82 Sermon Illustrations on Religious Decline

In 2020, life circumstances changed which made it more difficult to attend church services. And, before they even realized it, many haven’t walked into a church building in a couple of years.

For many, that’s described their current post-pandemic situation. But it also corresponds with post-high school life experience for many previously churchgoing young adults.

Lifeway Research found 66 percent of churchgoing teenagers drop out for at least a year between the ages of 18 and 22. Recent Lifeway Research surveys of both pastors and Americans indicate many pre-COVID parishioners are still missing from the pews.

Thinking about the similarities between a church dropout during college and COVID may provide pastors and church leaders with more realistic expectations moving forward and ways to think about reaching those who still haven’t returned.

First, we must discover why people are missing and then what to do to bring them back.

Some intentionally leave because of a change

As teenagers transition to young adults, many also transition away from the religious beliefs and practices they previously held. In the Lifeway Research study of young adults, 29 percent of those who dropped out of the church say they planned on taking a break from church after high school. When asked for a specific reason they dropped out, 32 percent point to hypocrisy or judgmentalism of other church members. And 25 percent say they disagreed with the church’s stance on political or social issues.

Some of those same factors may be at play post-COVID. In a February 2021 Lifeway Research study of churchgoers, 86 percent said they were proud of how their church responded during the pandemic, but 12 percent said they were ashamed. Pastors probably heard repeatedly from that 12 percent who were upset the church was doing too little or too much in response to COVID-19.

The primary reason young adults leave the church after high school, and more than likely the primary reason churchgoers have not returned post-pandemic, is not, however, an intentional decision. Most simply drifted away during those college years. And the same is true for many during COVID.

Most unintentionally got out of the habit

So why do 2 in 3 churchgoing teenagers stop attending church for at least a year as young adults? Among those who dropped out, 71 percent say their leaving wasn’t an intentional decision. It just happened during life transitions after high school. Almost half (47 percent) of those who dropped out of church and attended college say moving to college played a role in why they were no longer attending church.

Their habits and routines of life were disrupted, and many didn’t make the intentional effort needed to find a new church. Many teens aren’t changing their beliefs, but their beliefs aren’t enough motivation for the work of church hunting and attending.

It seems the same is happening with many pre-COVID churchgoers. They never planned on cutting back on church attendance, but they haven’t made the effort to restart.

In February 2021, 91 percent of churchgoers said they planned on attending in-person services as much or more than they did prior to the pandemic once things became safe.

Now, as almost all churches are physically re-opened, many previous churchgoers have not returned. Churches may still be missing as many as 1 in 4 attendees. Some churchgoers themselves admit they’re no longer attending as often as they did prior to the pandemic.

Like young adults who got out of the habit during college, many previous churchgoers have now fallen out of the practice of regular church attendance during the pandemic.

Most haven’t made some radical change in their theological beliefs. They probably haven’t even changed their feelings toward their churches. The cultural benefits of embracing the “Christian” label have declined, so many of those missing members have just filled their Sunday mornings with something else.

That’s good and bad news for churches. Good news: Your missing churchgoers aren’t actively rejecting you. Bad news: Your missing churchgoers aren’t actively thinking about you.

Churches seeking to draw them back aren’t trying to overcome antagonism, but rather apathy. That’s a different hill to climb. It may not be any less difficult, but it’s different. Still, both hills can be scaled.

Some return

As the saying goes, the best offense is a good defense. So the best way to help young adults return to church is to help them stay in church. But you can only address the current situation, so what about those who are currently missing?

When young adults drop out of church, they’re not all gone forever. In fact, 7 in 10 eventually return to some type of attendance, including 31 percent who attend twice a month or more. What drew them back? God working in their hearts, people extending invitations, and life circumstances causing them to rethink their priorities.

The most popular reason returning young adults give for plugging back into church after an extended absence is parents and other family members encouraging them to attend (37 percent). Another 19 percent said friends or acquaintances invited them.

Around 1 in 3 (32 percent) say they felt a desire to return, while 28 percent said they felt God was calling them to church. And 12 percent specifically felt convicted of the need to return.

Other returning young adults pointed to getting married and wanting to attend with their spouse (19 percent), having children and wanting to attend for them (18 percent), and having a crisis in their lives such as a death in the family (14 percent).

Just as God can draw back missing young adults, He can draw back missing adults and families of all ages. He often works directly in the hearts of people, but frequently He couples that with working in the hearts of others to encourage those who are missing to return.

He’s working right now among those you haven’t seen in a while. But He’s also working in you and your church to take steps to draw them back. There are some practical steps you can take in your church and in your communications with those who are missing to play a role in God bringing them back.

What is a millennial?

There are no precise dates when this generation starts and ends; most researchers and commentators use birth years ranging from 1978 to the early 2000s. I was born in 1978, so I just missed the Generation-X group and barely fit into the millennials. In fact, some definitions would keep my age group out of the millennials category, but I am around true millennials all the time by speaking to high school and college students, church planters and young families on a regular basis.

In my experience with this broad and large people group, I find there are extreme differences between 34-year-olds and 17-year-olds. However, there are some common views that come to the surface in most millennials no matter their age.

This is extremely important because, as children of God, we have firsthand experience of the incredible grace of Jesus. So, we should have a never-ending drive within us to love every age group the way that He loves us, and be students of every generation in order to be faithful missionaries with the Gospel to them.

With that in mind, here are 10 common views of millennials that may help us understand this large and diverse generation:

1. Millennials don’t promote ageism. People tend to think that millennials don’t want to have anything to do with the older generation. However, this generation is in desperate need for older generations to invest into them. This is largely a fatherless generation. They often seek out or are more open to discipleship or mentorship than we tend to believe. But they won’t know how to ask for it, so they ask you to “hang out.”

2. Millennials value experience over heritage. For the most part, millennials don’t value “heritage.” For example, a young person is not typically going to be Southern Baptist just because his parents were. If we can’t answer their “why” questions or we get defensive over their questions, we’ll lose them. Be ready to answer their honest questions with love, patience and kindness. Their experience with something or someone will dictate their views more than history will.

3. Millennials are fairly non-committal. Unless it’s an Apple product, millennials aren’t completely committed to anything. Previous generations may have valued commitment over enjoyment by making statements such as, “I’ve hated my job for over 40 years but I’m committed to it.” You’ll probably never hear a millennial say that, however, because they tend to value enjoyment over commitment. So they may say something like, “Why be miserable for 40 years? I may make less money and move around a lot, but I certainly don’t want to be miserable. Life is too short for that!” A great way to keep millennials engaged is by constantly communicating, illustrating and empowering participation in the vision and mission of the church. Remember, the younger generation is not the future of the church -- if they’ve been redeemed with the blood of Jesus, they’re the church right now. Let them have some ownership of the ministry and be patient with them when they mess up, possibly a lot.

4. Millennials mainly think about today. They often seem shortsighted. Think about it -- the defining moment of their lifetime involves the tragic events of 9/11. They saw the twin towers fall over and over again on a video screen while they were still children. It’s burned into their subconscious. Because there is so much focus on today, there will be very little preparation for the future by most millennials. This is also the reason for a lot of debt with this generation. “I need money today, so I’ll take out this loan and worry about how to pay for it tomorrow.” There is a great opportunity for the church to utilize the urgency of each day with this generation while also discipling them in the values of planning.

5. Millennials are more globally minded. Most millennials are up to date on world news and affairs. However, they may seem to be less patriotic to the USA than previous generations. They tend to view things from a global perspective while still valuing their country. It’s very possible that the Lord may accomplish the Great Commission through their interest in the nations.

6. Millennials know public shaming all too well. Public shaming once was a thing of the past but now has been revived with social media. Millennials have grown up afraid. They’ve felt the sting of cyber-bullying and may even have participated in viral trends. Their online persona is often as important to them as their real persona. Where we once said a photo was “A Kodak moment,” we now say, “That picture is Instagram-worthy.” This is an incredible opportunity for the church to teach this generation that a true identity found in Christ is better than a false identity created online.

7. Millennials see brokenness at an earlier age. They are exposed to more violence, graphic images and evil at an earlier age. Internet exposure, media coverage and broken homes are unfortunately the norm for far too many. Mass shootings are mainly a new phenomenon in their generation. This is a pornography-saturated generation -- the average age of first exposure is 11. The fastest-growing consumers of Internet pornography are girls 15–30; 90 percent of guys admit to interaction with Internet pornography and 60 percent of girls. This generation is looking for solutions at a much earlier time in their lives. They know they’re broken. Thank God for the Gospel because it is mighty to save millennials. Share it with them because they’re starving for it, whether they know it or not.

8. Millennials are cause-oriented. This generation wants to be a part of “doing” something. They’ll want more out of their church than sitting on a pew, listening to sermons, going to potluck dinners, while waiting on the Rapture Bus to swoop down to pick them all up. They are not scared to die young; however, they are terrified to die at a ripe old age while not having done anything significant with their lives in their own eyes. They are not typically impressed by a church’s size or budget. They’re more interested in being noticed relationally and in what the church is doing outside the walls of the building. Sometimes you’ll find a greater percentage of millennials in smaller churches or church plants because of the assumed accessibility of the leaders to cultivate a relationship.

9. Millennials are an ADHD generation. Surprising to some, they usually don’t mind long sermons. The communicators most popular among millennials commonly preach 45-50-minute sermons. However, millennials have about a 7-10-minute attention span at the most. In communicating, teaching, preaching, it is a must to break up the message several times with a story, illustration or practical application. Also, teaching has to be more than relaying content. This generation is visual. If they can’t see it or envision it, they have difficulty understanding it.

10. Millennials value doctrine. Mature Christ-following millennials deeply value doctrine, verse-by-verse preaching and missions. This generation seems to get weary of gimmicks and sleek presentations very quickly. The seeker-sensitive movement of their parents’ generation has grown to be “old hat” for the millennials who grew up in church. In preaching, the more raw, transparent and vulnerable the communicator is, the more millennials connect. There was a time when preachers were told not to use themselves in personal illustrations; however, this generation wants to hear those personal stories.

