are simply counted among the “leaving.” Professor Byron Johnson from Baylor’s Institute for Studies on Religion confirms this, “Switching is not an indication that Americans have abandoned or lost their faith, as many in the media and, unfortunately, a number of Christians would have us believe.” Changing lanes from one Christian tradition to another cannot honestly be categorized as “leaving” their faith.

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