Lifeway student leaders conference lead by Pam Gibbs at Ridgecrest in Summer of 2005. (her contact is below)
Pam Gibbs, Discipleship Resources & Girls’ Ministry| pam.gibbs@lifeway.com |

It can also be found in

Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, by Smith and Denton

and to some degree in

Transforming Student Minsitry, Richard Ross General, editor

Hope this helps.

Of actively churched teens whose parents are nominal Christians, 80% bail and 20% stick.

Of actively churched teens whose parents are unchurched, 50% bail and 50% stick.

Of actively churched teens whose parents are growing Christians, 20% bail and 80% stick.

80-50-20 is not a total of teens, but of those bail in three different situations.

How do those numbers work? 80-50-20 is more than 100%. How are they counting this?

Kelly

Great thoughts. I appreciate this series of posts and think they will be very helpful to a good number of us. I think their is a good deal of hope here relating to kids and teenagers that attend our churches without their families. They seem to have a better shot at really getting it than kids of nominal members. This should cause us to look at kids we often tag as “drop offs” in a different way. Thanks again for your good words.

But, sad to say, ministry in higher education has always had to fight for its right to exist, because seldom can it ever produce the numerical “successes” that denominational leaders like to see. There are many reasons for that inability to produce large numbers, but one of them is, in my experience, the fact that young adults are running from the church in all its forms when they go to college. They may have experienced hypocrisy or insincerity, and/or they may have recoiled against the anti-intellectualism attitudes they have heard from the pulpit. I am sure I did more work reclaiming young people for Christ than I did finding new converts.

Now what saddens me is that I am seeing retrenching, backing away from funding and placing campus ministers in several denominations, including even Southern Baptists. Here in the D. C. Baptist Convention, where I spent the years 1976-1986 building a network of ministry on the seven universities in DC alone, plus those in the Maryland suburbs, we are now doing almost nothing at all.

Randy

i think that you hit the nail on the head on this. and, is this not true about us reaching anyone for the Lord Jesus out there? that we live out our faith…in all our weaknesses……that we live for the Lord and be real? that people see us having a real and vital walk with the Lord?

i think sometimes that we can have all the witnessing training classes in the world, and yet, the best way to truly reach people is by christians out there talking about Jesus….loving people….helping people…..being involved in the community to shine the light of Jesus on folks…and letting the lost crowd out there see a difference in our lives, and hear why we are different.

david

Cliff,

Would you believe that I am a speaker? See you there?

Art