College-bound kids and their faith have never been more threatened. As a parent, you can make sure they are already connected in community.
Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
“A screaming comes across the sky.” The opening line of Thomas Pynchon’s novel, Gravity’s Rainbow foretells the impact of v-2 rockets on hundreds of characters against the backdrop of World War II. However, this first sentence can describe many things. In reflection, I find that it describes my first few weeks of college quite well. It didn’t take long for me to discover that defending and keeping my faith in college required my careful attention to the screaming coming across my college experience.
If you’re a parent of a soon-to-be college student, you’ve likely heard anecdotes of how universities employ faculty committed to the destruction of your child’s Christian faith. Maybe you’ve even warned your children of the opposition to Christianity across college campuses.
College-bound kids and their faith have never been more threatened. Current trends among graduating high schoolers reveals a sharp decline in continued faith once they arrive on campus. Even the most committed young believer will have their convictions challenged during their college experience.
As a parent, you can positively shape your young adult before they leave for college. Understanding more about available opportunities for your college-bound kids will equip them to arrive to college prepared to find community and face challenges. As you do your research, consider your child’s personality, interests, and goals. Think about their struggles and potential pitfalls within their upcoming college experience.
Doing this with community would have been much easier. A Navigators study showed that the friends a student makes during first 72 hours on campus often determines the trajectory of his or her faith. Prior connection is essential. Now students can join a community today with Christian friends and leaders at their future college with Every Student Sent.
Once your child steps foot on their college campus, the number of influences vying for their attention exponentially increases. Between class, community, and a collection of political, social, and cultural organizations, your child will have countless options for how to spend their time.
Unfortunately, many habits of their life before college become causalities to increased freedom, other interests, and an overall decrease in godly influences. According to multiple research studies, more than two-thirds (66%) of young adults stopped attending church between the ages of 18-22. Additionally, this study focuses on young adults that attended church regularly for at least a year in high school.
When asked about the main reason for their church departure, 34 percent of respondents cited moving to college as the primary motivation. Another 32 percent pointed to a consistent theme of hypocrisy or judgement from church members.
This data reveals a glaring shift in church attendance among college-aged kids. It’s clear that previous commitment to church attendance drastically shifts during the college years. However, what’s not so clear is why.
Sure, some college students might reference a poor experience with a church member. In other cases, they describe a schedule that simply doesn’t have room for church. Further still, there are a handful of teens preparing for college that are completely done with trying church.
Citing these reasons and more, one ministry works harder than ever to reverse the trend of departure from attending church among college-bound kids.
Keeping one’s faith in college has never been more important. This belief is at the core of Every Student Sent. A rapidly growing ministry effort, Every Student Sent exists to “create and catalyze united movements that transform college campuses for Christ.”
Every Student Sent focuses on uniting students, campus ministries, and local churches together to achieve this mission. However, the beauty of Every Student Sent’s design is that you don’t have to wait until you’re on campus to begin building your community. Here are a few highlights of Every Student Sent:
If you’d like to continue to explore what Every Student Sent has to offer, click here. Start searching for ministry connections and opportunities for your college kids today.
Keeping the Christian faith in college is more difficult in isolation. To return to the opening line of Thomas Pynchon’s novel. The “screaming across the sky” in the book’s world instantly causes separation, division, and confusion among the characters. It’s the same story with keeping faith in college.
Among the various threats to keeping faith in college, isolation from community is perhaps the most subtle, yet the most detrimental.
In Hebrews, the author describes the negative impact of poor community: “Exhort one another every day, as long as it called today, that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin” (Hebrews 3:13).
Without Christian community, the deceitfulness of sin grows more influential. For your college kid to successfully keep his or her faith they desperately need a strong community.
Nancy Pearcey, professor of apologetics and scholar-in-residence at Houston Baptist University, is the author of Finding Truth: 5 principles for unmasking atheism, secularism, and other god substitutes. She is familiar professionally and personally with the challenges students face in college. She related this story.
