Why Congregations Shouldn’t Work So Hard to Keep Their Young People

This is an article I wrote for the Collegeville Institute about “Jacob,” a Jewish kid who composes music on an old Game Boy and plans to stop being “religious” when he goes to college, and impressed me in a conversation we had last week. Maybe he’ll never come back to synagogue as an adult, but he’s a great human being and his congregation hasn’t failed him. I hope the same for the kids in my own church.