Millennials are a hopeful generation, and I personally am encouraged by this. My prophetic prediction about this generation is that God will use them to further the Great Commission more than any previous generation. Even if I’m wrong, millennials nevertheless are people made in the image of God who desperately need the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #1400]

According to scholar Richard J. Evans, Adolf Hitler’s hostility to Christianity reached new heights, or depths, during the war. It was a frequent theme of his mealtime monologues. After the war was over and victory assured, he said in 1942, the Concordat he had signed with the Catholic Church in 1933 would be formally abrogated and the Church would be dealt with like any other non-Nazi voluntary association. The Third Reich “would not tolerate the intervention of any foreign influence” such as the Pope, and the Papal Nuncio would eventually have to go back to Rome. Priests, he said, were “black bugs”, “abortions in cassocks”.

Hitler emphasized again and again his belief that Nazism was a secular ideology founded on modern science. Science, he declared, would easily destroy the last remaining vestiges of superstition. “Put a small telescope in a village, and you destroy a world of superstitions.” “The best thing,” he declared on 14 October 1941, “is to let Christianity die a natural death. A slow death has something comforting about it. The dogma of Christianity gets worn away before the advances of science.”

He was particularly critical of what he saw as its violation of the law of natural selection and the survival of the fittest. “Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of human failure.” It was indelibly Jewish in origin and character. “Christianity is a prototype of Bolshevism: the mobilization by the Jew of the masses of slaves with the object of undermining society.” Christianity was a drug, a kind of sickness: “Let’s be the only people who are immunized against the disease.” “In the long run,” he concluded, “National Socialism and religion will no longer be able to exist together.” He would not persecute the Churches: they would simply wither away. “But in that case we must not replace the Church by something equivalent. That would be terrifying!” The future was Nazi, and the future would be secular.

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Richard J. Evans, THE THIRD REICH AT WAR (Penguin Press).

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #7649]

A British Christian charity has spent 200,000 pounds (US $350,000) to produce a film and distribute it to 26,000 primary schools in the U.K. to teach children about Jesus. “There are over 12 million children in the U.K. and only 756,000 of them go to church regularly,” said the animated film's creator, Steve Legg. “That leaves a staggering number who don't and are probably not receiving basic Christian teaching.”

He said he came up with the idea for the movie to teach kids Bible basics “when I heard about the boy asking why Jesus Christ was named after a swear word.”

________

Manchester Evening News

Consider these facts:

• The GI or Builder Generation is 9.7% of the U.S. population. Some 60% are members of a church.

• Boomers (born between 1946 and 1966) are 29% of the U.S. population. About 40% are affiliated with a church.

• Survivors or GenXers (born between 1967 and 1981) comprise 27.5% of the population. Only 18% are affiliated with a church.

• Millennials (born 1982 and after) are 21.4% of the population. Less than 10% affiliate with a church.

If nothing changes the current trends...

• By 2010 many of the Builder Generation will no longer be with us.

• By 2010 church membership will drop from 42% today to about 23%, and 15% or lower by 2020 - a decline of 65% in just 18 years!

I shudder when I think about the kind of nation the United States of America may become for our children and grandchildren if you and I fail to make the gospel real and relevant to this and future generations. Currently, the United States is the 3rd largest un-churched and un-discipled mission field in the world!

Is it necessary to believe in God in order to have solid personal values? A new survey seems to answer that question with a “yes.”

The survey by a pollster at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, found that adults who profess a belief in God are significantly more likely than atheists to say that forgiveness, patience, generosity and a concern for others are “very important.” In fact, the poll found that on 11 of 12 values, there was a double-digit gap between theists and atheists, with theists more likely to label each value “very important.”

The survey by sociologist and pollster Reginald Bibby examined the beliefs of 1,600 Canadians, 82 percent who said they believed in “God or a higher power” and 18 percent who said they did not.

The poll was released as an aggressive branch of atheism is getting increasing attention. Led in part by authors Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris as well as by the so-called Blasphemy Project, the new combative form of atheism argues that society would be better off in a “God-less world.” The research -- while not addressing any specific authors or groups -- seems to claim otherwise. The poll was conducted in 2005 and released Oct. 8.

“To the extent that Canadians say good-bye to God, we may find that we pay a significant social price,” Bibby said in a press release.

According to the survey, there is a:

• 32-point gap between theists and atheists on whether forgiveness is “very important” (84 percent vs. 52 percent).

• 33-point gap on patience (72 percent vs. 39 percent).

• 30-point gap on generosity (67 percent vs. 37 percent).

• 19-point gap on concern for others (82 percent vs. 63 percent).

• 23-point gap on family life (88 percent vs. 65 percent).

Among the poll’s other findings, there was a 13-point gap between theists and atheists on kindness, 16-point gap on “being loved,” 11-point gap on friendship, 10-point gap on courtesy, 12-point gap on politeness, 13-point gap on friendliness and 5-point gap on honesty.

If the poll is correct, Canada has a higher percentage of atheists than does America. A Gallup poll of American adults this summer found that 6 percent consider themselves atheists. Also, most polls find that roughly nine in 10 Americans profess a belief in God, a higher percentage than in Canada.

The Ottawa Citizen took the poll results seriously, asserting in an editorial that “declining religious affiliation could be accompanied by a decline in civility.”

“Clergy and theologians have long argued something similar, namely, that without formal religion it is hard for society to maintain and perpetrate ethical behaviour,” the editorial stated. “Of course, clergy are not the most objective analysts in these matters. Bibby, however, speaks as an academic. ...

“Bibby’s research suggests that as religiosity declines, we start to travel blind -- and society pays a price,” the editorial continued. “Religious affiliation, apparently, has a civilizing function. We become socialized at church. The fear, then, is that as we separate ourselves from these institutions, social harmony could suffer.”

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #20870]

But humans being what they are — fallen creatures — we will always struggle with sin. And racism, like all sins, will be always be crouching at the door. Even within the church.

I was reminded of this recently by a pastor I had dinner with in Mobile. He told me a great story about what happened to his former associate, who took over the First Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. His name is Dr. Stan Lewis.

First Baptist had struggled with racism since the 1960s. On Easter Sunday in 1963, the Rev. Earl Stallings, who was then the pastor, had welcomed African-American Freedom Riders to the church, but the ushers refused to seat them. Still, Martin Luther King commended Rev. Stallings later that week in his famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

Things got worse when the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed and four little girls were killed. Based on the reaction from First Baptist, Rev. Stallings was forced to write in his weekly newsletter, “The hearts of some of us [were] broken last Sunday when the despicable crime of the bombing of a house of worship and the taking of the lives of innocent children became a reality.”

Stallings would later be honored for his efforts at racial reconciliation, but the church, which he left in 1965, continued to be divided. As late as 1970, the First Baptist congregation voted to deny membership to African Americans. With that the church finally split, and a new church was formed.

But what of the old church? Dr. Lewis says, “Over the next few decades First Baptist Church would continue to decline in membership and influence.” During these years the church “stumbled and lost its identity... The church struggled with strife over theological and cultural issues.”

That’s no surprise, is it? When a church follows cultural instead of scriptural standards, theological troubles are certain to follow. In 2009, Dr. Lewis, new in the church, decided it was time for the church as a body to repent of its sin. He preached a message of “corporate repentance” from Nehemiah chapter 1.

The deacons led the congregation in a “time of confession and repentance,” and the church went through a period of prayer, fasting, and reaching out to other churches for guidance. “Since that time,” Dr. Lewis told me, “we have seen more people baptized and join our church than ever before. There is a sense of freedom from past sin.”

I think this is a wonderful model for any church to follow when it confronts corporate sin — whether it’s the sin of racism or anything else.

As Christians, we cannot change the past. But we can be accountable to God for what we do now. We can appeal to Him for forgiveness, restoration, and direction. Then and only then can we really be free to be God’s people.

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Copyright (c) 2010 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.*

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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #11291]

According to a comprehensive national survey released this week by the Program on Public Values at Trinity College, those identifying with no religious tradition, or as atheists or agnostics, account for 15 percent of the population, up from about 8 percent in 1990. “No religion” Americans are the only religious demographic that’s growing in every single state.

And in northeastern states like Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine, the “no religion” group has surged even more dramatically, shooting up 300 percent in the last 20 years and now accounting for a quarter or more of the population.

With as many Americans identifying as “no religion” as there are mainline Christians, Jews, and Mormons in the United States combined, the Trinity College survey has helped create a portrait of an exploding secular tradition that reveals commonalities beyond lack of belief.

The Trinity College report, called the American Religious Identification Survey, finds that 60 percent of the nonreligious are men. They tend to be young, accounting for one in every three American adults under age 35. According to Trinity College Professor Barry Kosmin, a large chunk have baby boomer parents who came of age in the 1960s and wound up rejecting religion.

And Kosmin says that many of the 750,000 additional American adults who each year identify as having “no religion” are reacting to what he calls the “triumphalism and judgementalism of the Christian right.”

A full quarter of those identifying as “no religion” in the Trinity College report are former Catholics, many of whom were turned off by the church sex abuse scandals of the past decade. That helps explain why the Northeast now rivals the Mountain states and the Pacific Northwest — whose frontier beginnings established rugged individualist traditions that resisted organized religions — as the most secular parts of the country. “Despite the population growth, New England has lost 1 million Catholics” in the last decade, says Kosmin. “The trend in the Catholic Church has been obscured by the large number of people from Latin America who’ve filled the pews as the Irish Americans left them.”

Other religious traditions feeding the “no religion” boom are Judaism and Asian religions like Buddhism and Hinduism. While people who leave mainline Protestant churches often find new spiritual homes in evangelical or nondenominational megachurches, the Trinity survey shows that former Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, and Hindus are much more likely to abandon religion altogether. Nearly half of “no religion” Americans come from Irish, Jewish, or Asian backgrounds.

Only a small minority of the nonreligious call themselves atheists or agnostics, but just 21 percent believe in a personal God, compared with 70 percent of all Americans. “They’re the inverse of the rest of the American population,” says Kosmin. “Three in four Americans want a religious funeral, but in this group, three in four don’t.”

A new study of the American religious landscape should call Christians to intensify their efforts in both evangelism and discipleship, R. Albert Mohler Jr. said Feb. 25, 2008, on his national radio program.

