You Lost Me Quotes

“The second arena is vocation, that powerful, often ignored intersection of faith and calling. Millions of Christ-following teens and young adults are interested in serving in mainstream professions, such as science, law, media, technology, education, law enforcement, military, the arts, business, marketing and advertising, health care, accounting, psychology, and dozens of others. Yet most receive little guidance from their church communities for how to connect these vocational dreams deeply with their faith in Christ. This is especially true for the majority of students who are drawn to careers in the fields of science, including health care, engineering, education, research, computer programming, and so on. These young Christians learn very little in their faith communities about how to live honestly and faithfully in a world dominated by science—much less how to excel in their chosen scientific vocation. Can the Christian community summon the courage to prepare a new generation of professionals to be excellent in their calling and craft, yet humble and faithful where God has asked them to serve?”
― David Kinnaman, You Lost Me

“reactionary thinking plagues much of evangelicalism—whether to conservatism or to liberalism, whether to perceived moral laxity or to perceived legalism, whether by resisting all cultural change or by accommodating it at all cost. “We won’t do it like them!” is no solution. We need a rich understanding of church history to inform our criticisms, a humble respect for the Holy Spirit’s work in the lives and times of our spiritual parents to overshadow confidence in ourselves, and a courageous commitment to biblical authority to frame any efforts at reform.”
― David Kinnaman, You Lost Me

“many young Christians admire the words and works of Jesus (information) but do not know him as Lord and God (wisdom). They read and respect the Bible (information) but they do not perceive that its words lay claim to their obedience (wisdom).”
― David Kinnaman, You Lost Me

“The next generation is caught between two possible destinies—one moored by the power and depth of the Jesus-centered gospel and one anchored to a cheap, Americanized version of the historic faith that will snap at the slightest puff of wind. Without a clear path to pursue the true gospel, millions of young Christians will look back on their twentysomething years as a series of lost opportunities for Christ.”
― David Kinnaman, You Lost Me

“Overall, knowledge of Scripture, doctrine, and church history is poor among most Christians, not just young adult believers.”
― David Kinnaman, You Lost Me

“Disciples are handmade, one relationship at a time.”
― David Kinnaman, You Lost Me

“We are at a critical point in the life of the North American church; the Christian community must rethink our efforts to make disciples. Many of the assumptions on which we have built our work with young people are rooted in modern, mechanistic, and mass production paradigms. Some (though not all) ministries have taken cues from the assembly line, doing everything possible to streamline the manufacture of shiny new Jesus-followers, fresh from the factory floor. But disciples cannot be mass-produced.[3] Disciples are handmade, one relationship at a time.”
― David Kinnaman, You Lost Me

“We need to recognize the generational shifts from left-brain skills like logic, analysis, and structure to the right-brain aptitudes of creativity, synthesis, and empathy. We need to renew our catechisms and confirmations—not because we need new theology, but because their current forms too rarely produce young people of deep, abiding faith.”
― David Kinnaman, You Lost Me

“The Creator was not content to exclude those who had rejected him, but neither was he prepared to tolerate our hatefulness and sin. So what did he do? He became one of us, one of the “other,” identifying with us to embrace us in solidarity, empathy, and selfless agape love—all the way to the cross.[63] What would it look like for the Christian community to do the same? How would the church be different if we were to reject exclusion as unacceptable and tolerance as not good enough? What would we do differently when discipling young adults to help them cultivate Christlike empathy that identifies with the least, the last, and the lost?”
― David Kinnaman, You Lost Me

“Let’s look first at relational experiences. Most young Protestants and Catholics do not recall having a meaningful friendship with an adult through their church, and more than four out of five never had an adult mentor. This is true of enough young Christians that we must ask ourselves whether our churches and parishes are providing the rich environments that a relationally oriented generation needs to develop deep faith. I believe we need a new mind to measure the vibrancy and health of the intergenerational relationships in our faith communities.”
― David Kinnaman, You Lost Me

“The dropout problem touches countless students, parents, and faith leaders, but many of these have only a vague grasp of what, exactly, the dropout phenomenon is. The first step in the discovery process is to understand two simple facts: Teenagers are some of the most religiously active Americans. American twentysomethings are the least religiously active.”
― David Kinnaman, You Lost Me

“The Bible’s influence on this next generation is up in the air.”
― David Kinnaman, You Lost Me

“My aim is to provoke new thinking and new action in the critical process of the spiritual development of the next generation.”
― David Kinnaman, You Lost Me

“To follow Jesus, young adults in the next generation—just like the generations before them—will have to learn humility. From whom will they learn it? When they look at us, do they see humble servants and eager students of the Master?”
― David Kinnaman, You Lost Me

“In a misguided abdication of our prophetic calling, many churches have allowed themselves to become internally segregated by age. Most began with the valuable goal that their teaching be age appropriate but went on to create a systematized method of discipleship akin to the instructional model of public schools, which requires each age-group be its own learning cohort. Thus many churches and parishes segregate by age-group and, in doing so, unintentionally contribute to the rising tide of alienation that defines our times. As a by-product of this approach, the next generation’s enthusiasm and vitality have been separated from the wisdom and experience of their elders.”
― David Kinnaman, You Lost Me

“wisdom entails the spiritual, mental, and emotional ability to relate rightly to God, to others, and to our culture. Proverb 9:10 says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Wisdom is rooted in knowing and revering the God who has revealed himself in Christ through the Scriptures.”
― David Kinnaman, You Lost Me

“Adults identify as Christians typically because they had formative experiences as a child or as a teenager that connected them to Christianity. But that connection is often shallow and on the surface, having more to do with cultural identification than it does with deep faith. And our research shows that Mosaics do not share the cultural identification of previous generations.”
― David Kinnaman, You Lost Me