I’ve written before about the astounding number of college students who are abandoning their faith in Christ. It’s vital that parents and church leaders understand some of the major reasons behind this trend and know what they can do now to help their children prepare for the challenges ahead.

This post from Nancy Pearcey on the Desiring God blog provides a great way for Christian young people (and all of us) to answer other worldviews they’ll encounter on college campuses and beyond:

One Strategy to Rule Them All: How to Answer Skeptics from Romans 1

In high school, Dylan was a natural leader, voted Most Valuable Player on his football team. Everyone expected him to succeed. But when he went to college, Dylan’s Christian convictions were assailed by doubts in virtually every class.

In his science classes, Darwinian naturalism was an unquestioned assumption. In English class, a postmodern attitude treated all truth claims as disguised power plays. In psychology, the prevailing theories — from Freud’s psychoanalysis to Skinner’s behaviorism — treated Christianity as a symptom of mental pathology.

Dylan’s church had taught the basic gospel message, but it had not equipped him to meet the challenges of the university classroom. Deeply shaken, he dropped out of college and began to rethink whether Christianity was even true. Dylan eventually found his way to L’Abri, the ministry of Francis Schaeffer in Switzerland. There he finally met Christians who could teach him to “destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God” (2 Corinthians 10:5).

How can the church be more effective in equipping young people to keep the faith when they leave home?

Read the rest.

photo by Ryan Tauss via Unsplash