God On The Shelf...

Question: "Do you think most people wonder away from thier faith in their 20's?"
- The Hipster
Another One From Relevant Magazine.com

Matt loved Jesus, you were supposed to believe. And you would have. The very moment you first see Matt, all round, wide eyes that are set deep just above an adorable smile, Matt convinces. But he was full of it. “I thought that by satisfying my flesh, I could escape from my head.” He devoured a steady diet of girls and booze. In an odd inconsistency, Matt hid his secret life, though he hoped it would free him. “I know that I believed in the Lord and loved Him, but ... I guess the easiest thing to say is that I didn’t understand grace.” In sin he tried to banish the God he couldn’t connect with, and separate from the unsustaining spirituality he had known as a child.

Here, insert the standard sinful sequence: bad choices, problems with alcohol, smatterings of drugs for fun and drugs for downtimes, when no sense of peace could be found. Then came Rick Warren. Yeah, that Rick Warren.

Matt took himself to Saddleback Church. “Do I remember what they were talking about at the time? Nope.”His spiritual development had entered a progressive phase. He says he doesn’t remember what was preached when he returned to church, but Matt remembers knowing he needed to return again. The next week he gave himself to God, claiming a spirituality born of his own intention. Of the conversion, or reconversion, you could call it, I ask Matt if he feels he was a Christian prior to the night he drove home, knowing God changed him forever. When he answers, Matt says perhaps he was. And then he adds, in simple truth, “But I may not have chosen Him until [that] time.”

It was theologian Paul Tillich who asked whether or not Christians could identify the values that had centering power in their lives. Can you? On that day, Matt did.

The Barna Group, the go-to Christian research organization, confirmed in a 2006 study what most of us already know—a lot of Christians experience spiritual drift during their 20s. We put God on the shelf. “The levels of disengagement among twentysomethings suggest that youth ministry fails,” vice president David Kinnaman says.

Bible-study Wednesday gets replaced by poker or Pilates. WOW 2002 gets replaced
by Arcade Fire.

But here’s the catch: Barna statistics suggest religious habits get the boot, not religion itself. Many of us are finding that we want God. The debate is whether or not it’s normal, and a necessary part of psychological development, to shelve God and go do something else in order to know, when we get back to God, that we want that relationship for life.

It's All In Our Head
A pioneer of human development, psychologist Erik Erikson assigned a number to the act of putting God on the shelf. It’s No. 5 in the stages we have to go through in order to mature. You and I know stage five by its other name, though: adolescence. The central conflict during adolescence is identity. We’re confused.

Pastor Phil Wyman directs The Gathering, a Salem, Mass., church operating in the heart of a town made famous for witchcraft. He compliments the Neo-pagan community in Salem for the focus they place on every person as a creative individual. “I know many Christians who have not left the faith, but left their former church experience in search of something deeper,” he says. “They were in search of deeper relationships, deeper service to the community and the world, or a deeper sense of wonder.”

Read more by going here: http://www.relevantmagazine.com/god_article.php?id=7552