Growing up in church can be… complicated. For some people, church provides a safe community where they can grow, socialize, and find a personal relationship with God that lasts throughout the rest of their lives. For others, growing up in church can be incredibly traumatic experience that they spend years trying to recover from. There are about as many individual experiences in church as there are people, but over the past decades the church’s struggle to keep young people engaged has grown from a concerning topic of conversation to a full blown crisis.

To put it more plainly, young people today are having a far harder time connecting with organized religion than the generations before them.

A lot of time and money has been invested in studying this separation. And people who study it have recommended all sorts of solutions - from changing the style of the worship music to pushing more Bible studies and church services. One article published in 2022 suggested that there is a direct link between how often families have worship at home together and how likely their children will be to stay involved in church. I remember reading that article and thinking, “This doesn’t reflect my experience at all.” For most of the people I grew up with, their reasons for disconnecting had a lot more to do with what they found in church, Christian schools, and their home lives than anything else. Their unanswered questions and disappointments in Christian culture remain topics of conversation even when we talk to each other today.

Is the answer more family worships, more chapel services, and more prayer meetings? Or is It something else?

For this episode, I decided to ask one of my high school classmates about her experience. Krystal Nolasco grew up heavily involved in church. She was the kid you’d see doing special music and staying late with her family on Saturday afternoons for more worship services. She joined Christian clubs and memorized Bible verses in Sabbath school class, and attended the same Seventh-day Adventist high school I did.

Although our paths have taken some different directions, Krystal remains a close friend in my life today and someone I greatly respect - and I think a lot of her story can challenge the conversations we have around young people, church, and the walls we’ve built between them.