Dear Church,

It’s no surprise to any of us that college is hard, especially for Christian students. In fact, I think most of us can agree that university campuses are the main place where an overwhelmingly vast majority of young Christians arrive at a decision to denounce their faith, or even their belief in God.

When it comes to faith, college is a battleground, and we know it. When our kids graduate from high school, we ask for prayer as they’re starting on this next chapter in their lives. Many of us bark accusations of heresy against university professors in classes like philosophy, moral ethics, and their sibling classes, virtually mortified at their disbelief, and what it does to our children’s faith. But I don’t think we know exactly what our problem is. According to Jonathan P. Hill, most studies on whether college has been driving students to denounce their faith have been biased; i.e., they’ve been studies in which college Christians were examined, but Christians of the same age who did not attend college were not. So does college really drive these kids to apostasy? Or is it something different that we’re not seeing?

While the college years might not be the ones that drive a kid to denounce his faith, it’s definitely the place where the final act most often occurs. Too many of us have witnessed our favorite children grow up in church, only to attend college and return to remove their names from the church roll. We like to pin it on the philosophy teacher who claims that God does not exist, but in reality the largest part of the blame falls on us.

I live in the St. Louis metro area now for college, an hour’s drive on the interstate from where I grew up. So during my freshman year when I first moved to St. Louis, I researched the different churches around my university in order to find a place I could attend while I am gone from my home church. To my dismay, of the 25+ churches that I looked at, not one mentioned a college-specific ministry. None of them were invested in college students at all, and not many were heavily involved with their high school students, either. This makes two major problems: first, as the church in America, we’ve abandoned the college students. Second, we’re not doing much with the high school kids to equip them with the confidence and security they need to survive college with their faith intact. But don’t get me wrong—we know that this problem exists, we just don’t want to take the blame for it. It’s classic human nature: I’ve created a problem, but there’s no way I can accept that it’s my fault, so I’ll pin the blame on somebody else.

I’ve heard friends of my father who are in the clergy nationwide say things to the effect of, “This generation of young people is arrogant. They’re selfish, irresponsible, and reckless. God help the church when it’s their turn to take over.”

People, this problem isn’t of them—it’s of us! We need to stop blaming the kids and their professors and start helping them out. It doesn’t matter if there are only 20 Christians on a campus of 30,000—those 20 need to know that it’s possible for them to do awesome things for Christ at their school. How are they supposed to see that potential if we’re constantly telling them that college is going to rip them apart, and then blaming them when they don’t live up to our expectations?

So where do we start? What do we do? First of all, we could at least think about getting involved with the college students. A lot of churches have a “college and career” class, for young adults from age 18 to 30. But the problem with that is we go through so many different types of lifestyles during that 12-year period, that to lump everyone into one small group study is just too diverse; it’s not localized enough. College students need their own group, people who are going through what they’re going through. Think about it like this: how well would you relate to a 28-year old mother of 2 as a male college freshman? You couldn’t relate to her at all.

Second, and most importantly, we need to invest way more time with our high school kids. A lot of the kids in our youth groups are kids who’ve had no experience growing up in church and are already rather skeptical about not only our beliefs, but their own as well. When we spend little time with them and live like the Bible doesn’t really apply to our lives like we claim it does, we’re sending them mixed messages. Who wouldn’t be skeptical to that? We’re practically setting them up for apostasy, and then blaming Professor X when he hits the walk-off to send it home.

It doesn’t have to be like this. My generation can be more than capable of taking over the church when it’s time for the older generations to hand it off. You just have to start giving us the baton, one piece at a time. The transaction starts in high school, so don’t miss that initial part. But we also need help and support while we’re in college. You can’t abandon us and expect us to do well on our own. We just don’t work that way, and I’d be willing to bet that deep down, you don’t either.

With love,

Your kids.