Why People Leave Church–and What Parents Can Do: Jim Davis & Michael Aitcheson

For a parent, we have to be in community, and the church is designed to be that. I mean, the church really is. We should have a church family.

So when we talk about de-churching, we would be remiss not to talk about we are saved into the body of Christ, which is the local church. My name is Toby Abbott, and your hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson. You can find us at familylifetoday.com or on the Family Life app. This is Family Life Today. Every Christian parent I know, including us, has the same goal for their kids. I agree.

What is it? That their kids will walk with Jesus their entire life, that they will surrender and give all of themselves to the King of Kings. It's the passion of a parent, a Christian parent, keeps you up at night. You pray about it. I mean, I fasted and prayed every Friday, still do for 37 years now, our oldest 37, to that end. God, would you make my sons, and if your mom or dad or daughters, women of God, men of God, who pursue the kingdom and advance the kingdom their whole life? Because we've experienced the gospel changing us, putting our eyes on other people, bringing us joy in the midst of hard circumstances, making our marriage more than you and me.

It's just a bigger picture of what God has, and that they live out their calling in this life. Yeah, and every parent's listening and going, yep, I'm with you 100%. My question is how? How do we do it? And that was our question. And we've got two experts in the studio that are going to answer that question. You guys didn't know that? Listen, you are the two who have launched kids.

If anybody's an expert at this table, it's y'all. Don't you have grandchildren? We do. We have kids in our home. We are prayerfully begging God that what you're saying would be true, that our kids would continue in the faith in the church. And by the way, you're listening to Jim Davis and Michael Aitchison, who are both pastors and, I'd say more importantly, dads. And we started a conversation yesterday with these two guys about the church. In fact, you've written a book called The Great Decherching, and it's the culture we're living in. There's an exodus going on from the church, and a lot of it's our own kids. And so, as we—and again, if you missed yesterday, go listen to it, because there's a lot of great conversation, but a lot of data that's going to shock you, I think. And these two have a podcast that they do together that you're going to want to listen to that as well, and it's called— As in Heaven. As in Heaven.

And you can find it on The Gospel Coalition. The subtitle of their book is Who's Leaving, as we're talking about the Great Decherching. Who's leaving, why are they going, and what will it take to bring them back? That's where every parent just pulled in. And every person that's seeing so many people leave their church, including their kids or some of their relatives, you're wondering why.

Or maybe you've left as a listener, and you're thinking, oh, I wonder what they're going to say about this. Yeah, so I would start there as dads, you know, help us as parents, where do we start? You have the same dreams, same goals, and you have kids still in your home. We've already done it. We're done. We're done.

It's over. But now we're thinking grandkids, same kind of thing. So, I mean, as we and you approach this, wow, we're living in a world, people are walking away, our own kids are, where do you start?

Where would you begin this conversation to help parents? For me, as I was engaging in this data, it was really more, because there's no one reason, obviously, that anybody, everybody leaves the church. It's multifaceted. But you can identify common themes.

Right. And there were some things that I was processing, and there are more themes than I can do in a short interview like this, but it was kind of a gut check for me. Am I creating this kind of environment in my home, or are my kids seeing this kind of idolatry in my life? Are these other things, am I giving my kids, exposing them, now I'm the pastor, so there's an extra burden on me teaching, but are my kids getting real answers for the questions that they're asking in their life?

Are they getting enough Bible? Because we began to see data, let me first say, it was very interesting, the vast majority of de-churching happens from the age of 13 to 30. But the season of life, overwhelmingly, regardless of your generation, that you would say you were most religious is 0 to 17, and the period of your life that you would say you were the least religious was 18 to 30.

