Already Gone: Why your kids will quit church and what you can do to stop it

I perfectly fit Ken Ham's description of a kid who was already gone. I dutifully went to a "Bible-believing" church, Sunday School, and youth group. I was even a student leader in my youth group and taught children's Sunday School during my teens. Nevertheless, I am now in my late twenties, have left the church, and have no intention of ever returning. I bought this book figuring that I would disagree with all of the authors' prescriptions but curious about his overall diagnosis of people like me. I wasn't disappointed.As with a lot of Christian apologists I have read, the authors' work was glaringly shoddy from an academic perspective. Ham's biography at the end of the book doesn't include where he earned his degree(s). The majority of the "Resources" (as opposed to a decent bibliography) at the end of the book were written by just two authors (Jason Lisle and Ken Ham). Virtually all of the listed resources were put out by a single publisher (Master Books) or were available on Ham's website (answersingenesis.org). In other words, there isn't a broad academic discussion about these issues. It's merely Ham on a soapbox.I found the survey data interesting, but even more so, I was bemused by the authors' interpretation of it. In particular, I found their blind-spots to be insightful. For example, they talk about "the Sunday School Syndrome", that is, kids who attend Sunday School are actually MORE likely to stop believing the Bible than those who don't attend Sunday School. Ham thinks this is because Sunday Schools are not teaching kids that the Bible is the Word of God, that it is literally true, and that it can be defended. However, his own data shows that, of the young adults surveyed, 94% said their Sunday School classes taught that the Bible was true, 86% were taught that the book of Genesis was not a myth, 83% were taught that the earth was created in six 24-hour days, and 57% said that their Sunday school classes taught that the Bible could be defended. Perhaps the reason that kids who go to Sunday School are more likely to stop believing the Bible is because they are more familiar with the Bible's claims. In other words, the Bible becomes less plausible the more you read it. The authors' didn't seem to think of this alternate explanation.My favorite example, though, is on page 139. Beemer, the researcher who oversaw the survey, is befuddled by two statistics. When asked, "Do you believe that God used evolution to change one kind of animal to another?", 24% said yes. When asked, "Do you believe that humans evolved from apelike ancestors?", 30% said yes. He says that he had expected the results of those two questions to be the same, and he can't think of any reason for the discrepancy except that sometimes people aren't logical. The much more reasonable answer is that the 6% difference is the group of atheists. Both young-earth creationists and atheists will disagree with the statement that GOD used evolution to change one kind of animal to another. To write a question in such a way that two people with diametrically opposing views will both disagree with it but for totally different reasons is just plain sloppy.In short, I got $4 worth of amusement out of the book, and I set it down feeling pretty good. Young people are leaving the church in droves, and there's precious little that church leaders can do about it. Ultimately, conservative Christians are telling their kids to believe things that don't have a shred of evidence in their support, so digging their heels in and insisting more loudly and more shrilly will only speed their demise.

This is the best book that I have seen explaining the difficulty facing the Church today. We are losing our young people, and our success in the eyes of God depends upon retaining them.The Old Testament concludes with the following words:Malachi 4:4 "Remember the law of my servant Moses, the decrees and laws I gave him at Horeb for all Israel. 5 "See, I will send you the prophet Elijah before that great and dreadful day of the LORD comes. 6 He will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers; or else I will come and strike the land with a curse."The church today needs to do the work of Elijah: turning the hearts of the fathers to the children and the hearts of the children to the fathers. This not about declaring some man, church or ministry to be "Elijah"--it is about doing that work. Jesus said that John the Baptist did the work of Elijah at that time (Matt 11:14), but when people asked John if he was Elijah, he said, "No" (John 1:21). John was not intrested in declaring a title for himself, he simply did the work that God have him to do. We need to really turn the hearts of children to fathers and vice versa, not to make claims for ourselves.1Tim 1:3-4 shows that a good church overseer must manage his how family well. Should not a good church manage its family well--retain its young people? Many of our churches are not doing that. Adults are much more intersted in taking care of themselves than they are their young people.Matthew 19:18 "Which ones?" [commandments] the man inquired. Jesus replied, " 'Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony, 19honor your father and mother,'[a] and 'love your neighbor as yourself.'[b]" 20"All these I have kept," the young man said. "What do I still lack?" 21Jesus answered, "If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me." 22When the young man heard this, he went away sad, because he had great wealth. 23Then Jesus said to his disciples, "I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. 24Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." 25When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, "Who then can be saved?"Many people in the church are living "good" lives, keeping these commandments of Jesus. But we are too intrested in our houses, cars, vacations and other luxuries. We are not willing to give up what he have to keep our children in Christian enviornments. Our jobs are more important than moving to a place where our children will have Christian friends or spend the money to place them in Christian schools or Christian communities. It is more important to us to send them to an evolution-teaching hich school or college where we think they can get the best education and best job, but where most will make secular friends and be absorbed into that culture.The young people see our hypocrisy and would tell us about it if we ask, but we do not. Is God going to smite the earth with a curse if we do not bring our Christian generations together?Read this book, and learn what Ken Ham has discovered that we all need to know!

good product. Arrived within allotted time.

As an educator, I was able to relate to Ken Ham's call to bring the "facts" back into "faith". Educators are taught to start with the concrete and move from there to the abstract. The thinking behind this is that students are able to grasp abstracts such as faith, or hope, if we begin with concrete things they can actually see, touch or taste etc. This book made me realise that this is what God has done in the bible: he has begun with a concrete creation and built from that to more abstract things. "Already Gone" argues that by bringing the facts about God's created world back into our Sunday school classes, we help students to reconnect faith with the "real world". Facts and faith should never have been separated. A lot of research went into this book. The title reflects the statistics of young people who have fallen foul of the facts/faith disconnect. Dare we make changes to the way we teach faith? What changes can we make? Read "Already Gone" - it gives you some thought provoking suggestions.

This well-researched book addresses the all too common problem of church children drifting away from church in their teenage years and rightly concludes that the damage begins much, much earlier than that, in middle or even primary school. How easy it is for a churchgoing child today to believe that church is for 'spiritual things & stories', whereas secular school is where we learn the real facts. This is a wake up call for churches, and for individual christians, especially parents and grandparents, to sow fact based christianity into the lives of young people and at the same time encouraging them to question some of the evolutionary 'facts' they are being taught in school.

This book explains why, seemingly regardless of what we teach our children they are not going to come to church as adults "they are alredy gone". Ken Ham is absolutely right in that as soon as they go to senior school they will be taught about Darwinism as if it were proven fact, and they will believe it and not see the relevance of the bible in their lives. He goes on to explain that in Sunday school/church they are only taught that the bible is "stories" and so moralistic stories are what children see them as, not real provable history. Having nice trendy music and activities in church is only like a sticking plaster for now; in the long term it will make no diffference; the church will still fail. Whilst Ken Ham and I will not see eye to eye over the first eleven chapters of Genesis, he is absolutely right about all the rest. This is a well reseached book worthy of being read by everyone teaching our children.

absolutely fantastic book which gets straight to the heart of why children are no longer in church and why churches are emptyingthis isn't easy reading, but does, clearly, demonstrate the problems the church has facednothing in this book surprised us, but it is good having some solid data to back up what we have been saying for so very long, always on deaf earsbuy it, read it - we have to understand, in the simplest terms, what has happened in church and where we have been failing and this book does just that