“When you look at these numbers, we have a huge challenge before us,” said Mohler, who serves as president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. “By any estimation, it means we’ve got a huge job out there in evangelism to reach this country.”

The study, conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life and released Feb. 25, surveyed 35,000 Americans about their religious preferences. The study found that:

• Most Americans (78.4 percent) identify themselves as Christians of some sort.

• America’s Protestant majority, which has been in place since the colonial era, has dropped to 51.3 percent and will soon become a minority.

• Evangelicals are the largest single group of American Christians (26.3 percent), followed by Roman Catholics (23.9 percent).

• More than a quarter of American adults have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of either another religion or no religion at all. If a change from one type of Protestantism to another is included, 44 percent of American adults have switched religious affiliation.

Roman Catholicism has lost the greatest number of adherents, Mohler said, while mainline liberal Protestant denominations also have seen a mass exodus. Even though evangelical churches have grown, the growth has a discouraging side, he said.

“The bottom line is that if you look at evangelicals, we’re growing but not commensurate with the growth of the population,” Mohler said. “The reality is that less than half of Americans will soon be Protestant, which means that America’s Protestant majority, true from the founding of this nation, is about to disappear.”

Several callers on the show said they had switched religious affiliation because of theological convictions. Mohler said those callers are probably in the minority of those who switch.

“I think you may be in a minority who are making a change for what are clearly understood to be theological reasons,” he told one caller. “I’m sure that happens. But my guess is that for a lot of Americans, who are unfortunately less theologically minded, it might be something else that has led to this. And there certainly is a lot of church hopping and church shopping that’s going on out there.”

When it comes to responding to the new data, churches must step up their efforts to share the Gospel with lost men and women, Mohler said. Otherwise the Protestant worldview could soon disappear from the American landscape.

“The evangelical church and evangelical churches -- speaking of local congregations -- are not doing enough,” he said. “I also want to suggest that evangelism, in terms of this kind of missiological setting, often has to be reset in terms of our self-understanding. I think most American evangelicals simply have no idea, no idea that we’re about to lose a Protestant majority in this country.”

The data about Americans switching religious affiliations is not all bad news, he said. Such changes are a byproduct of religious liberty, Mohler said.

“Insofar as [religion switching] is theologically driven, it is a good thing,” he said. “It is the necessary outcome of what happens when you have religious liberty, when people can indeed make decisions other than the decision that would be made for them by their parents or by the state or by a state church or by some kind of external authority.”

The study should remind pastors to preach messages grounded in Scripture that help believers remain faithful to orthodox theology, he said.

“When people are deeply grounded in God’s Word, and in their convictions, they’re not going to switch,” he said. “Now they may make a move from one church to another, but it’s going to be on the basis of something other than they’re switching their theology.”

Mohler also posted comments about the study in his blog at www.albertmohler.com. In the blog, he concluded, “All this reminds us of the complexity of our context and the immensity of our challenge. We cannot look at this data with mere interest. These numbers represent real people who desperately need to hear the Gospel -- and to see authentic Christianity made visible.”

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More on the survey from Baptist Press, 2/29/08:

The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life survey was released Feb. 25 and was based on interviews with 35,000 Americans. It showed that 6.7 percent of American adults say they are Southern Baptist, which makes it the largest represented non-Catholic denomination in the survey. Adults affiliated with the United Methodist Church are 5.1 percent of the population, while every other denomination makes up 2 percent or less of the population.

More than three-quarters of the population (75.8 percent) say they are affiliated with a Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox church. Protestants -- which in the survey include evangelical churches, mainline churches and historically black churches -- make up 51.3 percent of the adult population, followed by Catholics (23.9) and Orthodox members (six-tenths of a percent).

Evangelicals in America -- of which Southern Baptists are a sub-set -- comprise 26.3 percent of adults and outnumber Catholics and mainline Protestants (18.1 percent).

Pew compared data from the survey to data in past General Social Surveys (GSS, another well-known survey) and found that Protestants are declining as a share of the population. But that decline may not be among evangelicals, a Protestant sub-set.

“What scholars who have analyzed the GSS data have found,” Pew reported, “is that the proportion of the population identifying with the large mainline Protestant denominations has declined significantly in recent decades, while the proportion of Protestants identifying with the large evangelical denominations has increased.”

Both the Pew report and the GSS findings are in line with the results released in 2002 by the Catholic-affiliated Glenmary Research Center which showed growth among conservative evangelical churches and decline in liberal mainline denominations.

Among the study’s other findings:

• People affiliated with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, the Alliance of Baptists and a general “liberal/progressive Baptists” category make up less than three-tenths of a percent of the population. The survey lumped all three into one category and placed them under the mainline Protestant category.

• Mormons are 1.7 percent of the population, Jehovah’s Witnesses seven-tenths of a percent.

• Historically black churches make up 6.9 percent of all adults.

• Those who attend nondenominational evangelical churches are 3.4 percent of the population.

• Members of historically black churches (69 percent) and evangelical churches (68 percent) are more likely than those of mainline churches (55 percent) to marry someone from their own Protestant affiliation.

• Catholicism has “lost more people to other religions or to no religion” than any other religious group. The losses, though, have been offset by immigrants, 46 percent of whom are Catholic. Nationwide, half of all adult Catholics under 40 are Hispanic. There is a “significant ethnic shift that is occurring among younger Catholics.”

• Jews comprise 1.7 percent of the population.

• Four-tenths of a percent of the population are Muslim, a decrease from a figure of six-tenths of a percent found in an earlier survey. [Both figures are quoted in the Pew report.] Seven-tenths are Buddhist, four-tenths are Hindu.

• More than one in six adults (16.1 percent) are not affiliated with any religious group. But most of them are not atheist or agnostic. Atheists make up 1.6 percent of U.S. adults, agnostics 2.4 percent. The remainder of the unaffiliated group are those who say religion is “not too important or not at all important in their lives” (6.3 percent) and those who say religion is “somewhat important or very important in their lives” (5.8 percent) but nonetheless have no affiliation.

When it comes to religion, the USA is now land of the freelancers.

The percentage. of people who call themselves in some way Christian has dropped more than 11% in a generation. The faithful have scattered out of their traditional bases: The Bible Belt is less Baptist. The Rust Belt is less Catholic. And everywhere, more people are exploring spiritual frontiers — or falling off the faith map completely.

These dramatic shifts in just 18 years are detailed in the new American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), to be released today. It finds that, despite growth and immigration that has added nearly 50 million adults to the U.S. population, almost all religious denominations have lost ground since the first ARIS survey in 1990.

“More than ever before, people are just making up their own stories of who they are. They say, ‘I’m everything. I’m nothing. I believe in myself,’ “ says Barry Kosmin, survey co-author.

Among the key findings in the 2008 survey:

• So many Americans claim no religion at all (15%, up from 8% in 1990), that this category now outranks every other major U.S. religious group except Catholics and Baptists. In a nation that has long been mostly Christian, “the challenge to Christianity ... does not come from other religions but from a rejection of all forms of organized religion,” the report concludes.

• Catholic strongholds in New England and the Midwest have faded as immigrants, retirees and young job-seekers have moved to the Sun Belt. While bishops from the Midwest to Massachusetts close down or consolidate historic parishes, those in the South are scrambling to serve increasing numbers of worshipers.

• Baptists, 15.8% of those surveyed, are down from 19.3% in 1990. Mainline Protestant denominations, once socially dominant, have seen sharp declines: The percentage of Methodists, for example, dropped from 8% to 5%.

• The percentage of those who choose a generic label, calling themselves simply Christian, Protestant, non-denominational, evangelical or “born again,” was 14.2%, about the same as in 1990.

• Jewish numbers showed a steady decline, from 1.8% in 1990 to 1.2% today. The percentage of Muslims, while still slim, has doubled, from 0.3% to 0.6%. Analysts within both groups suggest those numbers understate the groups’ populations.

Ihsan Bagby, associate professor of Islamic studies at the University of Kentucky-Lexington, says that most national telephone surveys such as ARIS undercount Muslims, and that he is conducting a study of mosques’ membership sponsored by the Hartford (Conn.) Institute for Religious Research.

Meanwhile, some Jewish surveys that report larger numbers of Jews also include “cultural” Jews — those who connect to Judiasm through its traditions, but not necessarily through actively practicing the religion.

Meanwhile, nearly 2.8 million people now identify with dozens of new religious movements, calling themselves Wiccan, pagan or “Spiritualist,” which the survey does not define.

Wicca, a contemporary form of paganism that includes goddess worship and reverence for nature, has even made its way to Arlington National Cemetery, where the Pentagon now allows Wiccans’ five-pointed-star symbol to be used on veterans’ gravestones.

RELIGION AS A HOBBY

Since the first ARIS study was released, other major national surveys have offered snapshots of the USA’s faith.

The Baylor University Religion Surveys in 2006 and 2008, each based on 35,000 interviews, were distinguished by a look at how people described and understood God. The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released its Religious Landscape Survey last year, also based on 35,000 interviews, mapping Americans’ beliefs state by state. It found that 41% of people had switched their religion at some point in life.

The initial ARIS report in 1990 set the table for those surveys.

It was based on 113,000 interviews, updated with 50,000 more in 2001 and now 54,000 in 2008. Because the U.S. Census does not ask about religion, the ARIS survey was the first comprehensive study of how people identify their spiritual expression.

Kosmin concluded from the 1990 data that many saw God as a “personal hobby,” and that the USA is “a greenhouse for spiritual sprouts.”

Today, he says, “religion has become more like a fashion statement, not a deep personal commitment for many.”

Kosmin is now director of the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.; ARIS co-researcher Ariela Keysar is associate director.

The ARIS research also led in quantifying and planting a label on the “Nones” — people who said “None” when asked the survey’s basic question: “What is your religious identity?”

The survey itself may have contributed to a higher rate of reporting as sociologists began analyzing the newly identified Nones. “The Nones may have felt more free to step forward, less looked upon as outcasts” after the ARIS results were published, Keysar says.

Oregon once led the nation in Nones (18% in 1990), but in 2008 the leader, with 34%, was Vermont, where Nones significantly outnumber every other group.

Meabh Fitzpatrick, 49, of Rutland, Vt., says she is upfront about becoming an atheist 10 years ago because “it’s important for us to be counted. I’m a taxpayer and a law-abiding citizen and an ethical person, and I don’t think people assume this about atheists.”

