The classroom seemed somewhat empty this Sunday without the presence of last year’s seniors. Obviously, we knew they were leaving. Our team of youth workers went to their graduation ceremonies in June, and several people from the church went to the kids’ open-house celebrations. It was fun to look at the old photographs their parents had displayed. Yeah, we knew these kids were leaving our group at some point. Most of them had attended this church since they were little. But this was the first week they didn’t come to our senior high Sunday School class—and we missed them.

We reminisced a little bit about each of these kids and talked about what each had contributed to our youth program. Let me tell you about a few of last year’s seniors. Stacy came to everything we did and always sat in the front. She contributed to every discussion, called visitors, and demonstrated solid leadership skills throughout our ministry. She left early last week to attend a well-known Christian university in the Midwest.

Josh attended Sunday School almost every week, but missed several weeks of our mid-week youth group meetings each year due to his involvement with the school’s cross-country and track teams. He is attending a local community college, but we’re not sure where—or if—he went to Sunday School or church services this week.

Emily grew up in our church along with her two older sisters. None of us could recall where any of them went to church when they graduated from high school. In fact, it’s sad to realize that we’ll probably never see her again either.

I could go on with this fictional story, but the reality is that the number-one time for people to drop out of church is immediately following high school graduation. The statistics are startling. Most students who were very active in church and youth group during high school often quit going to church once they enter college.

Youth workers, we all must do a better job at helping our students transition out of youth group and into the adult ministries of our churches—or help them get actively plugged into a church in the community where they go to college!

(By the way, I have done a great deal of research on this particular topic, and I share my findings with participants in the Next Generation Seminars that I present for Regular Baptist Press. Please click on the banner ad above to see the details of my seminars this fall. I will be in Lafayette, Indiana, and Mason City, Iowa, in October, presenting this strategic and important one-day, highly-interactive seminar. I’ll present some very revealing research on how many kids are leaving our churches and then will take a significant amount of time discussing what churches can do to reverse this trend. I highly encourage all pastors, youth workers, parents, and other church leaders to attend either one of these seminars if you live anywhere near either of these sites. Registration details and costs can also be found by clicking on the banner above.)

This article does not do justice to this critical topic, but here are a few thoughts to consider as you face the issue of your high school graduates walking away from church once they leave your youth ministry.

1. Equip parents to see the importance of regular church involvement for their children in high school and in college.
The real issue here, of course, is that if parents see church attendance and church involvement as critically important in their own lives, their children will be more likely to grow up with those same values. However, if parents of teenagers allow work, school, athletic involvement, or other things to come before church, the students will probably grow up with the idea that church is somewhere down the line on the priority list. This doesn’t mean that we should be legalistic about not missing even one week of church. It means we should help our people make a commitment to church involvement because they see it’s important to God and should be important to us.

My parents didn’t give me a choice. No matter what, church was first. Not the high school basketball team, not a job, not homework – nothing came before our family’s commitment to our church. That value stayed with me into college and on into adult life. I don’t think its naïve to believe that emphasis will work today as well. That’s why I tell youth workers to equip the parents of teenagers in their youth groups to make church involvement a top priority in the lives of their children now.

A few weeks ago I met a set of parents who had just dropped off their daughter for an early-admit program at a state university a few hours drive from their home in the Midwest. These parents, after hearing me speak about the solutions to the above-quoted statistics about our kids leaving the church, admitted that while they were at the university, they were involved in paying their child’s school bill, moving their daughter into her dorm room, helping her select her classes, and even making sure that she had a parking place on campus, but they never took the time to see if there was a good church in that community. Church involvement is a family issue first, and all youth workers should do their best to help parents see the importance of consistent involvement in God’s church.

2. Build leadership skills into the lives of your students as they progress throughout their senior high years.
Youth group must be more than entertainment and a place to hang out with friends. It must be a place of intentional transition from spiritual childhood into God-honoring adult maturity. In other words, youth group must be a place where high school seniors have more leadership responsibility than ninth graders do. If we want our kids to stay in church after high school, it is very important that we give them increasing levels of leadership involvement as they progress throughout our ministries. Developing student leadership may be more important than we ever realized.

