As Keith Loomis works with student ministers around Alabama, he hears a consistent trend: While many young people are remaining faithful to God and to church attendance, Alabama is seeing too many of its young people drop out of church.
Loomis serves as a state missionary in youth ministry at the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions.
He said that while many students drift away from church involvement during their early college years, the problem really starts even sooner.
“We’re not losing our students when they graduate from high school,” he said. “We’re losing them in 10th and 11th grade.”
Separation from a local church often starts as students get cars and jobs.
“They are at a stage in their life when they have more freedom to make decisions,” Loomis said. “If we’re not very intentional to keep connected with those students, the drift can start then.”
To keep more students in attendance, Loomis encourages churches to base their student ministries on relationships, not programs and events.
“It is easier to walk away from a program or an event than a relationship,” he said.
Reality, though, is that many churches struggle with high turnover in youth ministry leadership.
“It pulls apart at the seams of those relationships, and it makes it easier for students to walk away,” he said.
“Churches have to think very intentional about having stability and consistency in their youth ministry leadership.”
What Loomis sees in Alabama reflects a nationwide trend toward students dropping out of church. In 2007, LifeWay Research surveyed more than 1,000 young adults, ages 18 to 30, who had attended a Protestant church regularly for at least a year during high school.
The survey found that, between ages 18 and 22, 70 percent of students stopped attending church regularly for at least a year.
But the trend starts long before students turn 18. Before they turned 14, 70 percent of students surveyed attended church regularly.
At age 14, just 66 percent attended. By age 17, that percentage dropped to 58; at age 18, only 44 percent of young people surveyed attended church regularly.
As Linda Osborne, national collegiate ministry leader at LifeWay, has talked to youth ministers around the country, she’s heard these statistics confirmed.
Many high school juniors and seniors just aren’t going to church, student pastors have told her. Though it has long been a problem, it’s amplified now as more high school students have part-time jobs and more are involved in time- and travel-intensive sports teams.
This busyness continues when students get to college.
“When I went to college, there weren’t a lot of things to do on a Sunday morning,” Osborne said. “Today, students have choices.”
In the past, Baptist teenagers often went to their new college towns and immediately looked for a Baptist church or Baptist Campus Ministry (BCM), but today’s students are more open to new experiences and ideas.
“Now, less students are coming to college looking for something comparable to their past experience,” Osborne said.
Baptist state conventions are working with youth and college ministers to address this challenge in new ways, Osborne said.
When high school juniors and seniors attend camps, such as World Changers and Centrifuge, LifeWay collects their names and their top college choices. LifeWay shares this information with BCM directors so they can contact students before they ever arrive on campus.
Some BCMs offer high school junior and senior days, along with retreats for high school students, to get them plugged into BCM before they start college.
During BCM survival programs — similar to freshman orientation but from a Christian perspective — BCM leaders help students learn how to meet the challenges of college life, including the temptation to stray from church.
Osborne said she thinks it’s important for home churches to take responsibility, too.
“If a church sent three students away to college, they need to consider themselves a college church,” she said.
If those home churches stay connected to students even after they’re in college, the students will be less likely to walk away from church, she added.
Even simple things, such as sending care packages; staying in contact through phone calls, e-mail or Facebook; and encouraging students to find a church home in their college towns, can make a real difference in students’ lives.
Osborne said it’s also critical that youth ministers keep in touch with students once they’ve left the youth group and gone on to college.
Wes Black, professor of student ministry at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, agreed.
“As youth ministers, we ought to see our responsibility as extending at least one year beyond high school,” Black said. “We ought to evaluate how well we’re doing in youth ministry by how many of those graduates are still faithful a year after graduation.”
While youth ministers don’t need to do formal programming for college students, they do need to maintain encouraging, mentoring relationships, he added.
This can be as simple as contacting students regularly through e-mail, enlisting church members to write notes and send goody bags to graduates and contacting campus ministries and churches in the students’ college towns so they can connect with the students.
In Alabama, student leaders have recognized the gap between when youth ministry ends and when college ministry begins and are working to close it by developing a holistic approach to student ministry.
“Student ministry isn’t compartmentalized into junior high, high school and college,” Loomis said.
Instead, student ministry should take young people all the way from junior high school through college.
Once students receive their high school diplomas, Loomis wants to see youth ministers intentionally launch them into the next stage of their faith journeys and follow them as they begin that stage of their lives.
Likewise, instead of waiting until students arrive on campus, college ministers should be building relationships with local church youth ministers and finding ways for their campus ministries to connect with youth ministries.
One way they’re doing that is through CampusConnect — regional gatherings around Alabama where high school juniors and seniors, parents and youth leaders can visit with college ministry leaders.
At the same time, some campus ministers make their buildings available to youth groups for special events, providing another way to connect students to BCMs before they even start college.
To learn more about youth and college ministry in Alabama, visit www.alabamabaptiststudentministry.org.
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