have chosen to write my paper with Alexis Williams. We
chose to write about option #2 which is researching why young people leave the
church. We are going to do lots of research for reasons why this happens. I don’t
know if this is even an option but we could interview some teenagers and young
adults and see if they give any good insight from their perspective. Someone
asked on the google doc if we are able to use conference talks, I think that
would be a wonderful resource as to why people end up leaving. Our research
question is why do young people leave the church? People leave the church for many reasons but
for some it may be because they are either offended or feel restricted by
rules. They don’t want to be forced or pressured into behaving a certain way.
Alexis and I plan to familiarize ourselves with the information quickly by
reading talks and addresses to the church. Luckily because we are LDS and we
are also young adult, we will be able to relate to the experience and we have see
this first hand in our lives. That will help a lot in formulating this paper.
We are already connected and familiar with the topic and subject matter. I just
hope we can find enough research to support our reasoning. Because this is such
a common issue and each individual is a different situation, there isn't one
particular reason why they leave. It is hard to pin point the why’s
because there are so many.
There are a lot of varying reasons why people leave. It's important to note the difference between those who leave because of personal conflicts with doctrines of the church, those who leave because of how the church is structured and administrated, and those who leave because of interpersonal conflicts with individual members. Those are the three major categories that occur to me. I know when I was the mission secretary in Germany and on the phone with Salt Lake's missionary department fairly often I was shocked and somewhat disgusted by how much internal politics and bickering actually goes on at church headquarters when things get tense like they did with the boundary changes to the missions in Germany that I had to deal with during my time as secretary in 2010.
ReplyDelete