Not all Nones have made such a philosophical choice; most just unhook from religious ties.

Diane Mueller, 43, of Austin, who grew up Methodist, says she’s simply “totally disengaged from the church and the Bible, too.” Sunday mornings for her family mean playing in a park, not praying in a pew.

Ex-Catholic Dylan Rossi, 21, a philosophy student in Boston and a Massachusetts native, is part of the sharp fall in the state’s percentage of Catholics — from 54% to 39% in his lifetime.

Rossi says he’s typical among his friends: “If religion comes up, everyone at the table will start mocking it. I don’t know anyone religious and hardly anyone ‘spiritual.’”

SOCIAL MOBILITY A FACTOR

Anger and dismay over the clergy sexual abuse scandal, which erupted in Boston in 2002, may be reflected in declining rates of Catholics across New England. But the total percentage of Catholics in the USA declined only slightly from 1990 to 2008, from 26.2% to 25.1%. Analysts say immigration and other demographic shifts account for most of the changes.

“It’s not that everyone in New England lost their Catholic faith since 1990. It’s not the same people in New England,” says sociologist Mary Gautier, senior researcher at the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, the research arm of the Catholic Church in America.

Membership in New England’s Catholic churches is shrinking as older Catholics have died or moved to sunnier climates. Young adults are choosing non-Catholic partners, having civil weddings and skipping baptism for their babies. And those moving in to areas served by the churches are young adults who often find their communities of work and friendship online, not in parish halls.

“I sometimes wish I had a sky hook to take people from dying parishes up North and plunk them down in the parishes around Austin or Atlanta — and bring their beautiful buildings with them,” Gautier says.

Bishop Gregory Aymond would be happy to have those resources in Austin. He’s spiritually delighted and financially challenged as his Texas diocese has doubled in numbers with retirees, Mexican immigrants, students at five major universities and Californians moving in for high-tech jobs.

“And demographers expect it to double again in the next 10 to 12 years,” he says.

In Mount Pleasant, S.C., a suburb of Charleston, “everyone from Ohio is here,” says Msgr. James Carter, pastor of Christ Our King Catholic Church. The church has grown so big so fast that it has spun off another parish and a mission church, and it plans outdoor split-shift services for Easter to accommodate about 2,500 families.

South Carolina also exemplifies the Protestant faiths’ shrinking share of the national religion “pie.” The state has more Catholics (10%, up from 6% in 1990) and the percentage of Nones has more than tripled, from 3% to 10%. The share of Protestants is 73%, down from 88% in 1990.

Like Gautier, the Rev. Kendall Harmon, theologian for the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina, blames social mobility.

“Mobility means your ideas are more challenged and your family and childhood traditions have less influence, particularly if you are not strongly rooted in them. I see kids today who have no vocabulary of faith, and neither do many of their parents.”

Harmon recalls, “A couple came into my office once with a yellow pad of their teenage son’s questions. One of them was: ‘What is that guy doing hanging up there on the plus sign?’ “

Kosmin and Keysar also found a “piety gap” in how Americans understand God: While 69% say they believe in a personal God, the Judeo-Christian understanding of the Almighty, an additional 30% made no such connection.

The piety gap defines the primary sides in the culture wars, Kosmin says.

“It’s about gay marriage and abortion and stem cells and the family. If a personal God says, ‘Thou shalt not’ or ‘Thou shalt’ see these a certain way, you’d take it very seriously. Meanwhile, three in 10 people aren’t listening to that God,” he says.

“There’s more clarity at the two extremes and the mishmash is in the middle,” Keysar adds.

Mark Silk, director of the Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College, sees in the numbers “an emergence of a soft evangelicalism — E-lite — that owes a lot to evangelical styles of worship and basic approach to church.

“But E-lite is more a matter of aesthetic and style and a considerable softening of the edges in doctrine, politics and social values,” Silk says.

Additional narrowly focused surveys, with closer looks at Catholics, evangelicals, mainline Protestants, and African-American Christians, will be released later this year by Trinity’s Program on Public Values, which sponsored ARIS, Silk says.

Some believers might be alarmed by the ARIS findings, but Tom Haynes isn’t. Haynes, 46, a Houston entrepreneur, is the brother of Diane Mueller, the Austin mom who claims no religion. Same Methodist upbringing. Totally different spiritual choices.

Haynes, like 69% of Americans, said in the ARIS survey that he believes there is “definitely a personal God.” He calls himself a deeply committed “follower of Christ,” rather than aligning with a specific denomination. He attends a non-denominational community church where he likes the rock music, but Bible study is the focus of his faith.

“We just look to Jesus,” he says. “That’s why I don’t pay attention to surveys. Christianity is moving totally under the radar. It’s the work of God. It can’t be measured. It happens inside of people’s souls.”

___________________________________________________________________

RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT IN THE USA

How Americans describe their religious identity, 1990 — 2008:

Religious tradition

2008 estimate

(in millions)

Estimated %

of population

1990

Estimated %

of population

2008

Change

___________________________________________________________________

Catholic 57.2 26.2% 25.1% -1.1%

Baptist 36.1 19.3% 15.8% -3.5%

No religion 34.2 8.2% 15.0% 6.8%

Christian, generic 32.4 14.8% 14.2% -0.6%

Mainline Protestant 29.4 18.7% 12.9% -5.8%

Don't Know/Refused 11.8 2.3% 5.2% 2.9%

Pentecostal/Charismatic 8.0 3.2% 3.5% 0.3%

Protestant denominations 7.1 2.6% 3.1% 0.5%

Mormon/latter-day Saints 3.2 1.4% 1.4% 0.0%

Wiccan, other religions 2.8 0.8% 1.2% 0.4%

Jewish 2.7 1.8% 1.2% -0.6%

Eastern religions 2.0 0.4% 0.9% 0.5%

Muslim 1.4 0.3% 0.6% 0.3%

___________________________________________________________________

Note: “Catholic” includes Roman, Greek and Eastern Rite Catholics. Christian generic includes non-denominational, unspecified Christian and Protestant, evangelical/born-again. Protestant denominations includes Churches of Christ, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh-day Adventist.

________

Source: American Religious Identification Survey 2008, based on 54,000 interviews in 2008, margin of error +/- 0.5 percentage points.

Back in 2007, the New York Times famously proclaimed that the evangelical movement in America was cracking up. Since then, the media has relished exposing what they see as fault lines in evangelicalism over such issues as abortion, marriage, and the environment.

The pundits seized upon President Obama’s decisive electoral victory last fall to opine that evangelicals were no longer the political force they once were.

And just last week, a well-known evangelical blogger predicted the “collapse” of evangelicalism in America within the next decade, even though he also predicted that out of the ruins of evangelicalism, “new forms of Christian vitality and ministry will be born.”

But the American Religious Identification Survey of 2008 gives me reason to think that the predictions of evangelicalism’s demise are greatly exaggerated. In fact, quite the opposite may be true.

Although the survey, published by Trinity College, boldly proclaims that Americans are “slowly becoming less Christian,” it also points out that 34 percent of all American adults now identify themselves as “Born-Again or Evangelical Christians.” That’s no decline from previous years.

While the report shows that mainline denominations like the Methodists, Lutherans, and Presbyterians have experienced “sharp numerical declines” over the past decade, the number of evangelicals within Christendom is increasing. Some 45 percent of all Christians now identify themselves as evangelicals or born again.

“What is significant,” the survey says, “is the recent spread of Evangelicalism well beyond Christians affiliated with those groups that are members of the [National Association of Evangelicals], so that millions of Mainliners and Catholics now identify with this trend.”

So what does all this mean? It means that the single largest voting block in America remains evangelicals. No other single group comes close. It also means that America still is, by and large, a conservative nation. This is why, for example, we ought not to be surprised (even though the media is flabbergasted) that voters across the country time and time again uphold traditional marriage.

Yes, the evangelical movement is growing, which is good, but numbers don’t mean everything. For example, a new Barna survey shows that only 19 percent of evangelicals hold a consistently biblical worldview. What this tells me is that we’re growing in numbers, but we’ve got to do a better job making disciples.

And here’s where some see a coming collapse, but I see an enormous opportunity — an opportunity to re-catechize believers, to re-introduce them to the glories of Christian truths, to train them to defend and live out their faith winsomely, reaching out to the needy and hurting as Christians have done for two millennia.

I can’t help but think of William Wilberforce, the English parliamentarian who led a small band of believers to eradicate the British slave trade. These men and women, inspired by God, shared their resources, talents, and faith, and not only put an end to a great evil, but they also formed the heart of a movement that quite literally sparked revival and transformed the culture of Britain. It began with a handful of the faithful.

Just think what God might do with 34 percent of the American population calling themselves evangelicals — if those evangelicals re-capture their first love, present a winsome witness, and do the good works God has prepared for us to do.

________

Copyright (c) 2009 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

In WHY WE MUST CALL OURSELVES CHRISTIANS, Marcello Pera writes that Europe’s only hope for unity lies in acknowledging its Christian roots. It is “Christianity’s concept of the human person as created in the image of God” that justifies European “values,” he wrote.

He warns that if Europe cuts itself off “from these Christian principles . . . [it] will have destroyed [its] constitutional heritage” and leave itself vulnerable to attack from those hostile to its values.

What makes Pera’s argument remarkable is that he is an atheist! His book came in response to questions posed by Pope Benedict.

The decline of religion in America has been predicted again and again.

________

America was famously founded by companies and churches. The woes of American capitalism are well known: Wall Street is a synonym for excess and greed around the world, and Detroit is tottering on the edge of bankruptcy. But just as its temples to Mammon are under fire, so suddenly are its churches to God.

Easter week upon us, Newsweek’s April 13 [2009] cover proclaims “The Decline and Fall of Christian America.” The new American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) shows that the proportion of Americans who claim to have no religion has increased to 15% today from 8.2% in 1990. The Christian right has lost yet another battle, this time in the heartland state of Iowa, with its Supreme Court voting unanimously to legalize gay marriage. The proportion of Americans who think that religion “can answer all or most of today’s problems” is now at a historic low of 48%.

