Interested Culture/Uninteresting Churches

One of today’s Christian Post headlines reads “American Christianity Remains Strong in 2007.” The tagline is derived from a recent Gallup Poll reporting that the vast majority of Americans identify with a Christian faith. The breakdown looks like this on a national scale: 82% of Americans identify with a Christian faith. Yet only 62% of Americans say they are members of a church. And only 44% of Americans can be described as frequent churchgoers.

Applying these percentages to the current US population as reported by the Census Bureau, we get the following numbers:

249 million people in the US think they are Christians (or at least identify with Christianity).

188 million people are somewhere on a church’s membership roll.

134 million people actually attend church.

These figures mean that 115 million people in the United States identify with the Christian faith but have no way to grow spiritually in a body of believers. And 61 million of them are easily identified (they belong to a church). Clearly, not all of these people are orthodox Christians. And I’ve seen lower figures reported on the number of Americans who actually attend church. But the sad fact remains: our churches are not connecting with the vast amount of people who are at least somewhat receptive.

Once again, the polls show that many people in the United States connect with Christianity. The receptivity is out there. The opportunity for a great revival lies dormant beneath the surface of our culture. But perhaps a better spin on the story would read “Interest in Christianity Remains Strong in 2007 – Churches Do Little to Capitalize on this Interest.” Perhaps 2008 will bring a new breed of churches willing to become interesting to the people who are interested in what they are supposed to represent.

The Church Attendance Tug of War

The folks over at the Pew Research Center got my attention today. They reported that people who attend religious services weekly tend to be happier than those who do not attend or attend less often. This correlational pattern crosses denominational lines.

The finding seems to make sense. I hope that what people discover in their churches would push them to the only true joy and contentment found this side of eternity – a relationship with Jesus Christ.

The problem is that many spiritual teens and young adults who are searching for this true joy are not finding it in our churches. As addressed in one of my previous blogs, 70% of those that drop out of the church do so between the ages of 18 and 22. These students aren’t lacking in spirituality. In fact, the older they get, the more interested in all things spiritual they become. A recent UCLA study found that college juniors are more likely to be engaged in a spiritual quest compared to when they first entered college as freshmen.

But this rise in spirituality does not equate to more church attendance among students. Attendance among students actually drops from 43.7 percent in high school to 25.4 percent in college.

We’ve got a major religious tug of war on our hands: some aspects of church do make people happier, perhaps because they think (and rightly so) that their questions will be answered by attending a church. But the church leaves our students wanting. They don’t get the answers they need. So they drop out. The happiness they thought might be found through the church is a surprising dead end on their spiritual journey.

Tonight many people will go to a Christmas Eve service. It might be the only church service that they attend all year long. I am praying that the many churches holding these services tonight will connect with all ages, but particularly the younger generation. It’s time to stop fighting against ourselves and embrace a huge opportunity to bring in a generation that is searching for Truth.

Megacities and Missions

I’m a city-boy. I grew up most of my life inside large urban areas. My wife is a country gal. Her family raises their own beef. So when we started looking for a home, I was thinking a downtown loft. She wanted farmland. So we compromised. Our home borders corn fields and cattle farms.

I’ve grown to like living in the country. It’s a bit too quiet – sometimes I think that I can hear all the twinkling stars up in the sky (the ones that hide behind the city lights). Louisville is only a short trip away, so we’re not too far from civilization. But the extra space is nice. I still have a heart for the city, though.

According to a couple of population experts in a recent interview, in the year 2025 the number of “megacities” — those with more than 10 million people — will swell from the current number of 20 to as many as 40. In 1980, there were only 10 megacities in the world. By 2050, the population will expand from 6.5 billion today to more than 9 billion.

While sounding somewhat sensational, these experts claim this rapid rise of city dwellers will lead to mass homelessness, poverty, unemployment, dwindling water supplies, disease, and crime spikes. Most of these new megacities will be in some of the poorest countries on the two poorest continents, Africa and Asia.

I’m not as doom-and-gloom on a sociological worldwide scale. Human suffering should always elicit a response from the evangelical community, but the one piece of this population boom that does break my heart: who’s going to go tell them about the good news of Jesus Christ? The United Nations forecasts that these megacities will be the largest in 2015. While missionaries are already in many of these areas, start praying that God will prepare more hearts and minds to work in these urban meccas.

1. Tokyo, Japan (36.4 million)
2. Mumbai, India (21.9 million)
3. São Paulo, Brazil (20.5 million)
4. Mexico City, Mexico (20.2 million)
5. New York-Newark, USA (20 million)
6. Delhi, India (18.7 million)
7. Shanghai, China (17.2 million)
8. Dhaka, Bangladesh (17 million)
9. Calcutta, India (17 million)
10. Karachi, Pakistan (14.9 million)

Three Myths about Church Dropouts

I am putting the final touches on my first book (co-authored with my father). The tentative title is Essential Church. The bulk of the work is based upon a three-part research project on why 18-22 year-olds leave the church and how to get them back. The manuscript deadline is fast approaching, and the release date is planned for Fall 2008.

Before the book is released, however, I want to give you guys an opportunity to interact with some of the findings. We’ve found that 70% of those that leave the church do so between the ages of 18 and 22. While more is detailed in the book, let me introduce three myths about these dropouts:

The influence of the secular university has pushed them away. Wrong - State universities and colleges are not to blame. No significant difference exists between the dropout rates of those who attend at least a year of college and those who do not. For those that attend college, 69% of active churchgoing youth stop attending church for at least a year between the ages of 18 and 22. Yet 71% of active youth who do not go to college stop attending church during the same period. It’s a statistical tie – the college itself is not prompting students to drop out of church.

High school students are planning to leave the church once they go to college. Wrong - Students are not planning to leave the church. Our research reveals that an overwhelming majority (80%) of high school students do not plan to leave their church once they graduate. Conversely, only 20% of high school students have preconceived notions to leave the fellowship once out of their parents’ nest. Students are not fleeing the church because of deep desires for personal freedom. Nor are they scheming to leave once out of the house.

The scandal-happy media has disenchanted our youth. Wrong - students are not leaving the church because of the attention given to recent scandals surrounding several well-known pastors and churches. While a media melee usually accompanies these large scale evangelical failures of church leadership, students do not leave the church because of them. In fact, only 15% of those who feel displeasure with the church say it’s because of a moral or ethical failure of the leadership.

What’s your take? What do you think about some of these research findings? Do any of you have any myths that you feel are prevalent in our churches surrounding this generation?

The Lunch-Lady and Skeletons in the Closet

Sitting at a table during our last church fellowship, I asked a woman who was visiting, “Do I know you or have we met before?”

She just looked at me with a wry grin. I thought I recognized her, but I wasn’t sure why.

“I know you, and we’ve met many times before,” she said.

I was confused, “I’m sorry if I’m not recognizing you, but where did we meet?”

She smiled again and paused before saying, “I was your lunch lady in high school.”

My eyes got big, and I laughed heartily, “Ah, now I know who you are!”

We chatted for a brief amount of time and caught up on life’s changes. Then I realized something; she knew me from high school…

“You could ruin my ministry, you know,” I whispered.

“Don’t worry,” she said, “Your skeletons are safe with me. What happened in the lunch room during high school stays in the lunch room.”

Thank you, God, for the many people out there with a sense of understanding and a sense of humor.