교회를 떠나는 청년들의 이유와 대안 모색을 위한 델파이 연구

Abstract

One of the negative phenomena overall regardless of denominations is that many young people disconnect themselves from churches. However, the more serious problem is that the older generation’s leaders do not understand the actual reasons young adults leave churches and criticize them as ‘abandoning the faith to pursue the pleasure of the secular world.’This study tries to explore the reasons for young adults dropping out from churches and how to invite them back to churches. This study is different from the many past studies on the same topic because it uses the Delphi method of selecting appropriate experts for the study and seeks to uncover the reasons for regular churchgoers among young adults disconnect either permanently or for an extended period of time from churches. The research uncovered the following two significant themes. First, it is the restoration of the essence of faith that young adult ministry experts think why young adults disconnect themselves from churches and how to embrace them back to churches. Second, the variety of reasons suggested by the experts were unexpectedly different from the actual reasons for young adults disconnecting from churches. Some actual reasons were surprisingly ignored by the experts. For example, young adults cited being “unsatisfied or disappointment with the pastors,”while young adult ministry experts did not consider “issues concerning pastors”to be important. This inaccuracy is quite surprising. For such reason, the researchers make the following three suggestions: 1) for the young adults to restore the essence of their faith; 2) for the pastors to do thorough self-reflection and learn to understand more about the younger generations; and 3) for the researchers to conduct further study to discover why there are significant differences between the reasons of young adult disconnection from church compared to the past studies.