So what that means is the most religious and the least religious seasons of our life are back to back. So there's a major problem in the generational handoff that Deuteronomy 6 tells us that we're supposed to be facilitating. So that was, to me, really highlighted the fact that we have this season of kids in our home, and it's really important what we do. So Mike and I, as we're processing this data, we're doing both as parents and as pastors. It's been very convicting, it's caused me to pray more, so there's been some decisions in my life that I've changed because I am convicted that I wasn't giving Jesus every part of my life. And I became convicted that not only for my own sake, which that should be motivating enough, but my kids, I want them to see in the short period of time what it looks like for their parents to really follow Jesus. Jim touched on, we're both pastors, and of course you know this, being a pastor, there's this more nuanced, complex thing when you're raising up your children as a pastor. And I think in this whole space of de-churching, one of the things I've been wrestling with is, well, my kids see that the gospel actually does work for dad in our home, apart from him being the pastor as our dad, not simply because he's the pastor. God has come after me in some amazing ways, and I concluded that, at least in one way, the most important thing we can do is display repentance before our kids. I had a great mentor, she's gone to be with the Lord, she said the gospel is transferred through relationship. And I was like, oh, so I can't be up here preaching every Sunday and just only wanting my kids to make sure that dad's reputation is intact so the family doesn't lose our job and our income.

No, it has to be that, hey dad, if you did get fired, is this really true for you? Like, do you love Jesus? Do we matter?

And do you want this for us? This whole de-churching thing has made me really think, how can I make sure my girls know that next to Jesus and my wife, of course, they're the most important people in the world to me, and that I care about them simply because I want them to know Jesus, who has known me, not because dad's a pastor, and they have to perform well in order for dad to keep his job. And I think a lot of some of the folks are saying the de-churching, they saw incompatibilities between doctrine and ethics, between what we believe and maybe conversations at the dinner table, and how we treat people.

And so for me, I'm constantly thinking, how can I strive for consistency and integrity between what I'm saying and what my kids are experiencing in the home and at the dinner table? Let me encourage you with this, and I've shared this here before, and I'll make it quick, but my youngest son, who just flew in from Detroit last night with his two little kids, was in college and had a radical conversion, really. He would tell you now, I fell on my face in my dorm room. He's a college football player, and he was all about himself, and a miracle happened. He would say, man, my life was transformed. So he's on this cool journey, and I don't know what year it was, he came home for a break, and I said, hey, you want to preach with me?

I think you have a gift to preach. So he gets up on stage, and he was passionate. He's yelling, he's crying, he's talking about Jesus, and tears are just streaming down his face. All the stuff that drove me crazy when he was a little kid, you know, he was frustrated about everything.

You were like, oh, there it is, it's all good now. Long story short, these guys come up to me that I had mentored, and one of them's named Dave, and he goes, hey, man, we're doing a little men's retreat at a little retreat center next weekend. Is there any chance you could come?

You don't need to come to retreat. Could we have dinner with you? And we're all young dads ask you questions.

It would take you about an hour. I go, love to. And then they go, hey, we just heard Cody preach. Is there any chance he could come with you?

Long story short, he goes with us. And this is classic, we're sitting there, and they're just asking us questions, and finally they turn to Cody, and they go, okay, Cody, I mean, you're on fire right now. We saw you preach, and, you know, we're hoping that our kids, when they're in college, they're living like you are.

Here's our question. What did your dad do to stoke that kind of faith in you? And I remember, guys, I'm sitting there going, there's a thousand things I did, man.

I mean, I had this thought, like, you know, we had devotions, we were on mission trips. You know, and again, I'm not saying I did it right, but there were a lot of things, because we were intentional as parents. And so I'm thinking, I wonder what he's going to say, and he just sits there in no response. And so then I'm thinking, oh, there's so many, he doesn't know which one to pick.

And I'm making this funny. But finally, they say, seriously, Cody, because it was so long, do you have anything? And he goes, you know, I don't remember a single Bible study or anything his dad taught me, and he tried to do all that stuff. There's one thing he did.

And then I'm like, what was that? And he goes, he lived it. He said, if I want to know what a man of God looked like, he was right down the hall. He showed me.

That's it. And I remember thinking, oh, my, it's just what you said, Mike. It's like, what we do is more important than anything we say. Do you guys agree, as you studied the D church and the research saying they're walking away, is this a big part of what is causing our next generation to walk away? They're just not seeing a consistency in what we say and what we do? So we have a whole chapter on children, actually two chapters, on children and the reason for their de-churching. And they would say, I see hypocrisy either in their parents or in their church leaders. Actually, if I remember correctly, one of the biggest things people who de-churched in this season, in this young season, would say, I wish my parents had just listened to me better.

They wanted to just tell me what was true, but they didn't want to listen. Or people would felt like politics was as important, if not more important, than Jesus. And they saw their parents doing more to that end than just walking with Jesus. So there are a lot of, I mean, we have a lot of data to that end.

