I think I've found the reason for the increase in school shootings, but not everyone will like what I've written

Staggering Numbers Of Millennials Are Leaving Church

and It's All Our Own Fault

by Web pastor Paul J. Bern

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For decades, the United States has been thought of as a Christian nation around the globe. But today that is dramatically changing – especially among America's young people. The truth is that all of the recent polls tell us that Americans under 30 years of age are rejecting the Christian faith in unprecedented numbers. In fact, what the numbers reveal is not a slow move away from the Christian faith. Rather, they clearly portray a massive wave of young Americans running away from traditional Christianity as fast as they can. Not only that, but the vast majority of young adults in America today do not go to church, do not pray and do not read the Bible. Just consider a few of the results from a fairly recent (2015) and deeply troubling survey of 18 to 29 year old Americans:

• 65% rarely or never pray with others, and 38% almost never pray by themselves either.
  
• 65% rarely or never attend worship services of any kind.
  
• 67% don't read the Bible or any other religious texts on a regular basis.
  

That is a solid two-thirds of American young adults who don't even have the slightest connection to traditional Christianity. If the current trends continue, the Millennial generation will see churches closing as quickly as Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Daewoo, Plymouth and Saturn dealerships from just a few years ago. The survey did find that 65% of those surveyed did call themselves "Christian", but among that 65%, the majority are what I call CINO's (Christians in name only). Most are just indifferent. The more precisely you try to measure their Christianity, the fewer you find committed to the faith.

But it just isn't this latest survey that is showing a mass exodus from the Christian faith by America's young people. According to a more recent (2016) survey by America's Research Group, 95 percent of 20 to 29 year old evangelical Christians attended church regularly during their elementary school and middle school years. However, only 55 percent of those young evangelical Christians still attended church regularly during high school, and only 11 percent of them were still regularly attending church when they went to college. That's it, just a paltry 11 percent! And that was among self-identified evangelical Christians.

But the most recent survey from this same nonprofit was perhaps even more troubling. According to that survey, 15% of Americans now say they have "no religion" – which is up from 8% in 1990. However, what was much more disturbing was that 46% of Americans between the ages of 18 to 34 indicated that they had no religion in the survey. Is it any wonder that atheism is on the rise? Forty-six percent is not just a trend. That is not just a landslide, either. I would define that as a stampede. Today there most certainly is a mass exodus of America's young people from the traditional Christian faith. There is simply no getting around it. Another recent poll by America's Research Group showed that less than 1 percent of all Americans between the ages of 18 and 23 hold a Biblical world view. And what is a Biblical world view? This has been defined as someone holding on to the following six key beliefs:

1) Believing that absolute moral truth exists.
2) Believing that the Bible is completely accurate in all of the principles it teaches.

3) Believing that Satan is considered to be a real being or force, not merely symbolic.

4) Believing that a person cannot earn their way into Heaven by trying to be good or by doing good works.

5) Believing that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life on earth.

6) Believing that God is the all-knowing, all-powerful creator of the world who still rules the universe today.

Using those six criteria, less than 1 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 23 hold a Biblical world view. That's no more than 3 million out of 330,000,000! The implications of this are staggering. The truth is that the United States is quickly becoming a highly secularized nation. Europe has already been down this road, and now America is rapidly following. Hundreds (perhaps thousands) of churches will close in the next 10 years as more and more people simply quit going. Large numbers of Christian ministries, radio stations, television shows and book stores will have to shut their doors because there will not be nearly enough people to support them. But the most frightening thing of all is that we are losing almost an entire generation to the world. Never before in U.S history has an entire generation rejected the Gospel as much as this one has. America's young people are rejecting the Christian faith, and yet the mainstream Christian establishment keeps running around and telling everyone that everything is fine. Fine??

No, everything is not fine. Not even close -- in point of fact, nowhere near! The Church in America is broken – completely! It is very rare to find a church where authentic Christianity is being practiced anymore. Our young people are not stupid. They know what is real and what is not. When they hear pastors tell them they must give 10% of what they earn each and every week, that's not what the Gospel says and they know it. When they hear TV evangelists trying to convince them that God wants us all to be rich, when our youth hear them condemning gay people when it's not their business to judge, when they see 'conservative Christians' protesting abortion in the streets as they send your sons and daughters off to fight wars that benefit only a handful of people, millennial's can see the hand-writing on the wall. If the Church in America – yes, I said the Church – would repent and turn back to real, authentic Christianity, at least we would have a chance of capturing the attention of those young Americans who are honestly looking for the truth. But instead, people of all ages – not just the young – are hungry and thirsty for some real truth. They're fed up to here with all the spiritual bull-crap being dished out by for-profit churches and all the con artists on TV who have the nerve to call themselves “apostle” or “bishop”, and they're looking for some authenticity. You know, like the kind Jesus had?

What did Jesus say about all this? “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled (Matthew chapter five, verse 6).” Translated into 21^st century English, this simply means come to Jesus Christ in and of himself, and simply leave the churches behind. You will no doubt recall that Jesus put his money where his mouth was in this regard when he threw the money changers out of the temple. He wasn't nice about it either. He didn't have to be. In the here and now of the modern church – or Church Incorporated as I like to call it – anybody can see that the descendants of the money changers have once again set up shop in houses of worship. As a result, you had best be really sure that He is returning very soon for yet another house cleaning. Christ will be far more angry the second time around as he was the first. So much more....

On the surface, it would be easy to say that every bit of the fault for this lies with modern church leadership. But that is not entirely the fault of the Church, although the leadership does bear a good bit of the responsibility. The truth is that we – the parents of the millenials I'm writing about – have created a society where our children are taught that Jesus and Christianity are not important any more. Our public schools teach our children day after day after day that they evolved from monkeys, that abortion, indiscriminate sex before marriage and homosexuality are perfectly normal for everyone, and that anyone who disagrees is either a bigot or an idiot. Then these same accusers go home and surround themselves with endless entertainment for the rest of the day (television, video games, Internet, movies, and often pornography), effectively isolating themselves from their families and each other. The overwhelming message regarding the Christian faith in the above forms of entertainment is that either Christianity is irrelevant, not true or should be openly mocked. Only thing is, they have forgotten that you can't mock God or Jesus. You cannot mock God any more than a Chevy can mock General Motors.

So should we be surprised that the overwhelming majority of our children and grandchildren have rejected the Christian faith? Should we expect anything else? What else were we expecting, John the Baptist? We have raised our children in the godless society that we have constructed and now we are so surprised that they are godless. People everywhere are pulling their hair out trying to figure out why all these school shootings have sprung up seemingly out of nowhere over the last 15 years or so. But nobody should be surprised. We are just reaping what we have sown, and we now have an unexpected bumper crop of wanton violence. I'd say we have our work cut out for us for the foreseeable future, so we'd better get started. Because if we don't start repairing the damage we have caused by letting electronic devices do our parenting for us, we are going to lose an entire generation. And that, ladies and gentlemen, would be totally unacceptable.