There’s another perspective to this matter that I want to share with readers. I have personally talked to several youth workers who told me that they have many senior highers who virtually “check out” of youth group long before they graduate from high school. These students were very active as freshman or sophomores, but became less and less involved as they progressed through high school. Is that happening in your group? Perhaps it is because our youth programs are exactly the same year after year. In some churches, the basic structure of youth ministry is the same for seniors as it is for seventh graders. No wonder kids get bored and quit coming! That’s why it is so critical to develop student leadership as students grow throughout our youth ministries. (By the way, I present some specific ideas on this issue in my book Impacting the Next Generation: A Strategy for Discipleship in Youth Ministry, available from RBP at http://www.rbpstore.org/productView/showprod.cfm?prodnum=5288.)

The solution, of course, is to give your senior highers more and more leadership responsibilities in youth group and in church as they mature. You’ll want to make sure that these students are actively living for the Lord so that a lifestyle of carnality and sin is not promoted. However, I really believe that students are much more likely to stay involved in church throughout their college-age years and into their adult lives if they are encouraged to develop specific leadership skills as they progress through their years in your youth ministry. Specifically, I’m talking about giving your older kids opportunities to mentor the younger kids in the group and to be involved in other key avenues of hands-on ministry as juniors and seniors. If churches are going to be proactive about keeping their teenagers in church after they graduate, then it’s time to be serious about developing leadership in the lives of maturing students.

3. Create a genuine loyalty to the whole church, not just the youth group.
I’m afraid that in typical youth ministries, kids are more loyal to the youth group than they are to the church as a whole. If this is the case, it’s no wonder that they don’t want to be a part of the church itself after they leave youth group. They graduate from high school, we make them leave youth group, and then they struggle to find their place in the larger church community. They don’t seem to fit into the adult world of the church, so they tend to feel like the proverbial fish-out-of-water, missing the familiar safety and security of the youth group. Wise youth workers will deliberately ensure that teenagers realize they are a part of the local church as a whole instead of isolating students in the cocoon of the youth group. Ways to do this include providing kids with opportunities for significant ministry, teaching them to give financially (including the discipline of tithing), and giving them positive interaction with people from other age groups. I also recommend that the church’s senior pastor be actively involved in the lives of teenagers. He is their pastor too. Students need to grow up realizing that they are a part of something bigger than their own world of peers.

4. Carefully teach your students the Word of God, including the ability to personalize doctrinal truth.
Contemporary sociologists and church leaders alike are realizing that college-age young adults are struggling to know what they believe. This is the age when students must come to terms with the importance of clear-cut, rock-solid doctrinal truth. This generation wants to know what they believe. It doesn’t matter if they go to a Bible college, a major state university, or enter the military or workforce—these young adults will be forced to evaluate their own personal belief system. They’ll be forced, time and time again, to ask themselves, “Do I really believe this?”

That’s why it is so important for our teaching ministries to be much, much more than just quick devotionals we get ready at the last minute. So many youth workers build their teaching times around hot topics of the day or teen-generated subjects instead of the “whole counsel of God” that includes solid Bible content and in-depth doctrinal truth. If we look at youth ministry as a terminal program (i.e., it has a clear beginning and ending), we’ll realize that we have a very short amount of time to make sure that our kids are prepared to face an adult world knowing what they believe based on the complete, inerrant, and inspired Word of God.

5. Be intentional about developing wholesome connections between adults and teenagers in your church.
My last suggestion for youth workers on this subject is something I alluded to earlier in this post: the importance of building strong intergenerational connections into the lives of students. We are making a mistake if we isolate teenagers into their own little sub-culture of youth ministry. However, isolation seems to be the prevalent practice of so many of today’s youth ministries. Adolescents need and desire healthy and growing relationships with godly adults. This seems to be the pattern espoused in Titus 2, for instance, as Paul instructed Titus to develop strategic intergenerational ministries in the early church.

Let me be clear, I am not advocating a total departure from peer ministry. I believe in youth ministry, and I can argue for the value of a strong, vibrant church youth program. However, teens need adults and vice versa. The generations will often become very absorbed into their own cultural worlds of friends and experiences if they are not making intentional intergenerational relationships. The research is clear. We must break down generational barriers that tend to develop selfishness around externals such as music, fashion, and other cultural trends.

I wouldn’t mind that empty classroom I spoke about in the beginning of this article if our team of youth workers knew that Stacy, Josh, and Emily were heartily welcomed into a caring community of believers in an active adult or young adult ABF (Adult Bible Fellowship) or Sunday School class that demonstrated genuine love and a heart for ministry. That may be the key to the situation I am describing here—godly adults who are totally committed to welcoming members of a new generation into the overall life of the church. After all, there is really no such thing as graduating from church!