And we isolate the data in the high school years, in the college years, and in the young professional years. But one thing that I think can easily be overlooked, I hear y'all talking, and I agree, the most important thing is us. It starts with us and our relationship. And I even remember stories you've told me, Dave, about you laying in bed with your 16-year-old boy praying with him. And I still think about that. You know, you think you can age out of that kind of interaction. And I think about you.

And it's awkward in the field. Yeah. And you know what? I'll lay with my 13-year-old, my 15-year-old, and I'll rub their back and pray.

And Angela will sing if it's her turn. And it's just like, I think about you telling me that. And so that's the most important part.

But I think what's often missed is the importance of community and parenting. I was actually listening, I told Mike this, to a non-Christian psychologist. And he said something— That's allowed? You can listen to non-Christian psychologists?

General revelation, you know, like we can learn things outside. But now I think he was wrong in some areas, and I'll say how, but he was making the case. And he would say from evolution, I would disagree, I think it's by design that sin has impacted. But his argument was between the ages of 13 and 25, our kids are wanting to leave the house. And he would again say, because of evolution, which I would not say, but he would say they're wanting to leave the house. And so they're disinclined in their core to listen to their parents. And his point was, this is why it's so important to have other parents saying the same things to your kids. Because you can say something and it's like, whatever, Dad.

Well, Mike Aitchison says something to my kids and it's like the best thing they've ever heard. Now, I would say our design is to leave the house. Our design has been influenced by sin.

So something, I think he was onto something, he just didn't have all the data. And so it is so important for us to be in a community, in a church community, where parents and youth people are going to be speaking the same truths that I'm speaking, and Angela's speaking, into their lives. And one story I think of often last year, there's a sweet family that I know, they were asking me if I would start a Saturday night church. And I said, well, if I started a Saturday night service with four kids in my home right now, I would be disqualified to lead that service. My wife would tell you right now, don't do it, because I did it. It's the hardest thing ever. I don't want to do it. I mean, maybe as an empty nester, I can see the value, of course.

I couldn't do it. But I said, well, why do you need a Saturday evening service? Well, we have three kids in nine sports leagues right now.

And every third Saturday, we could possibly make a church service. And I think this is a picture of something that's also epidemic in our culture, where we can't do everything. So we as parents have to decide what's most important, and people are picking, and we flush this out too in the book, but people are picking youth sports. And 99% of our kids, maybe if you've got Mike and Lucy's genes, this is different, but my kids, they're not going pro. They've got my genes and Angela's genes. But we have to decide what are the priorities, and if we raise our kids on the ball fields every Sunday, why would we have an expectation that that's going to change when they leave our home?

That's a great point. It might not be athletics. It could be all kinds of – and they're all good things. They're wonderful things.

It becomes an idol. Yeah. And you feel the pressure from other parents that are all playing on Sunday, and their kids are traveling. And I know that. I remember feeling like, our kids are going to be behind.

If we don't get in that league, then our kids are going to be nothing. And so we all have – We have that fear. Yeah. But we have to pick something to be behind it. Exactly.

And if we don't pick Jesus at that point, at those ages, why would they, if it's not important to us? You wrote D Church advice for the parents. Listen better. Second was live out your faith. We just talked about that.

Here's the third one. Be more charitable toward those with whom you disagree. So that's a big factor. Our kids are watching how we treat people we disagree with. I was sitting in a group with some pastors, one well-respected. And during one of the election cycles, the pastor said that one of the leaders in the church came to him, deeply concerned, because while they were watching, you know, the news or whatever, the son said, so now, Dad, why do we hate this guy? We have to stop and wrestle with that for a second.

There's layers to that. Who knows what reason he disdained or had strong disagreement, but the kid interpreted it as hatred because his partisanship or whatever it was, was so strong against this particular candidate. When we're raising our kids, we cannot say love your neighbor, you know, pray for those who persecute you, those who hate you, and then turn around and do that, and not expect there to be some dissonance in the lives of our children at best, and then just disregard at worst if they just sense that, well, this really didn't work for Mom and Dad, because whenever somebody that's different than them, thinks different, looks different, talks different, sounds different, whatever, cultural, they have this weird reaction, so I don't know how this works out with the Jesus thing. Well, it reminds me that G.K. Chesterton quote, there was this article in the London Times or something, What is wrong with the world? And a lot of what we experience in Christian homes is like, these people are what's wrong with the world, or these people, these politicians.