America has long stood out among developed countries for its religiosity. This has less to do with innate godliness than with the free market created by the First Amendment. Pre-Revolutionary America was not that religious, because the original Puritans were swamped by less wholesome adventurers -- in Salem, Massachusetts, the setting for “The Crucible,” 83% of taxpayers by 1683 confessed to no religious identification.

America became religious after the Constitution separated church from state, thus ensuring that religious denominations could only survive if they got souls into pews. While state-sponsored religion withered in Europe, American faith has been a hive of activity: from the Methodists, who converted close to an eighth of the country in the half century after the Revolution, to the modern megachurches.

Has this model really run out of steam? Betting against American religion has always proved to be a fool’s game. In 1880, Robert Ingersoll, the leading atheist of his day, claimed that “the churches are dying out all over the land.” In its Easter issue in 1966, Time asked “Is God Dead?” on its cover. East Coast intellectuals have repeatedly assumed that the European model of progress, where modernity equals secularization, would come to the U.S. They have always been wrong.

Look closer and the new poll numbers are not quite as simple as headlines suggest. For one thing, they show that America remains remarkably religious by the standards of other advanced countries -- with three-quarters of the country still firmly Christian. And a significant number of Americans are becoming more godly, not less so: The increase in the number of atheists is going hand in hand with ever more conservative Christians and Pentecostals.

Religion, like everything else, is polarizing, with the faithful more willing to call themselves “born again” and doubters more willing to call themselves unbelievers or atheists. George W. Bush may have been a factor: Many of the unbelievers are less worried about religion per se as about the fusion of religion and political power in the form of the new right. A fifth of the “atheists” in a recent Pew Survey said that they believed in God, a semantic confusion rich in meaning.

The polling numbers actually underline the strength of the nation’s pluralism. More than one in four Americans have swapped religions. Americans harbor a powerful distaste for religious establishments, seeing faith as something that they should choose rather than inherit. More than ever, they mix and match spiritual traditions. In other words, the forces that made America such a uniquely religious country, competition and choice, are working as powerfully as ever. In the American model, modernity goes with pluralism.

Most of the evidence from the ground indicates that the American religious marketplace remains vibrant. The biggest megachurches attract tens of thousands of people. There is plenty of data to show that the turmoil of modernity stimulates demand for religion. The churches act both as a storm shelter for people who feel overwhelmed by social change and a community for people who feel atomized. Above all, there is the search for spiritual meaning that has haunted man through the ages. The forces that drove the young Barack Obama to find purpose in a Chicago church will keep on occurring.

Meanwhile, the supply seems as plentiful as ever. Religion, no less than software or politics, is a competitive business, where organization and entrepreneurship count. Religious America is led by a series of highly inventive “pastorpreneurs” -- men like Bill Hybels of Willow Creek or Rick Warren of Saddleback. These are far more sober, thoughtful characters than the schlock-and-scandal televangelists of the 1970s, but they are not afraid to use modern business methods to get God’s message across.

Mr. Hybels’s immaculately organized church employs several hundred staff, and the church has both its own mission statement and its own consulting arm. Mr. Warren’s book “The Purpose Driven Life” has sold almost 30 million copies, with the author comparing his purpose driven formula to an Intel operating chip that other churches can use.

The real strength of religious America lies in its diversity. There are more than 200 religious traditions in America, with 20 different sorts of Baptists alone. Religious America is remarkably good at segmenting its customer base: There are services for bikers, gays and dropouts (the Scum of the Earth Church in Denver); Bibles for cowboys, brides, soldiers and rap artists (“Even though I walk through/The hood of death/I don’t back down/for You have my back”); and even theme parks for every faith. This Holy Week you can visit the Golgotha Fun Park in Cave City, Kentucky, or the Ave Maria Grotto in Cullman, Alabama, which includes a mini-version of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

Looked at from a celestial perspective, the American model of religion, far from retreating, is going global. Pastorpreneurs are taking their message around the world. In Latin America, Pentecostalism has disrupted the Catholic Church’s monopoly. Already five of the world’s 10 biggest churches are in South Korea: Yoido Full Gospel Church, which has 800,000 members, is a rival in terms of organization for anything Messrs. Warren and Hybels can offer. China is the latest great convert. There are probably close to 100 million Christians in China, most of them following a very individualistic American-style faith. Already more people attend church each Sunday than are members of the Communist Party. China will soon be the world’s biggest Christian country and also possibly its biggest Muslim one.

The Christian right has certainly stirred up an angry reaction to its attempt to marry religion to political power. But it would be a mistake to regard this reaction as evidence that America is losing its religion.

________

Mr. Micklethwait is the editor in chief of the Economist. Mr. Wooldridge is its Washington bureau chief. They are the authors of “God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith is Changing the World,” published by Penguin Press.

Atheism is on the rise around the world, so does that mean spirituality will soon be a thing of the past? Rachel Nuwer discovers that the answer is far from simple.

________

A growing number of people, millions worldwide, say they believe that life definitively ends at death – that there is no God, no afterlife and no divine plan. And it’s an outlook that could be gaining momentum – despite its lack of cheer. In some countries, openly acknowledged atheism has never been more popular.

“There’s absolutely more atheists around today than ever before, both in sheer numbers and as a percentage of humanity,” says Phil Zuckerman, a professor of sociology and secular studies at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, and author of Living the Secular Life. According to a Gallup International survey of more than 50,000 people in 57 countries, the number of individuals claiming to be religious fell from 77% to 68% between 2005 and 2011, while those who self-identified as atheist rose by 3% – bringing the world’s estimated proportion of adamant non-believers to 13%.

While atheists certainly are not the majority, could it be that these figures are a harbinger of things to come? Assuming global trends continue might religion someday disappear entirely?

It’s impossible to predict the future, but examining what we know about religion – including why it evolved in the first place, and why some people chose to believe in it and others abandon it – can hint at how our relationship with the divine might play out in decades or centuries to come.

Scholars are still trying to tease out the complex factors that drive an individual or a nation toward atheism, but there are a few commonalities. Part of religion’s appeal is that it offers security in an uncertain world. So not surprisingly, nations that report the highest rates of atheism tend to be those that provide their citizens with relatively high economic, political and existential stability. “Security in society seems to diminish religious belief,” Zuckerman says. Capitalism, access to technology and education also seems to correlate with a corrosion of religiosity in some populations, he adds.

Crisis of faith

Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada, South Korea, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, France and Uruguay (where the majority of citizens have European roots) are all places where religion was important just a century or so ago, but that now report some of the lowest belief rates in the world. These countries feature strong educational and social security systems, low inequality and are all relatively wealthy. “Basically, people are less scared about what might befall them,” says Quentin Atkinson, a psychologist at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Yet decline in belief seems to be occurring across the board, including in places that are still strongly religious, such as Brazil, Jamaica and Ireland. “Very few societies are more religious today than they were 40 or 50 years ago,” Zuckerman says. “The only exception might be Iran, but that’s tricky because secular people might be hiding their beliefs.”

The United States, too, is an outlier in that it is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, but also has high rates of religiosity. (Still, a recent Pew survey revealed that, between 2007 and 2012, the proportion of Americans who said they are atheist rose from 1.6% to 2.4%.)

Decline, however, does not mean disappearance, says Ara Norenzayan, a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and author of Big Gods. Existential security is more fallible than it seems. In a moment, everything can change: a drunk driver can kill a loved one; a tornado can destroy a town; a doctor can issue a terminal diagnosis. As climate change wreaks havoc on the world in coming years and natural resources potentially grow scarce, then suffering and hardship could fuel religiosity. “People want to escape suffering, but if they can’t get out of it, they want to find meaning,” Norenzayan says. “For some reason, religion seems to give meaning to suffering – much more so than any secular ideal or belief that we know of.”

This phenomenon constantly plays out in hospital rooms and disaster zones around the world. In 2011, for example, a massive earthquake struck Christchurch, New Zealand – a highly secular society. There was a sudden spike of religiosity in the people who experienced that event, but the rest of the country remained as secular as ever. While exceptions to this rule do exist – religion in Japan plummeted following World War II, for instance – for the most part, Zuckerman says, we adhere by the Christchurch model. “If experiencing something terrible caused all people to become atheists, then we’d all be atheists,” he says.

The mind of god

But even if the world’s troubles were miraculously solved and we all led peaceful lives in equity, religion would probably still be around. This is because a god-shaped hole seems to exist in our species’ neuropsychology, thanks to a quirk of our evolution.

Understanding this requires a delve into “dual process theory”. This psychological staple states that we have two very basic forms of thought: System 1 and System 2. System 2 evolved relatively recently. It’s the voice in our head – the narrator who never seems to shut up – that enables us to plan and think logically.

System 1, on the other hand, is intuitive, instinctual and automatic. These capabilities regularly develop in humans, regardless of where they are born. They are survival mechanisms. System 1 bestows us with an innate revulsion of rotting meat, allows us to speak our native language without thinking about it and gives babies the ability to recognise parents and distinguish between living and nonliving objects. It makes us prone to looking for patterns to better understand our world, and to seek meaning for seemingly random events like natural disasters or the death of loved ones.

In addition to helping us navigate the dangers of the world and find a mate, some scholars think that System 1 also enabled religions to evolve and perpetuate. System 1, for example, makes us instinctually primed to see life forces – a phenomenon called hypersensitive agency detection – everywhere we go, regardless of whether they’re there or not. Millennia ago, that tendency probably helped us avoid concealed danger, such as lions crouched in the grass or venomous snakes concealed in the bush. But it also made us vulnerable to inferring the existence of invisible agents – whether they took the form of a benevolent god watching over us, an unappeased ancestor punishing us with a drought or a monster lurking in the shadows.

Similarly, System 1 encourages us to see things dualistically, meaning we have trouble thinking of the mind and body as a single unit. This tendency emerges quite early: young children, regardless of their cultural background, are inclined to believe that they have an immortal soul – that their essence or personhood existed somewhere prior to their birth, and will always continue to exist. This disposition easily assimilates into many existing religions, or – with a bit of creativity – lends itself to devising original constructs.

