Why do Christian college students leave church and struggle

[SMOOCH]

Alot of us are born into christianity, so were forced to go to church and even forced to participate which as get older makes us want to rebel against it. which usually happens in the teens into college. and college is where we are told by the media and society experimentation is supposed to happen so we do. Most of us eventually choose to return to God but it takes us seeing that the secular world is a literally a living waste land. I know this from experience, it starts off fun but doesnt last.

 

[TamiSchall]

This is something that I saw growing up and now that I am older and once again in school I keep seeing. I think we need to pray for our youth and try to encourage and offer support to young adults in our church and in our families.

I have seen how young adults who were on fire ended up in sin the moment they went to college. The transition seems to go like this once they are 17yrs -18yrs old - finishing h.s., they start going to church less and less, when they start college they rebel and use studying and finals as an excuse to leave and begin to fall in sin. By the time they graduate they may not even go to church anymore. Im not judging any of them but I think we need to take some action and be aware of what is going on. I believe its due to all the freedom they experience at once, that leads them into making decisions with little thought on the consequences.

When I was a freshman in college I suffered big time because the encouragment I needed wasnt there, the only young men in church that where my age had either left or had fallen in sin. That is why I try to be a good example to the youth in my church because I want to be there for those young guys that may be feeling the same way I did.

Many young people give up their faith when they go to college. It is necessary to distinguish between the degrees of sins that students create when entering college. If a student just buys an essay from the service about which you can get more info <- here, then there is nothing wrong with that, because it is really difficult to study in college, but if a student gets drunk and starts relationships with several individuals of the opposite sex, then this is already a terrible sin.

 

[WIP]

I can only vouch for what happened in my life. I grew up in a devout Catholic tradition. We never missed a Sunday or Holy Day of Obligation Mass for we were taught to do so was a mortal sin. We attended Mass and prayed through the Rosary daily during the Lenten season. I served as an altar boy, sang in the choir, attended Catechism classes, and attended Catholic school. Every evening my brothers and sisters and I knelt on our living room floor to say our prayers before going to bed. The 10 Commandments were strictly taught and adhered to. To this day (I'm 61) I can attend a Mass and still recite nearly the entire Liturgy from memory including the Priest's words.

What happened? As I entered into my later teens I began to question some of what I had been taught. Of particular impact for me was the subject of prayer.

In all those years I was never taught what prayer really was... a conversation between me and God directly. Prayers were always these formal penned statements and except for the Lord's Prayer, never addressed God directly but instead addressed those the Catholic hierarchy identified as saints, asking for their intercession. When I read Scriptures like Isaiah 53:12, Romans 8:26-27, Romans 8:34, and 1 Timothy 2:5 I began to understand that there is but one intercessor and that is Jesus.

When I attended confession and after performing absolution the Priest assigned penance in the form of repeated prayers, such as 10 Hail Marys and three Our Fathers, and this too began to raise a lot of questions in my mind. First, it reassigned the purpose of prayer as a form of punishment (penance means punishment) and secondly I began to realize that it flew in the face of Matthew 6:7 about praying with vain repetition.

I began to see those prayers and the Liturgy (which I now believe is a prayer) as nothing more than mere words repeated from memory with no meaning for me anymore. It just happened that these things began in my later teens and about the same time I was entering college. This is a time in our lives when we enter adulthood and we start to think more for ourselves, exploring and learning more of our individuality. My confusion then led me to leave the Catholic tradition and unfortunately I also left any belief in God. It wasn't until I was nearing 40 before I began to become aware of God's presence in my life again through the help of some neighbors and our small country Lutheran church.

 

[Who Me]

There are many reasons why young people from a church background stop attending church.
First is, they were never Christian, just went along with it.
Another is they were never taught Christian apologetics, only how to parrot Christianity.
There are those for whom freedom, being away from parents etc and liberty goes to there head and they try what the world offers, some do come back.
Others are unable to answer the objections of class skeptics and loose there way.

A large part of the problem could be prevented if ministers and parents would train young people in apologetics rather than just lecture them, teaching them what an unbelieving world will throw at them and how to answer it.

Check out wit's book Already gone.
Look at coldcasechristianity for ideas on training.

 

[Christ_empowered]

Dedicated to church, not Christ?