Written by Sarah J Kyle
Harding University will host its 86th annual lectureship series Monday, September 27 through Wednesday, September 30.Among the multiple speakers for the series will be Dr. Flavil Yeakley, who was recently commissioned by the Christian Higher Education Foundation to conduct a survey regarding the retention rate of members of Churches of Christ nationwide.
The Christian Higher Education Foundation is an annual meeting of the presidents of Christian colleges and universities that serve the same focus group as Churches of Christ across the United States.
Yeakley said the group had discussed for a length of time the need for a current and reliable set of figures on various topics regarding Churches of Christ.
“Dr. Burks asked me to put together a research proposal to accomplish that purpose,” Yeakley said. “He took it to the presidents, they approved it and I’ve been working on the thing ever since.”
Yeakley and his team selected Churches of Christ throughout the nation in regard to church size, location and racial and ethnic makeup. They then asked leaders of each church to make a list of all the young adults who had graduated from high school while attending the congregations between 1997 and 2006.
“We used this indirect method because previous research has shown that if Yeakley sends out a questionnaire or if Harding sends out a questionnaire to people who have left Churches of Christ, they’re not very likely to respond,” Yeakley said.
One facet of the survey included how many of the teenagers in the cluster sample attended college, and whether or not it was a Christian university. Yeakley said the results were positively surprising.
“We had been hearing for years that only 15 percent of the college bound young people in Churches of Christ go to a school like Harding,” Yeakley said. “Among the 5,000 young people in the cluster sample churches, 31.4 percent attended a Christian college or university, and among those who have already graduated, 85 percent are still members of the church.”
The team then furthered their research by conducting a survey including more than 3,000 students of 11 different colleges.
Yeakley said the survey team discovered that 85 percent of the alumni of Christian colleges and universities were members of the Church of Christ. Among those who attend public, state-supported schools 85 percent drop out as soon as they leave home.
“Some of them come back to church after they graduate, get married, start having kids; but they come back with much less leadership training than ones who went to Christian colleges,” Yeakley said. “Half of them never come back.”
After receiving the information produced by the survey, Yeakley said the presidents of the Christian Higher Education Foundation wanted to know more about those who decided to leave the Church of Christ.
Yeakley agreed and created a Web site called churchesofchristsurvey.com that contained just one survey: an open essay-format survey entitled “Why I Left Churches of Christ.” He spread the word about the survey through the presidents and leaders of the 100 cluster sample churches.
“The idea was that you contact someone you know used to be a member of Churches of Christ and now they’re no longer members, and ask them if they’d be willing to go on that Web page and answer just three anonymous questions,” Yeakley said. “It’s an open-ended essay. Why did you leave? What advice do you have for Churches of Christ so we’ll do better job of ministering to people who haven’t left? Where did you go?”
Yeakley said he conducted content analysis on the survey throughout the summer, searching for themes of those who chose to part ways with the Church of Christ.
“Reading some of those responses breaks your heart,” Yeakley said. “If I had been in their kind of congregation or got treated the way they said they were treated, I would have left too.”Yeakley also noted that it was in the far extremes of ultra-liberal and ultra-conservative church backgrounds that many dropouts were found.He plans to focus on this portion of the survey in his lectureship class entitled “Church Growth. Why Some Are Leaving: Most Are Not Leaving.”
Yeakley said he wishes to tell where those who leave the Church of Christ choose to go, and noted that out of 286 valid responses, 59 chose to attend independent community churches, 59 chose to attend Christian churches, and the rest were scattered.
“I’m going to be dealing with why they left,” Yeakley said. “One of the first ones is ‘Churches of Christ are so judgmental. They think they’re the only ones going to heaven.’ My response is that there are some churches like that, but that doesn’t represent all of us. I’m taking the position that we don’t judge other people to be saved; we don’t judge other people to be lost. God didn’t give us that roll.”
Yeakley added that another source of dropouts was a lack of discussion regarding grace and its part in salvation.
“Some of them are saying they left because there was no emphasis on grace, or maybe even a denial of grace,” Yeakley said. “And we do have some churches where if you mention the word grace two Sundays in a row, they think you’re some kind of liberal.”
Yeakley will present his class Tuesday at 9 a.m., 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. in McInteer 125.