“A Scandinavian psychologist colleague of mine who is an atheist told me that his three-year-old daughter recently walked up to him and said, ‘God is everywhere all of the time.’ He and his wife couldn’t figure out where she’d gotten that idea from,” says Justin Barrett, director of the Thrive Center for Human Development at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, and author of Born Believers. “For his daughter, god was an elderly woman, so you know she didn’t get it from the Lutheran church.”

For all of these reasons, many scholars believe that religion arose as “a byproduct of our cognitive disposition”, says Robert McCauley, director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Culture at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and author of Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not. “Religions are cultural arrangements that evolved to engage and exploit these natural capacities in humans.”

Hard habits to break

Atheists must fight against all of that cultural and evolutionary baggage. Human beings naturally want to believe that they are a part of something bigger, that life isn’t completely futile. Our minds crave purpose and explanation. “With education, exposure to science and critical thinking, people might stop trusting their intuitions,” Norenzayan says. “But the intuitions are there.”

On the other hand, science – the system of choice that many atheists and non-believers look to for understanding the natural world – is not an easy cognitive pill to swallow. Science is about correcting System 1 biases, McCauley says. We must accept that the Earth spins, even though we never experience that sensation for ourselves. We must embrace the idea that evolution is utterly indifferent and that there is no ultimate design or purpose to the Universe, even though our intuition tells us differently. We also find it difficult to admit that we are wrong, to resist our own biases and to accept that truth as we understand it is ever changing as new empirical data are gathered and tested – all staples of science. “Science is cognitively unnatural – it’s difficult,” McCauley says. “Religion, on the other hand, is mostly something we don’t even have to learn because we already know it.”

“There’s evidence that religious thought is the path of least resistance,” Barrett adds. “You’d have to fundamentally change something about our humanity to get rid of religion.” This biological sticking point probably explains the fact that, although 20% of Americans are not affiliated with a church, 68% of them say that they still believe in God and 37% describe themselves as spiritual. Even without organised religion, they believe that some greater being or life force guides the world.

Similarly, many around the world who explicitly say they don’t believe in a god still harbour superstitious tendencies, like belief in ghosts, astrology, karma, telepathy or reincarnation. “In Scandinavia, most people say they don’t believe in God, but paranormal and superstitious beliefs tend to be higher than you’d think,” Norenzayan says. Additionally, non-believers often lean on what could be interpreted as religious proxies – sports teams, yoga, professional institutions, Mother Nature and more – to guide their values in life. As a testament to this, witchcraft is gaining popularity in the United States, and paganism seems to be the fastest growing religion in the United Kingdom.

Religious experiences for non-believers can also manifest in other, more bizarre ways. Anthropologist Ryan Hornbeck, also at the Thrive Center for Human Development, found evidence that the World of Warcraft is assuming spiritual importance for some players in China, for example. “WoW seems to be offering opportunities to develop certain moral traits that regular life in contemporary society doesn’t afford,” Barrett says. “People seem to have this conceptual space for religious thought, which – if it’s not filled by religion – bubbles up in surprising ways.”

The in-group

What’s more, religion promotes group cohesion and cooperation. The threat of an all-powerful God (or gods) watching for anyone who steps out of line likely helped to keep order in ancient societies. “This is the supernatural punishment hypothesis,” Atkinson says. “If everyone believes that the punishment is real, then that can be functional to groups.”

And again, insecurity and suffering in a population may play a role here, by helping to encourage religions with stricter moral codes. In a recent analysis of religious belief systems of nearly 600 traditional societies from around the world, Joseph Bulbulia at the University of Wellington, New Zealand and his colleagues found that those places with harsher weather or that are more prone to natural disasters were more likely to develop moralising gods. Why? Helpful neighbours could mean the difference between life and death. In this context, religion evolved as a valuable public utility.

“When we see something so pervasive, something that emerges so quickly developmentally and remains persistent across cultures, then it makes sense that the leading explanation is that it served a cooperative function,” says Bulbulia.

Finally, there’s also some simple mathematics behind religion’s knack for prevailing. Across cultures, people who are more religious also tend to have more children than people who are not. “There’s very strong evidence for this,” Norenzayan says. “Even among religious people, the more fundamentalist ones usually have higher fertility rates than the more liberal ones.” Add to that the fact that children typically follow their parents’ lead when it comes to whether or not they become religious adults themselves, and a completely secularised world seems ever more unlikely.

Enduring belief

For all of these reasons – psychological, neurological, historical, cultural and logistical – experts guess that religion will probably never go away. Religion, whether it’s maintained through fear or love, is highly successful at perpetuating itself. If not, it would no longer be with us.

And even if we lose sight of the Christian, Muslim and Hindu gods and all the rest, superstitions and spiritualism will almost certainly still prevail. More formal religious systems, meanwhile, would likely only be a natural disaster or two away. “Even the best secular government can’t protect you from everything,” says McCauley. As soon as we found ourselves facing an ecological crisis, a global nuclear war or an impending comet collision, the gods would emerge.

“Humans need comfort in the face of pain and suffering, and many need to think that there’s something more after this life, that they’re loved by an invisible being,” Zuckerman says. “There will always be people who believe, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they remain the majority.”

A recent report by Barna Research listed the top reasons people question Christianity. Among those who claim to be Christian, practicing or otherwise, the problem of human suffering (23%) topped the list, followed by hypocrisy of religious people (22%) and conflict in the world (19%). Among those who claimed no faith, religious hypocrisy was far and away the most cited response, identified by 42% as behind their doubt about Christian beliefs.

Christians have faced the charge of hypocrisy in various times and places. Around a century ago, G. K. Chesterton addressed it, specifically those who boasted of their humility, sought worldly success, and trumpeted it when they got it. Like Chesterton, we should not be surprised when Christians fall short of Jesus’ commands. As one theologian put it, “To be a member of the Church is to carry the mantle of both the worst sin and the finest heroism of the soul ... because the Church always looks exactly as it looked at the original crucifixion, God hung among thieves.” Until Christ’s return, we will face accusations of hypocrisy. Many times, we will have earned them.

The Barna study results are also cause for optimism. While half of Christians have experienced doubts in the past few years, there is also an unprecedented openness to questions within the general population. Seventy-four percent of U.S. adults say they “want to grow spiritually.” Seventy-seven percent report believing in a higher power. Forty-four percent say that they are “more open to God today than before the pandemic.” As Barna CEO Dave Kinnaman summarized, “Though religious affiliation and church attendance continue to decline, spiritual openness and curiosity are on the rise.”

To say the least, the American spiritual landscape is complicated. A much-vaunted Pew study found, for example, that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that trust, among both individuals and in institutions, is falling. This affects our most important relationships across the cultural spectrum, in everything from government to employment, from neighbors to political parties, from church to the news media.

In other words, we face a crisis that is also an opportunity. People who are spiritually hungry, relationally isolated, and tired of being suspicious tend to be more open to spiritual things than those who are overly distracted. Technology that was supposed to solve our deepest problems instead misunderstood what they were, isolating us into echo chambers. The only entity that can offer the worldview depth, relational connections, and moral formation required to rebuild trust is the Church.

The writer Sheldon Vanauken, author of A Severe Mercy, once wrote,

The best argument for Christianity is Christians: their joy, their certainty, their completeness. But the strongest argument against Christianity is also Christians — when they are somber and joyless, when they are self-righteous and smug in complacent consecration, when they are narrow and repressive, then Christianity dies a thousand deaths.

Led to Christ by none other than C.S. Lewis, Vanauken does not suggest here that Christians should retreat from public displays of faith, lest their inevitable public failures lead to additional charges of hypocrisy. Rather, it is the opposite. What the world needs most right now is more Christianity, not less: more people committed to connecting ultimate meaning with everyday life, more minds sharpened by and formed in the truth, more redeemed people open to discussing what matters with their lost and searching neighbors, more hearts alive to both beauty and suffering whose hope is in King Jesus and His kingdom.

The final answer to the charge of Christian hypocrisy is faithfulness, not perfection. What the world needs most is the Church to be the Church, full of Christians who embrace their faith as personal but not private, and as not so much inviting Jesus into our lives as accepting the invitation into His life.

________

Copyright (c) 2023 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

The doctrine of hell, claims an article in National Geographic, “isn’t as popular as it used to be.”

But evangelist David Stockwell apparently hasn’t received the memo. He has preached on hell at every single one of his evangelistic meetings through 45 years of full-time evangelism and told Baptist Press he sees people respond “with conviction and a great desire to get right with God.”

Stockwell, president of the Conference of Southern Baptist Evangelists, is among evangelicals who defend the traditional doctrine of hell and dispute the notion that individuals who have not received Jesus as their Lord and Savior simply cease to exist when they die -- a belief known as annihilationism and defended by some scholars quoted in the National Geographic article.

Other proponents of the traditional view -- like California pastor Ben Skaug and Boyce College professor Denny Burk -- dispute National Geographic’s suggestions that annihilationism may soon become the dominant perspective and that belief in eternal conscious torment for the unrighteous has not always been the consensus view of Christians.

‘Compelled to preach the truth’

The National Geographic article, published May 13, reports that 58 percent of Americans believe in hell, down from 71 percent two decades ago. The article quotes seven contemporary and historical Christian figures who have defended annihilationism and four who support the traditional teaching on hell.

In tandem with the article, the National Geographic Channel aired a documentary titled “Map of Hell,” which explored the history of belief in the afterlife.

In the article, writer Mark Strauss claims “it is difficult to know” where “most evangelicals stand on the issue of hell.” He references “a conundrum that continues to tug at the conscience of some Christians, who find it difficult to reconcile the existence of a just, loving God with a doctrine that dooms billions of people to eternal punishment.”

For Stockwell, the greater “conundrum” is how a holy God can accept sinful humans as His children.

“Eternal judgment in pain, agony and flames of hell are what we all truly deserve,” Stockwell said. “But God ... who is rich in love and mercy, because of His great love for us, so loved the world that He gave His only Begotten Son” to pay “the penalty for our sin.” Only those who do not receive this gift must suffer judgment in hell.

The mandate to preach hell as a place of eternal conscious torment, Stockwell said, stems from Scripture passages like Jude 1:22-23 and the fact that “Jesus talked about hell twice as much as He talked about heaven.” During Stockwell’s ministry, messages that included discussion of hell have led people to Christ who went on to become International Mission Board missionaries and leaders at prominent churches among other paths.

