A young person’s beliefs are not shaped by a single conversation. They are shaped by what they do, over and over, with the people around them and the devices in their hands. That is formation. Information arrives in words; formation arrives in habits.

Churches have usually counted the information. The sermons preached, the lessons taught, the verses memorized. That counting matters, and it also misses most of what is happening. What a young person watches on the way to school, who they vent to after a bad class, what they do with 20 free minutes before bed, whether their household treats Sunday as a rhythm or an inconvenience: those are formational. They outnumber the sermons by a wide margin.

A sobering number sits at the back of the mind of almost every parent. According to Lifeway Research’s 2019 study of 2,002 adults ages 23 to 30 who were active in church as teens, 66 percent dropped out of church for at least a year between the ages of 18 and 22. The leading reasons were leaving for college (34 percent), seeing church members as judgmental or hypocritical (32 percent), and no longer feeling connected (29 percent). None of those reasons is primarily about information. They are about formation and belonging.