Program
Doctor of Ministry
Year Approved
2015
First Advisor
Senapatiratne, Tim
Abstract
Every generation of believers face obstacles in figuring out how to pass on the Christian faith to the next generation. The North American urban church is currently experiencing attrition rates that are startling to the researcher. It is critical that urban Christian believers not take for granted faith transmission will pass to their children similar to how they experience it from their parents. This project is designed to ask questions that will engage the urban Christian community in a productive dialogue to reverse the trend of youth who are rejecting faith at alarming rates. From the conversation, the researcher has created a model that will allow urban churches to support families in a way that will stop the drift. The American church has been wrestling with this issue for over two decades and there have many books written about the challenges of youth attrition. This thesis focuses on the urban North American church, which has a more significant challenge. Much research has shown that youth who have a healthy relationship with devout Christian parents are much more successful at sustaining faith than those with strained relationships. Urban churches deal with extreme poverty, single parent households, and many other negative indicators that create less than stable environments for children to have healthy supportive relationships with their parents. These challenges increase the difficulty of urban youth sustaining faith through their teenage years. This project seeks to identify a workable model that will close the crisis of attrition rates urban churches are seeing with their young constituency.
Degree Name
Doctor of Ministry
Document Type
Doctoral thesis
Recommended Citation
Crawford, S. J. (2015). Building Sustainable Faith Experience for Urban Youth [Doctoral thesis, Bethel University]. Spark Repository. https://spark.bethel.edu/etd/142
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