This statement is so correct that I don’t know what else to say.

Some of us get it. I’m involved in evangelism in a mainline Protestant denomination that is not known at all for evangelism. What frustrates me is that most churches seem to want to create a culture that is separate from the culture at large, in ways that drive people away. Certainly the church should have its own culture (or else it becomes nothing more than a social club), but creating a culture that puts hurdles between the greater community and the Gospel is exactly what Jesus denounced in His earthly ministry. Collectively we have become Pharisees. But some of us get it, and are trying to change it.

I think this really hits on why churches lose the 20-somethings. Too many churches separate these two things, which are really one in the same, and only offer some cheap knock-off of the latter. The need that people go to church to try and meet IS the need to find and worship God, but I think most churches don’t know how to facilitate a real connection with the divine. And I think 20-something is the age that alot of people start really looking for that real connection and all the church gives them is praise songs and bible stories. Not that there’s anything wrong with praise songs and bible stories but without anything more it’s just kinda spiritual junk food. It’ll get your emotions going and make you feel good for awhile but when it’s all over you’re not really any better off than when you started.

When I read Slarti’s comment, what I see is ‘Anybody who wants a real spiritual connection to God instead of just singing happy songs talking about how we should be nice to eachother is going to be disappointed.” And that disappointment is what I think gives you alot of 20-something Christians who don’t attend church, because they find that the church just doesn’t deliver what it’s promised in terms of spiritual development and if the church can’t help them grow spiritually, there’s not really much point in spending time there.

I know that I drifted away from Churches because there was no community spirit in any of the local ones and they were all very judgmental toward my mother when she was trying to wrangle my and my sister’s spiritual education on her own. She didn’t go to church with my father because he was raised Catholic (nuns with rulers and everything) and he hated everything to do with it. Since he wasn’t a participant, the Churches didn’t want anything to do with her, and my mother is a President-of-the-PTA, take-charge, dominant-personality sort of woman. All the church communities we have had experience with gave her the ‘hit-the-road’ vibe.

So I got my ideals of faith and community from intense summer-camp situations, where everyone knows they’re part of a community and they do service to help the community because it’s personal. It’s THEIR community and they own it. We own it.

So I guess my biggest frustration with church is that they’ve pulled away from being a part of the greater community. It’s fine and dandy to have a church community, but when you start putting The Church Community on one side and The Other People Community on the other, you kind of break everything.

I don’t want to seek out a clique and beg them to accept me so I can pretend like I belong. That was High School and I didn’t buy it then, either. I went my own way. I want family, happy and mildly dysfunctional, but we love each other anyway because we are all children of the same God.

Don’t look know, but you are a living example of #3. You are writing off a lot of people by assuming that since you’ve reached a certain age you have a certain insight and there’s no getting around a fundamental truth.

Meanwhile I know personally a dozen Christians in their 20s who would make genuinely wonderful additions to a church body if people didn’t keep assuming that they were just about rebellion and acting out and playing foosball.

I don’t think they’ll find it there. Because from where I sit, growing in Christianity to the place of maturity is much like John Bunyan described it in “Pilgrim’s Progress”. It’s a journey that goes through different places and road has different challenges on the way.

I think the key ingredient of mature Christianity is a shaping of the Wilderness. A time when every Christian is alone in a desert, parched and longing. This is modelled in the life of every major prophet–Moses, Elijah, John the Baptiser–and in the life of Jesus himself. It’s what the Psalmist saw as the Valley of the Shadow.

A good church body equips you for this part of the journey. The cameraderie of the fellowship of believers is a sort of packing-your-bags and outfitting-you-with-foodstuffs. But you always have to go to that place and deal with darkness and doubt.

So many church bodies don’t WANT to scare people off from the gospel. So the entire church experience becomes about waiting around in the night before the journey. There’s a lot of packing, but not much going. Because the going is rough.

In addition you mention that people don’t see the Christlikeness of Christians in general. I think that the four reasons I mentioned are a big part of that. People in many modern churches are humans going to a social organisation that meets at traditional times and his focused around The Jesus Experience. Churches are human places with human faults and foibles. That’s why we should have NEVER turned over our evangelism to the local church body. The move to Seeker churches in the late 80s meant that instead of people seeing other people they saw buildings and powerpoints instead. Now no one has gotten what they wanted.

I am not anywhere near a completed work. I can’t claim that. But I do have a good deal of Wilderness under my belt and a testimony that the most powerful love anyone will ever know is the transformative love of a relationship with God made possible by the death and resurrection of Jesus.