Well, G.K. Chesterton wrote back, Dear Sirs, I am. It is this humility, like we're all sinful, but not for the grace of God. How different would we be? And so there is a humility, and I want to acknowledge that there's some fear, too, as our country changes so rapidly. We all have a friend, Carlos, who's a family life speaker, he is a pastor in New Mexico, and he's of Mexican origin, and he has this line, he always says, he starts it all lots with bro, bro, I didn't cross the border, the border crossed me. So his family never left, but the border's what changed, and all of a sudden he's living in a different, he never moved, but now he's living in a different place. That's kind of a picture for me of what we're experiencing.

We have not moved, but it feels like we are living in a different place. And our teenagers, they catch all of those things that we're saying, all of our attitudes, and you can say I hate somebody's policy, but why would you ever say we hate this guy? I think sometimes we do it as parents, we don't even recognize we're doing it.

Our kids, I didn't make judgments on adults like that, but what I would do is I would put people, kids, into good and bad. Is he a bad kid? Oh, he's a good kid.

Why? Because, what, he's not partying? And my kids, man, they're like, oh, is he a bad kid because he parties, mom? Does that make him a bad kid?

But even that, they catch it. And so, to really think, if Jesus is bringing everyone to the table, why wouldn't we, and why wouldn't we love them, maybe not agree with everything, but we're still going to love people, our kids catch that. Yeah, and what do we do when we don't?

Because I'm listening to you and I'm thinking, there's a lot of parents going, I blew it this morning. If what you're saying is true, and you used the word earlier, repent, is that what it looks like we have to go back to our kids? The whole of the Christian life.

I mean, it includes parenting. That's the whole, the only thing that makes us different is we're all sinners. We are this subset of sinners who have repented of our sin and put our faith in Jesus. That's the whole of the Christian life. And it's going to affect everything, including raising our kids. You know, and it's beyond just, you know, politics or cultural or whatever differences, things that are important, but not the most important. It even extends out to the way we deal with sinners or non-believers and people who have demonstrably an overt heinous sin that we'd be like, okay, this is just, this is a departure from biblical design.

The way we talk about and engage populations of people like that is significant because our kids are seeing it, they're interacting and they're taking their cues from us. And we've had to work through this. I mean, we've shared this even as early as the elementary years. Our kid in the second, first, second grade, we had to wrestle through. Hey, this is what we believe at home. Mommy and Daddy, you might see this at school. And we did the best we could.

We were caught flat-footed, unaware of just how fast things have changed. Give us an example, Mike. Well, one of our kids, dear friends with a classmates who had two dads, so we had to try to explain what was wrong with that and what God's design is and how we engage with folks who disagree with what Mommy and Daddy are teaching you at home.

Now, you got one or two options. You can come and say that, or you can say, hey, God created you through Mommy and Daddy. This is God's design. And they have chosen a path that's different from God's design. But we have to share the gospel with them in word and by the way we treat them.

Right? So we try to do the best we could. We rounded it out even more diplomatically than that with our youngest, our oldest. She was watching us. Our oldest was watching us try to navigate it with our second oldest.

It was layers of witnesses and how we were going to process this. I mean, those are just some of the small examples, although important, of how we have to think biblically about engaging people that don't agree with us and people that are different than us. It really has to be guided by love. Otherwise, our kids will sniff it out.

Yeah, the love. I mean, you guys know the issues in our culture right now. There's many, but it's going to be around race. It's going to be around gender. It's going to be around sexuality. What am I missing?

I mean, those are the big three that you can't open social media page. Not saying you should. Politics. Boom!

There's attacks every second and our kids are living in that world. I know you guys know as a pastor, I remember, well, you don't know this because you're too young, but years ago. He did it. I'll make it.

I'll make it. I can remember, you know, I could preach on whatever topic, look out at the congregation and know that I'm their expert on theology on this topic. And they don't even know all the things that I've wrestled through to give them what I think the Bible teaches on this. That changed. I don't know when.

