More youthful converts are leaving our message than we can afford to lose. I have discovered one reason for this, and would like to point out how this exodus can be partly prevented.
Since I left the preaching ministry and entered teaching as an instructor in Bible a few years ago, I have spent two summers soliciting students for our schools. At this time I endeavored to point out to Adventist youth and their parents the well-nigh imperative need of attending one of our colleges, if they hope to with stand Satan's subtle inducements and be ready to meet our soon-coming Saviour.
During these two summers of visiting different conferences and talking with pastors and district men, I have been forced to recognize their varying attitudes toward, interests in, and concerns for, the lasting conversion of the youth in their churches or districts. Some of these pastors, sensing their spiritual responsibility to help young people grow in grace and steadfastness in the message, are alert, and know every young person of academy or college age under their charge. They are acquainted with their educational attainments and varied circumstances, and are ready and pre pared to give a school representative all requisite information and every aid in order to have their own hopes fulfilled of seeing the youth go to one of our schools.
A few, I am sorry to say, hardly know whether they have any young people in their churches. If they are finally able to recollect the existence of some youth, they seem to know nothing about their ages or educational attainments. They rather seem to be surprised that one even poses a query concerning possible prospective students in their districts.
To illustrate their varying interest in education, I shall relate a specific instance that could easily be multiplied. In one small church an evangelistic effort had been conducted a few years ago. Among the converts were two girls from a divided Adventist home. Last summer, when I visited their church, I learned about these two young women through lay members. The district pastor apparently did not know about them, or else he did not think of them as prospective college students.
Shortly after the effort had ended, the evangelist had left the small city, and neither he nor the district pastor who followed him had ever spoken to these young women about going to one of our colleges. Their parents, not possessing an abundance of this world's goods, nor being acquainted with our schools and the ways in which penniless students can finance their education, had naturally not encouraged them to go to college. Thus, they had stayed in the church for a short time and then slipped back into the world, inasmuch as they were the only young people in the church, and had encountered difficulty in securing employment with Sabbath privileges. When I met them they were both working on the Sabbath, even though they were still nominally members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church into which they had been baptized a few years before.
In a church in a neighboring conference I found the very opposite. An evangelistic series had been held here, and several young people had accepted the message, from both Adventist as well as non-Adventist families. Here, however, both the evangelist himself and. the pastor who followed realized the absolute need of sending these young and new Seventh-day Adventists to one of our colleges, that they might be spiritually transplanted and might develop into firm and stanch church members.
Even though the young people had no financial backing, both the evangelist and the pastor recognized that the enduring results of their labors would depend upon sending these young converts to an Adventist school. Thus, they exerted their powers and exhausted all possible resources to see this plan materialize. Their efforts were gratifying and successful, and to one of our colleges these young people went, even though the means were as scarce here as in the other place. Today one young woman from this group is a secretary in one of our local conference offices; another is preparing for the nursing profession; and two of the young men are studying for the ministry. The fruitage of that effort has been preserved, and in time it will multiply.
It is almost essential that a youth from a small church go to one of our schools if his spiritual life is to be preserved. In many churches there are only one or two lone youth. All the other church members are older. As a result these young, recently converted church members have no one with whom to associate. Because all of us are social beings, and because these lonely young people have to find associates, unfortunately they will inevitably be found outside the church.
Their non-Adventist associates may be fine, outstanding young men and women, clean and respectable young people; and yet they will exert a constant pull away from the Seventh- day Adventist Church and beliefs. All of us who have been district pastors over small churches have repeatedly seen this gradual weaning away from our faith, until finally life friendships with non-Adventists have been formed which have resulted in marriage and consequent severance from the church.
In larger churches where there are more young people the danger is not quite so acute, inasmuch as the church young people usually associate together in smaller groups, as well as in larger gatherings and recreational activities. But even in such instances the danger of drifting away from the church is great for youth in their impressionable teens.
Therefore, we should frankly recognize that it is not sufficient that our youth attend academy, and then return home to stay on the farm or in a small community. With the young people completing academy at so early an age as they do today, the most crucial period in their lives, when they make decisions that are freighted with weal or woe, invariably comes after they have finished high school. Just at this time, after academy days, they need to be with other Seventh-day Adventist youth, so that their life friendships can be formed, and their marriages be contracted, within the pale of the church. Thus, after they have finished academy let us direct the eyes of our youth to college and help them all we possibly can to get there.
To this end may we as pastors or district men learn to know the young people in our churches as individuals. May we feel impelled to point out to them and their parents the importance of attending one of our Christian schools, at least for a few years, even if the youth do not intend to devote their lives to a profession, but merely to gain a firmer and more enduring hold of the faith once committed unto the saints. And if they are financially destitute, may we sense our responsibility of showing them and their parents ways in which even students with meager means can make their way through a Seventh- day Adventist college. Thus will we be instrumental in transplanting many of the youth in our churches in Seventh-day Adventist surroundings and influences, and as a result have the joy of seeing them develop into strong and sturdy church members who will "be able to stand against the wiles of the devil," and someday be presented faultless before the Father.