“If we really believe God and what He has said in His Word,” Stockwell said in written comments, “then we would be compelled to preach the truth of what God has said: that those who die without Christ in their hearts will spend eternity in hell, forever and ever! We would realize that our friends and neighbors, members of our own families, people all around us are dying in sin, without Christ, and on their way to hell.”

Consensus on hell?

Skaug, who is writing a doctoral dissertation on the doctrine of hell at Gateway Seminary of the Southern Baptist Convention, noted that judgment of the wicked is commonly referenced in Scripture as an expression of God’s justice.

The Old Testament Minor Prophets spoke of “the day in which God would bring judgment to the wicked.” In the New Testament, every book “speaks to or references God’s judgment of the wicked,” said Skaug, executive pastor of Los Angeles-area Immanuel Baptist Church in Highland, Calif., and a former vice president at Gateway Seminary.

“Since all judgment has been given over from the Father to the Son, hell is the place where Jesus Christ will sentence the wicked (John 5),” Skaug said. “It will be a place where they will face eternal fire (Matthew 18:6-9). This place is the very same place that has been prepared beforehand for Satan and his fallen angels (Matthew 25:31-46), where the worm does not die and the fire is not extinguished.”

Hell, he said, “is described as eternal destruction in 2 Thessalonians 1:5-10[*]. In other words, it is the place where the omnipresent God is actively pouring out His perfect wrath on the wicked who have rejected Jesus Christ.”

Skaug questioned National Geographic’s claim that “in its earliest years, Christianity didn’t have a consensus on the nature of hell.”

The early church “did not have a unanimous understanding of the doctrine of hell,” Skaug said, noting that the third-century theologian Origen believed postmortem punishment was only temporary. “However, to say the early church did not have a consensus on the doctrine of hell is another matter.”

Theologians like Tertullian in the second and third centuries and John Chrysostom in the fourth century believed in eternal conscious torment, and Augustine popularized that view in the fourth and fifth centuries, Skaug said.

“From Augustine through the medieval period, the traditional doctrine of hell was considered standard orthodoxy,” Skaug said, and it continued to prevail in the Reformation era. The Enlightenment of the 1700s saw some churches begin to depart from orthodoxy, yet “the conservative church maintain[ed] its hold on the traditional doctrine of hell.”

A matter of authority

In the end, Skaug said, beliefs about hell are determined by an individual’s view of Scripture.

“Our job is not to judge the Scriptures to determine if they fit inside of our Westernized perspectives, but rather allow the Word of God to mold and shape our thinking so that our thoughts are closer to God’s thoughts,” he said. “If the Bible declares that hell is a real place, then evangelicals should not be embarrassed to proclaim the traditional doctrine of hell as truth.”

Burk, who contributed to the 2016 book “Four Views on Hell,” made a similar observation, suggesting many theologians who reject the traditional doctrine of hell “tend to be drifting in other crucial areas of doctrine as well.”

“I do not claim this is true in every individual case,” Burk, professor of biblical studies at Boyce, wrote in a blog post, “but it is true in many cases. What we believe about Hell is fundamentally a reflection of what we believe about God, His character, and His justice. Revisions in the doctrine of Hell, therefore, are often accompanied by other revisions that undermine orthodox evangelical faith.”

The National Geographic article, Burk wrote, uses a tactic common among annihilationists when it notes that Anglican author and pastor John Stott, who died in 2011, was an annihilationist.

While expressing profound respect for Stott, Burk argued “he had a patently unbiblical view of Hell” which, because of Stott’s “otherwise impeccable credentials,” has “provided cover for others who have drifted away from the traditional view.”

Burk questioned a prediction attributed to theologian Preston Sprinkle by National Geographic that “even within conservative evangelical circles, the annihilation view of Hell will be the dominant view in 10 or 15 years.”

Burk responded, “It may very well be that belief in annihilationism is on the rise. But still, is it the ‘dominant’ view? Dominant among whom? Bible-believing Christians? Bible-believing Christians around the world? I don’t think so.

“In the entire 2,000-year history of the Christian church,” he wrote, “the near consensus view has been the Eternal Conscious Torment view. The recent decline of that view in the West may simply be a sign of Christianity’s decline in the West. I’m not convinced it’s a sign the Christian church is undergoing some historic shift in its doctrine of Hell.”

Among Southern Baptists, seminary professors and other entity leaders must affirm the Baptist Faith and Message, which states in Article X on “last things,” “The unrighteous will be consigned to Hell, the place of everlasting punishment. The righteous in their resurrected and glorified bodies will receive their reward and will dwell forever in Heaven with the Lord.”

________

* The original article incorrectly had 1 Thessalonians 1:5-10.

Cities in the Southeast have the highest percentage of churchgoers and self-identified Christians while cities in the Northeast and Northwest contain the greatest percentage of self-identified atheists and agnostics, according to a new Barna study that largely confirms perceptions of the nation’s religiosity.

The data is based on nearly 40,000 surveys conducted over the last seven years by the Christian research group.

Birmingham (67 percent), Baton Rouge, La. (62 percent), Salt Lake City (62 percent) and Huntsville, Ala. (60 percent) have the highest percentage of churchgoers. Conversely, San Francisco has the highest percentage of unchurched people, with 43 percent saying they have not been to a religious service the last six months. Following San Francisco among unchurched cities are Portland, Maine (43 percent), Portland, Ore. (42 percent), Albany, N.Y. (42 percent), Boston (40 percent), Sacramento, Calif. (40 percent), Seattle (40 percent), Spokane, Wash. (39 percent), New York (38 percent), Phoenix (38 percent), Tucson, Ariz. (37 percent), and West Palm Beach, Fla. (37 percent).

Portland, Maine, and Seattle lead the way with the highest percentage of atheists and agnostics (19 percent), trailed by Portland, Ore., Sacramento and Spokane, each at 16 percent.

On doctrine, significant differences between cities also were evident. Nearly three-fourths of those who live in Charlotte, N.C. (73 percent) and Shreveport, La. (73 percent) agree with the statement that “the Bible is accurate in all of the principles it teaches.” But few in Providence, R.I. (27 percent) and San Francisco (28 percent) agree with the statement.

Still, a large percentage of the country self-identifies as Christian, with the highest percentage found in the South: Shreveport (98 percent) leads the way, followed by Birmingham (96 percent), Charlotte (96 percent), Nashville (95 percent), Greenville, S.C./Asheville, N.C. (94 percent), New Orleans (94 percent), Indianapolis (93 percent), Lexington, Ky. (93 percent), Roanoke-Lynchburg, Va. (93 percent), Little Rock, Ark. (92 percent), and Memphis (92 percent).

The lowest percentage of self-identified Christians are found in San Francisco (68 percent), Portland, Ore. (71 percent), Portland, Maine (72 percent), Seattle (73 percent), Sacramento (73 percent), New York (73 percent), San Diego (75 percent), Los Angeles (75 percent), Boston (76 percent), Phoenix (78 percent), Miami (78 percent), Las Vegas (78 percent), and Denver (78 percent).

From an evangelical perspective, the “self-identified” category does not mean that a person is a Christian -- only that he or she claims to be one.

The edition of TIME magazine timed for Easter Week 2011 features a cover story on the controversy over Rob Bell and his new book, Love Wins. Interestingly, the essay is written by none other than Jon Meacham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former editor of Newsweek –TIME’s historic competitor. Meacham, who studied theology as an undergraduate at the University of the South, helpfully places Rob Bell in the larger context of modern theology, even as he offers a basically sympathetic analysis.

Meacham explains:

The standard Christian view of salvation through the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is summed up in the Gospel of John, which promises “eternal life” to “whosoever believeth in Him.” Traditionally, the key is the acknowledgment that Jesus is the Son of God, who, in the words of the ancient creed, “for us and for our salvation came down from heaven ... and was made man.” In the Evangelical ethos, one either accepts this and goes to heaven or refuses and goes to hell.

Bell, Meacham writes, “begs to differ” with this “standard Christian view.” He then relates that Rob Bell “suggests that the redemptive work of Jesus may be universal — meaning that, as his book’s subtitle puts it, ‘every person who ever lived’ could have a place in heaven, whatever that turns out to be. Such a simple premise, but with Easter at hand, this slim, lively book has ignited a new holy war in Christian circles and beyond.”

Well, “holy war” is an exaggeration loved by the media, but Bell has obviously ignited a raging controversy within evangelical circles.

Meacham then traced something of the reaction to Bell’s argument:

When word of Love Wins reached the Internet, one conservative Evangelical pastor, John Piper, tweeted, “Farewell Rob Bell,” unilaterally attempting to evict Bell from the Evangelical community. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, says Bell’s book is “theologically disastrous. Any of us should be concerned when a matter of theological importance is played with in a subversive way.” In North Carolina, a young pastor was fired by his church for endorsing the book.

All that is a matter of public record now, but what makes Meacham’s analysis really interesting is what comes next:

The traditionalist reaction is understandable, for Bell’s arguments about heaven and hell raise doubts about the core of the Evangelical worldview, changing the common understanding of salvation so much that Christianity becomes more of an ethical habit of mind than a faith based on divine revelation. “When you adopt universalism and erase the distinction between the church and the world,” says Mohler, “then you don’t need the church, and you don’t need Christ, and you don’t need the cross. This is the tragedy of nonjudgmental mainline liberalism, and it’s Rob Bell’s tragedy in this book too.”

This may mark the first time any major media outlet has underlined the substantial theological issues at stake. Meacham understands what Bell’s proposal amounts to — “changing the common understanding of salvation so much that Christianity becomes more of an ethical habit of mind than a faith based on divine revelation.”

To his credit, Meacham also understands that Bell’s argument fits comfortably within the context of Protestant Liberalism. “Early in the 20th century, Harry Emerson Fosdick came to represent theological liberalism, arguing against the literal truth of the Bible and the existence of hell. It was time, progressives argued, for the faith to surrender its supernatural claims,” he explains.

Rob Bell, he suggests, “is more at home with this expansive liberal tradition than he is with the old-time believers of Inherit the Wind.”

