Younger Generation View the Church as ‘unChristian’

A recent article published by researchers from the Barna Group shares that young people – both Christians and non-Christians – have increasing and persistant negative views about Christianity compared to older generations. The article shares that younger generations frequently see Christianity as judgmental, hypocritical and old-fashioned; young Christians frequently used phrases like “Christianity is changing for the worse” and “The church is losing touch with what Jesus taught.” The perception with the greatest increase among young generations was that Christianity is ‘anti-homosexual’ and that it does little to teach young believers how to interact with their gay and lesbian friends. Many respondants also called Christianity ‘too political.” And a specific term gaining in its unpopularity: ‘evangelical.’

Significant to these results was the fact that most young people had specific encounters or experience with Christians or the church that gave them these negative perceptions – they were not basing their opinions on misinformation or generic feelings. Researchers also speculate that these are persistant views that are increasingly held into adulthood, as opposed to what is sometimes labeled as a passing phase of youth. Read the article for more details and the numbers – its sobering.

What is happening here? What can the church learn from the testimony that it is apparently giving to a widespread audience in this country? I don’t think it is an accident that many of the critiques found in this study have prophetic overtones – the church isn’t living up to the standards that it teaches about Jesus. Christians themselves are not embodying hospitality and grace and community. Why do those who believe – people presently IN the church – see the same hypocrisy and failings as those who are outside the church? The fact that people who have been trained and shaped by the church community are seeing the same inconsistancies and ‘unChristian’ behavior as those outside the church stands out to me; this points to a deeper reality that the emerging generations and the emerging church will have to wrestle with. Is this all a failure of young people to understand or believe? A failure of the church to be church? A reality check for how much changing worldviews shape youth instead of the church? A prophetic call for redoing how we live our church in order to meet more challenging, more careful, maybe more cynical questions of the next generation? All of the above?