MANY young Christian adults feel they need a mentor to help them in their lives, a new report says.

The report Building Tomorrow’s Church Today, for the Evangelical Alliance (EA), surveyed attitudes among 1700 regular churchgoers aged between 18 and 37. It found that a third of them lacked a Christian mentor or a group of friends with whom they could be honest and accountable about their life and faith.

A third also said that their church did not really help them to live out their faith at work.

The general director of EA, Steve Clifford, said that it was “concerning” that such young people lacked suitable mentors. He described mentors as “the most effective tool we have in undoing past mistakes the Church has made, and transferring wisdom gained over a lifetime. Within each Christian leader is the potential for limitless reproduction.”

The EA’s report also showed that only 49 per cent of young Christian adults found their churches did not provide the teaching that most benefited them. Sources such as podcasts, online blogs, and social media helped them form a closer relationship with God, they said.

Almost three-quarters saw faith as the most important factor in the decisions they made. A quarter said that older people in their church struggled to relate to them; and a fifth were thinking about leaving.

The research revealed significant differences between white British adults and those with black and ethnic-minority backgrounds. The British were consistently much less conservative in their views.

The differences were found in such issues as the authority of the Bible, evolution, homosexuality, cohabiting, and marrying non-Christians.

About 81 per cent of the minority groups believed that cohabitation was wrong, compared with 63 per cent of white British Christians. Also, 73 per cent of the minority groups believed that the Bible was without error, compared with 52 per cent of white British respondents.