Churches should want their kids to believe in Christ and live ethical lives, but we tend to stop short. Often we just want a kid to confess Christ at some point while he is young and then refrain from certain sins while he lives with his parents, but we often make no real long-term investment in his spiritual well-being. Of course, when he becomes a complete apostate by the time he’s 20, we sit back and says things like, “Yea, he never really believed in the first place” or “These young’ns just don’t know how good they have it” or “College is so expensive, he’ll never pay it off.” So, I have been wondering, is there a better way to love our churches’ students than this?
I have been thinking about the apostasy epidemic for a while, and I have thought of a change in conversation that we could be having with High Schoolers who are thinking about what to do after graduation. Here it is:
Don’t just ask: “Where will you go to college?”
Instead ask: “Where will you go to church?”
Pretty simple, right? As simple as it is, I think that this conversation could change lives.
The college search often starts with questions like majors, scholarships, campus size/activities, and which colleges will accept the applicant. A high schooler might consider a host of factors, then narrow it down and pick his favorite. Then he moves out there and gets thrown into the world of class, clubs, friends, newfound freedom, etc. and has to navigate around all of this while searching for a church. All of this is done with the assumption that there will be a good church near the college to take him in — an assumption that I seriously encourage you to question!
But if we start by looking for a church first, then things line up a bit differently. There are several good churches around America and there are good church lists that you can go to and find one. Most universities do not have a good church nearby, but many if not most good churches are within a reasonable distance of a university.
Start there.
If you are talking with someone who wants to go to college, but he does not know where, then encourage him first to find a good church and even offer to help him find one. The Dallas/Fort Worth area is a good starting place. When I was a student at the University of Texas at Arlington, I actually had several good churches within a commutable distance. The DFW area is a hot spot for solid churches and there are several colleges and universities scattered throughout. Pastor conferences are another good opportunity for networking, though it may be difficult for a High Schooler to skip school for a week (it could be a great option for homeschoolers, though!). If the student can find a couple of pastors that he likes, then it’s a matter of looking at the schools in those areas, finding which ones have the right majors, campuses, clubs, etc. and narrowing down the options from there.
This is not the only solution to the mass exodus of the young, but it is certainly a good start.