Falling prayer

The Barna Group has released a new survey of “faith practices” among American Christian teenagers, which is to say it covers the things that many people think are important for young Christians to do. It’s comforting to find prayer on the list, though disquieting to learn it’s in a 15-year slump, according to Barna. Twenty-nine percent of self-identified Christian teenagers are under the impression, it seems, that one can have a relationship with Christ that does not include praying to Him. Other practices are down as well: Sunday school attendance, tithing, evangelizing, even the all-important small-group membership. At least church attendance is holding steady, though Barna’s president David Kinnaman suggests that one impetus for many teens to attend church is their desire to maintain friendships.

When our children do not pray, their souls are imperiled. My Reformed friends may disagree, but I suspect they concur at least on the point that prayer is essential to the Christian walk. If our children leave our churches inspired less and less toward prayer, we need to rethink what our churches are doing.

Changing Faith
In several ways, teenagers are much less inclined toward spirituality than were teens a dozen years ago. The study assessed nine different forms of teenage involvement; six of those religious activities are at their lowest levels since Barna Group began tracking such teen behaviors. These included small group attendance, prayer, Sunday school participation, donations to churches, reading sacred texts other than the Bible, and evangelism by Christian teens (explaining their belief in Jesus Christ with others who have different faith views).

Ashamed of the Gospel?
The most striking change was the fact that teenagers today seem much less inclined to have spiritual conversations about their faith in Christ with non-believers. The survey question specifically asked if the survey respondent had “explained your religious beliefs to someone else who had different beliefs, in the hope that they might accept Jesus Christ as their savior.” Among born again Christian teenagers, the proportion who said they had explained their beliefs to someone else with different faith views in the last year had declined from nearly two-thirds of teenagers in 1997 (63%) to less than half of Christian teens in the December 2009 study (45%).

Among 13- to 17-year-old Protestants, there are actually signs of increased religious activity: they are more likely to pray, go to worship services, read the Bible and attend youth group meetings than were Protestant-affiliated teens a dozen years ago. Given that religious participation is improving among this group, the drop in personal evangelism among born again Protestant teens is even more striking, dropping from 72% in 1997 to 53% in late 2009.