This happens to everyone for different reasons. For me it was because I was arrogant. I grew up in church, thought I knew everything about church, and felt like I was graduating from both academic school and God school when I left high school. My relationship with God was actually at an all-time low, but I barely noticed because I associated my relationship with God with knowledge. Bad idea. Don’t ever use what you know ABOUT God, the Bible, or church as a substitute for Him. Also, don’t substitute time with Godly people for time with God himself. It is important to spend time with Godly people. They can provide encouragement (and they did for me) at crucial times in life. However, God likes spending time with you by himself, all by himself.
My son wrote those words recently for a longer chapter that he and I are working on together called Why Students Lose Faith. He had attended Christian school his whole life. It was a University Model School, which is a hybrid model of home school and private school where he went to school on Tuesday and Thursday during elementary and Monday, Wednesday, and Friday during secondary. The school is rooted and grounded in the word of God and the Christian faith and somehow, he developed the attitude that he knew everything he needed to know about God.
I’m not berating him. I know that God will get our attention in anyway He needs to to get us to draw closer to Him, to understand him as Holy Creator and Master of the Universe. I didn’t go to Christian school, but I was youth group president and a church girl and I still got to college and questioned my faith while backsliding in a major way. It’s just like God to bring my son and I together around a message that we are both passionate about, being on mission for God in college–Instead of losing faith in college, growing your faith while in college.
I wholeheartedly agree with the reminders he wrote in that first paragraph. God wants us, all of us and he doesn’t want us to substitute other things for a daily, active relationship with him. As my son Joshua said, there are many reasons students lose faith. The students we are thinking of are high school seniors and early college students. I heard a statistic the other day that 16 is the average age when students unplug from their faith. Why is that?
It seems to me that 16 is right about the time that students are disconnecting from the faith of their parents or whoever it is that takes them to church and they are left to find their own motivation for continuing to build their relationship with Christ. They will either find that motivation or not. Their circumstances have a lot to do with their choice to either plug in or disconnect from their faith. They may see their need for Christ or not based on their family or friend dynamics. It could be based on any goal they’ve set for themselves, goals that may cause them to depend on God or not.
There are a lot of reasons students lose faith. They may feel let down by God because of a prayer that wasn’t answered they way they wanted, or they may be surrounded by people who have no faith who are influencing them–this is usually true in college (public college). Ultimately, I want to encourage you to hang on to Jesus tightly in college. He is the author and finisher of your faith, no matter what. Keeping faith in college it won’t happen unintentionally. It requires you to have a plan to hang on to God as the world tries to grab hold of you.
