High School Graduation

I was thinking this morning about how Hoover is graduating their seniors tonight. If statistics are correct, only about 20% of people will continue going to church after graduating high school and going off to college, though some studies have given a number as low as 3%, hopefully more because a lot of students will be going to DMACC and still living with their parents. The point is, in a school as diverse as Hoover, the Christian population is pretty small anyway, at best it's three or four hundred. When you look at the number of people who are going away for college though, and I mean out of their parents house, typically out of Des Moines, and out of the county, it's probably significantly lower. You also have to factor in the people who are not going on to college, the ones who will either find a place with some friends or continue to live with their parents. Once you get into those numbers, there are maybe 200 hundred people who have families that would want them to go to church, and if you look at it statistically, if between 3 and 20 percent of those students continue going to church, you are looking at around 6-40 students who continue a relationship with the Lord, so looking somewhere in the middle ther, you'll get around 20. I would say that that's probably a high estimate for the people that will continue to follow the Lord even beyond college. Some of them will walk away and come back around eventually. Some will call themselves Christians now and call themselves agnostics when they get into college, and some will fortunately come to know the Lord once they are in an environment other than the one where they grew up. It will be their choice to follow the Lord, not the choice of their parents. It's a scary thought to think that that many people will walk away though. I'm not saying that they won't ever go back to church, but the chances that they'll go sometime before they start a family is pretty low, and when they do go back, they will most likely be one of the families in their church that doesn't get involved. They might go to a church where they will make friends, but everyone is more interested in socializing with each other after the message than actually listening to what the message has to say about their lives. This world has come to a place where I can look ahead to going to see my friends graduate tonight and only feel sad that so many people are going to walk away from God because they will no longer be under their parents' roofs.