A mother choked back tears as she related the heartbreaking news. Her son Miko, studying at a state university, had abandoned his Christian faith. Miko’s major was psychology, a field where most theories are secular and often hostile to a Christian worldview. (Early 20th-century psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud set the tone, treating Christianity as a symptom of emotional immaturity.)
Miko came from a loving, Christian home. Yet he was completely unprepared for the challenges of the university classroom. How can parents equip teens to keep their Christian convictions when they leave home?
Miko is not alone. When researchers asked why young people left their religion, they were surprised to discover that the reason given most frequently was doubt and unanswered questions. They expected to hear stories of emotional wounding and broken relationships. But instead, these young adults were simply not getting their questions answered.
That was my story, too. Proponents of secular ideas — teachers, textbooks, and friends — surrounded me in high school. I began to wonder, How can we know Christianity is true? Tragically, none of the adults in my life offered answers. Eventually I decided Christianity must not have any answers, and I became an agnostic.
Later, I stumbled upon L’Abri, the ministry of Francis Schaeffer in Switzerland. For the first time, I met Christians who could intelligently rebut the secular “isms,” of atheism, materialism, and pluralism, which I had absorbed.
Can busy parents effectively teach their children to answer the secular “isms”? Yes, and the good news is that Scripture provides two basic principles that make the job easier — principles you can use to evaluate any worldview your teens encounter.
Evidence for God is “clearly perceived” in creation (Romans 1:20). We typically think this means the beauty and complexity of nature. But it also means humanity. You and I are part of the created order, and we, too, give evidence for God’s existence.
How? Think of it this way: A cause must be equal to the effect. Because humans are capable of choosing, the first cause that created them must have a will. Because humans are capable of thinking, the cause that created them must have a mind. As one Christian philosopher summed it up, because a human is a someone and not a something, the source of human life must also be a Someone and not the blind, automatic forces of nature.
The beauty of this argument is that you don’t have to believe the Bible to see that it makes sense. This logic can be effective if your teens are having doubts or are facing questions from their secular friends. The case for a creator fits our experience of human nature — what we all know about ourselves.
When we do not accept God’s existence, we’ve “exchanged the glory of the immortal God” for something in creation (Romans 1:23). We create idols.
An idol can be defined as anything put in the place of God as the ultimate reality. The prevailing philosophy in the academic world today is materialism, which puts matter in the role of God as the eternal, uncreated, self-existent source of everything.
The psychologists that Miko studied — Freud, Pavlov, Skinner — were all materialists. To be consistent, materialism must deny the reality of anything that is not material. It reduces humans to complex biochemical machines: robots with no free will, mind, soul, or spirit. Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins says humans are “survival machines — robot vehicles blindly programmed” by their genes.
But as we see from principle No. 1, such a simplistic, one-dimensional view does not fit what we know about ourselves and our human will. No one lives like a robot. We make choices daily. Again, you don’t have to believe the Bible to recognize that materialism does not match reality.
Discussing these two principles with your teens is a great starting place to help break the tragic pattern of young people who leave home and lose their faith. We can help our teens understand how these biblical principles equip them to confront any worldview they may encounter in the classroom.
There’s no greater opportunity to discover the depth of one’s commitment to Christ than to face challenges. For your college-bound kid, the challenges to faith are quickly approaching. Unfortunately, these challenges might not always be easy to spot or overcome.
Yet, you have the chance to continue to build a strong foundation of Christian community and friends to help your college kid once they begin college. Losing faith in college doesn’t usually happen all at once. It occurs in small moments that add up over time. So, as your young adult begins their college journey commit to setting them up for a healthy relationship with Christ.
Jackson Greer is a Special Projects Manager for Focus on the Family. He lives in Colorado Springs with his wife, Clara. They love feeding birds, debating whether or not to get a cat, and reading William Carlos Williams’ poetry together. Also, he is a former high school English teacher and a defender of the Post Office.
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