Low Hanging Fruit

Free Northerner has a post up about why young people leave the church, and what to do about it. There's a graph involved that you really should go there to look at:

Follow the yellow line, it represents the church. In 1940, the church was the third likeliest method of meeting your spouse, after family and friends. Now it is the lowest, practically non-existent, while family is the second lowest.

Some of this could possibly be chalked up to declining church attendence rates, especially among the young, but, church attendence has remained near 40% since 1940.

Church leaders are always asking why young people leave the church. The first graph is all that needs to be said.

Young people are looking to find love. This is natural, this is healthy. If they can not find love in the church, they will find it elsewhere.

The church should be supporting young people in finding love, so healthy, productive marriages will result. Instead, the church has entirely abandoned its responsbility to promote family formation, and has left the process to peers, clubs, and online dating.

Allegedly, the majority of women tend to pair-bond in their teen years, and despite all the craziness in the media- tend to settle down with one man. To me, this is low hanging fruit that the Church, or any other organization interested in existing throughout the generations has been really stupid to lose. And they've been losing it.

It is always useful to remember that God is the God of the Living. If your organization is no longer oriented to life, well, life can grow up in the cracks.