Probably you could put it around early 2000s. I'm preaching to a congregation who any minute I'm making a statement can pull up their phone and get five other reasons why I'm wrong. And they're compelling. Or they could be, and these are high school kids, they could be wise enough to go, he hasn't even touched three of the arguments that are really important to what he's saying right now. That's the world our kids are growing up in. And they're looking at mom and dad going, so the Bible says so is your answer?

You know, you got to be deeper than that. But I think what you said is more important than any of that is how are mom and dad living this out with people of different beliefs about sexuality and race and politics? Am I right? Is that what it really comes down to?

I think you are. Two elements that I would want to, that are part of this, that I'd want to drill down on. I think in the 20th century we really focused a lot on what is true and at the expense of the good and the beautiful. I'm not saying there is no, there is truth, our faith is built on truth of the Bible, but there's a good and a beautiful in there that we have historically struggled, I think, in the 20th century. We focus so much on truth and the way we share our faith, defend our faith, that the good and the beautiful can be lost.

And so we need to make sure we're experiencing the good and the beautiful in addition to the truth of the gospel. And the second part of this is how important it is for us to be in community. For a parent, we can't be like the pastor on the stage.

We have to be in community, and I am in community with Mike, with the Robins, with other dear families, and we're processing these issues together. The church is designed to be that. I mean, the church really is. We should have a church family, so when we talk about de-churching, we would be remiss not to talk about the community that God has saved us into.

The idea of an individualized faith is foreign from the Bible. We are saved into the body of Christ, which is the local church. I think that's really true. We've had a great community of friends that we raised our kids together. We love each other, we know each other, and our kids watched that all the years they had growing up. And now they desire that because that's normal for them. And they saw we struggled together, we loved each other, we went through immense pain with one another, and yet they saw how necessary that was.

And they all have great communities. Oh, we were just with our middle son in Denver, and you get on the plane and you're like, they have a great community. I'm jealous.

I'm like, wow, it's such—and I never thought they saw it modeled. But let me end this way. If you're a Christian family and you don't have that, you might be saying what a lot of us say. Well, nobody's reached out to me.

That's victim. Reach out. Go get it. If you're struggling with your kids, this might be the missing pieces. I'm just going to say to you as a dad, lead that family, find some other families, start meeting, and let God work. We're going to hear more encouragement from Anne here in just a second, but first, living life in the context of community with even with all of our flaws and successes.

That's the secret sauce. Without others around you to help push you toward walking with Jesus, I'll dare to say you're incomplete. Christianity is never meant to be a solo thing. So find your people and walk with God in the context of community. I'm Shelby Abbott, and you've been listening to David and Wilson with Jim Davis and Michael Acheson on Family Life Today.

Jim has written a book called The Great Decherching. Who's leaving? Why are they going?

And what will it take to bring them back? This is an honest look at where we are and where we need to go. You can pick up a copy at familylifetoday.com, or you can give us a call at 800-358-6329. And that number is 800-F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. It's the end of August.

We're winding down. The summer's almost over, and maybe your kids have already gone back to school, or maybe they're getting ready to go back to school, but August is such a unique time. And it's such an important time here at Family Life because when you partner with us financially all the rest of this month, we're going to give you two really important resources when it comes to parenting. One of them is a fun card game that you can play with your kids called Ferret Flush.

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Our address is Family Life, 100 Lakehart Drive, Orlando, Florida, 32832. All right, here's Ann with some encouragement about how to live without constantly judging other people. I'm going to add one too. I love the repentance part that we talked about. If you feel like, oh, I've been so negative in the way I've talked about certain people groups, in the way I've talked about maybe their friends or teachers. Repent. Tell your kids, like, I should not as a believer in Christ be talking like that and judging that person so harshly. I need to be better at that because Jesus doesn't do that. He loves all of us. And we're saying that because we did it.

I don't know if you did it as much as I did and I had to repent over and over. But those are some great truths. Coming up tomorrow, Dave and Ann are back again with Jim Davis and Michael Aitchison. They're going to talk about how parenting and coming to Christ require humility and authenticity. That's tomorrow. We hope you'll join us. On behalf of Dave and Ann Wilson, I'm Shelby Abbott. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a donor supported production of Family Life, a crew ministry helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.