PUBLICATION DATE: OCTOBER 1, 2011

avid Kinnaman is no stranger to information. As the president of the Barna Research Group, he is used to gathering and making sense of vast amounts of data. His previous volume unChristian provided statistical information and analysis about what outsiders think about the Christian faith. Some of what was revealed there was hopeful. Some of it bleak. You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church…and Rethinking Faith picks up where that volume ended. However, rather than polling non-Christians about their perception of Christians and their reasons for rejecting the faith, this title looks at young men and women who have chosen to leave the church of their parent’s generation and strike out on their own.

With these words, Kinnaman opens his volume and the reader is immediately alerted to the problem—and the problem is us. Somewhere along the way, the church has failed young men and women of faith. Those young people are leaving our churches in droves—some to form a church of another kind, others shirking their faith entirely, others still somewhere in-between what they were and who they’re becoming. But why? How has the church wronged these people? For those who might dismiss this mass exodus as simple youthful naiveté, Kinnaman begs to differ. Young people have legitimate gripes. And after laying out the types of people who are leaving—Kinnaman calls them “Nomads,” “Prodigals,” and “Exiles”—the book lays out these “disconnections” in detail.

Overprotective. Shallow. Antiscience. Repressive (sexually and emotionally). Exclusive. Doubtless. These are the major reasons that the church is watching young people walk out the door. Whether these reasons are entirely valid or not is beside the point. The reasons are myriad, well thought-out, and agree-or-disagree, people are still leaving and not coming back. Kinnaman walks through each of these disconnections, explains in detail the thinking behind them, and humbly offers a humble engagement with the issue. He does not outright deny the claims, but rather shows how the church can own its faults, and find ways to speak with those who have grown disillusioned on some level.

In the end, Kinnaman believes that people leave because the church has failed in the arena of discipleship. Every disconnection can be traced back to a lack of discipleship on the part of the church. This isn’t to say that sin and youthful rebellion are not a part of the mix. Young people—actually, just people in general—have the uncanny ability to rationalize almost anything. If one man can compel a nation to systematically exterminate an entire people group in the Holocaust, then it reasonable to think that someone can make illegitimate reasons to exit the church sound legitimate. Be that as it may, part of the discipleship process is more than simple explanation. Explanation and theory seeks closure, when life is so much more open and transitory than that. The discipleship suggested in You Lost Me is about community, love, and explanation. Given that the church is not going to get things right all the time—sometimes it will be overprotective, sometimes it will be shallow, etc.—a discipleship that includes community and love does more than “retain our teens”; it gives young people perspective as their questions arise and makes space for their doubts and misgivings.

I did take issue with one major oversight, though. I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Kinnaman about his book and raised the issue that You Lost Me speaks more of white North American evangelicalism than it does anything else. Where the church does not hold the same place at the center of white culture as it once did, the church is still central in the black and Hispanic communities. They certainly have their own issues, but young black men and women and young Hispanic men and women are not shirking their faith in the same alarming manner as their white counterparts. Kinnaman admitted that this was an oversight, but that his research organization is looking into gathering data on black and Hispanic church realities. For now, pastors in decidedly suburban environs will likely be the ones to most benefit from Kinnaman’s volume.