Meacham is right about this, of course. Readers may differ with his analysis of other aspects of this controversy, and, in the end, Jon Meacham seems to admire Rob Bell, whom he describes as “an odd combination of Billy Graham and Conan O’Brien.” But he understands that the liberal tradition in theology is where Rob Bell now finds his home.

Finally, this may be the most telling portion of the article:

Is Bell’s Christianity — less judgmental, more fluid, open to questioning the most ancient of assumptions — on an inexorable rise? “I have long wondered if there is a massive shift coming in what it means to be a Christian,” Bell says. “Something new is in the air.”

Like Brian McLaren, who argues for “a new kind of Christianity,” Rob Bell now openly wonders “if there is a massive shift coming in what it means to be a Christian.”

“Something new is in the air,” he says. Actually, arguments for universalism and the denial of hell are anything but new. The real question is now whether the church has sufficient biblical conviction to resist this doctrinal seduction. Otherwise, it may well be that Rob Bell’s “massive shift” is the shape of things to come.

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Jon Meacham, “Is Hell Dead?,” TIME, Thursday, April 14, 2011. TIME’s cover reads: “What if There’s No Hell?”

[Article from 2001 on an experimental Episcopalian seeker-sensitive church, which apparently no longer exists]

Harry Brunett and Chuck Donofrio remember when they felt that church was worthless. Brunett left the Episcopal Church as a young minister in 1965 because it seemed irrelevant to the civil rights struggle. Donofrio grew up singing in an Episcopal boys’ choir in downtown Baltimore, but he never considered himself a Christian and dropped out of church.

After spending years in community organization, Brunett returned to ministry in 1992 as pastor of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, a growing parish in western Howard County.

Donofrio also came back to the fold. But the two men retained a profound sense of their earlier alienation, which they are now using to shape an unorthodox ministry in Howard.

To reach people who never enter a sanctuary, Brunett and Donofrio have used market research and focus groups, and have designed weekly services that, among other things, deliberately de-emphasize Jesus Christ.

“The sad fact is the name of Jesus Christ has become for many people exclusionary,” said Donofrio, president and CEO of a Baltimore marketing and public relations firm. “Many people experience using Jesus almost as a bludgeon to beat them into submission.”

This effort to arouse the alienated has the backing and financial support of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland and the keen interest of its bishop, the Rev. Robert Wilkes Ihloff.

Typical Christian evangelism, Ihloff said, “has been a turnoff for people. This is really kind of experimental. What you have, in effect, is a dialogue with unchurched people.”

Brunett and Donofrio teamed up in 1998, when Donofrio was giving talks to Maryland Episcopal clergy about marketing the church. After two years of research and planning, and a year of experimental services, weekly gatherings began last month at Clemens Crossing Elementary School in Columbia.

So far, the services have drawn a small crowd of about two dozen. The effort includes a newly launched Web site, www.journeyscommunity.org. [link is dead as of 2011]

Despite the small turnout so far, ministry members think there is a wide audience for their message. According to recent research, only 20 percent of Americans regularly attend church, not the 40 percent that pollsters have reported for decades.

The main Protestant denominations have declined from a high of 30 million in 1965 to 22 million in 1995, according to the Hartford Institute for Religious Research. Episcopalians have mirrored that decline, from 3.4 million to 2.5 million during the same period.

In blunt business terms, mainline churches are losing market share even as their potential audience grows larger.

“It took at least a decade before churches acknowledged, ‘This is a real trend, and we’ve got to do something about this,’ “ said Scott L. Thumma, a Hartford Institute researcher.

Some have succeeded by shedding hymnals and pews for contemporary “seeker services” -- so named for people who wanted a spiritual dimension but were not attracted to a traditional church.

First developed 26 years ago by a suburban Chicago church, these services, which feature popular music and multimedia presentations, are offered at dozens of Washington-area churches.

In the Maryland Episcopal diocese, which covers most of the state beyond suburban Washington, the bishop is supporting such outreach even in a denomination that venerates tradition.

Three years ago, Ihloff defended the provocative -- some said sacrilegious -- television and newspaper advertising by a Frederick County Episcopal church.

More recently, he helped direct $40,000 from the diocese to Brunett’s effort. The ministry attracted an additional $55,000 from private and Episcopal church foundations.

“To really reach unchurched people, we’re going to have to develop a new style of being churched,” Ihloff said. “That’s not historically different from how Christianity operated in the early days.”

Donofrio’s research has revealed that many people are exposed to formal religion as children, reject it and then become spiritually curious as adults. At that point, say outreach ministry members, people want to ask questions, not listen to answers.

“We’re enabling people to discover God themselves, maybe through Jesus, maybe through Buddha, maybe through any number of ways,” Brunett said. “It’s not a back-door way to catch people and bring them to the Episcopal Church.”

In fact, St. Andrew’s officials aren’t counting on new faces in their pews.

“We don’t see it necessarily as a direct benefit to us,” said Peter Radue, the senior warden of St. Andrew’s vestry, its governing board. “Ministry shouldn’t be.”

During the services, the writings of Saint Benedict and Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh have equal exposure, along with country singer Willie Nelson’s tune “On The Road Again.”

There are meditation and movie clips, elements of Judaism and even 12-step programs for substance abusers. The services are designed by a ministry team that includes not only Brunett and Donofrio, but also a psychologist and a Baltimore fiction writer.

“I can relate to a movie clip more readily than I relate to the Bible,” said writer Jennifer Grow, a member of the ministry team. “If things [in the service] are only Christian, I would have a hard time with this.”

But officials with the Episcopal Church’s national offices in New York City weren’t sure how the ministry fits with the denomination’s mission.

“It is so radically different, some would see it as a repudiation of the basic tenets of the Episcopal Church, which is a community gathered around for the story, Jesus’s story,” said James Solheim, director of the Episcopal Church’s office of news and information. “I haven’t heard of anything like this since the ‘60s.”

The Rev. Melford “Bud” Holland, national coordinator for the Episcopal Church’s ministry development, said seeker ministries shouldn’t be preachy, but at some point they need to make their pitch for Christianity. “That’s who we are,” he said.

Some who have visited these small gatherings in Columbia prefer the potpourri of spiritual exercises.

“I like the intent of people coming together to seek something -- not having the answers is a nice part of it,” said Sheila Campbell, who grew up in a Southern Baptist family and now is a member of a Unitarian Universalist Church in Washington. “You can give yourself over to the moment.”

Michele Consentini traveled from Carroll County last spring to try the experimental services. She enjoyed the small group discussions and Brunett’s informal talk about namaste, a Sanskrit word meaning, “I bow to the divine in you.” Hindus greet each other with the expression, which urges people to recognize God in others.

It was an idea, Consentini said, that reverberated days later when a casual acquaintance unexpectedly helped her cope with her disabled son.

“For me, it’s the message and what you are going to take away and incorporate into your daily life,” she said.

Now, this woman who grew up in a nonreligious family, who felt out of place in a traditional church, stands before the microphone each Sunday and sings for the gathering. She is a new member of the ministry team.

________

c 2001 The Washington Post Company

Church planting is hot. Few things inspire me more than young adults called to vocational ministry who want to take the Gospel to the hard to reach. The tougher the city to reach, the more they want to go. The harder to reach the people group, the more willing they are to pay the price to take the Gospel to them.

Yet in preparing for our church’s annual global ministries week when we bring in some of the partners we work with around the globe, I gained some new insights about the Moravians, a pietistic Christian sect that made frequent evangelistic visits to America and other nations during the colonial period. Most Christians only know about the Moravians as being instrumental in the conversion of John Wesley when he was returning from America to England as a failed Anglican missionary. The big reason for Wesley’s failure is that even though he was an ordained Anglican clergyman, he was not truly saved.

On the ship home, a terrible storm came upon the Moravians and Wesley. Fearing for his life, he was struck by their calm faith. He knew the Moravians had something he didn’t. Under great conviction, he soon came to personally trust Christ as his Savior and Lord during that famous Bible study on Romans on Aldersgate Street in London.

But what most don’t know is how the Moravians were such a dynamic missionary force in the 1700s and early 1800s. They were bold and courageous. Their zeal and passion for spreading the Gospel was the driving force behind their movement. I got to thinking. What happened? What happened to the Moravians?

So I began to do some research and found there are just over 800,000 Moravians today. How could this dynamic missionary force be so small now? Was it a classic case of embracing liberal theology that killed the missionary zeal? No, it was not.

Nathan Finn, professor of church history at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, says that the Moravians were part of the Pietistic movement within the Protestant church that reacted against the dead orthodoxy among many Lutherans and Calvinists of their day. The Moravians felt what was important was preaching the Gospel for the individual to be saved, or born again. They were so focused on that, they neglected doctrine. So what happened? This dynamic missionary movement lost its zeal because second- and third-generation Moravians didn’t know the basic doctrines of the faith. They didn’t turn from the Gospel to liberalism or unbelief. They just weren’t taught the transforming power of the doctrines of our faith. So the children and grandchildren lost their zeal for taking the Gospel to the world.

Could there be a more sobering warning to the church planting movement of today? What a passion young church planters and missionaries have for reaching the tough-to-reach with the Gospel! Yet where are the basic doctrines of the faith emphasized and taught? Will this movement go the way of the Moravians?

Praise music is great for worship, yet so often it is weak on doctrine -- especially in comparison with classic hymns of faith. Often, Sunday Bible study or Sunday School is confined to children while regular weekly Bible study for adults is evaporating. Small groups that are strong on fellowship and prayer and discussing the pastor’s sermon of the week are seen as the way to go.

Since parents have the major role in discipling their children, how can they do so without being taught key biblical doctrines of the faith? Is it realistic that the church meeting with their children once a week can get this done since so few parents will be trained for the task of spiritual leadership in the home?

Please know, I’m not advocating church as it used to be -- with the structure and methods of yesterday. I am only asking the passionate young church planters and missionaries of today: How is the Spirit of God going to lead you to truly disciple the new followers of Jesus in your care -- to teach them biblical doctrine so that each succeeding generation knows what they believe and why they believe it? Then hopefully the missionary and church planting zeal can continue to prosper with the third and fourth generations to come.

Some thoughts:

1. David Platt’s Secret Church is seeking to address this need, yet how can this type of teaching be incorporated in the local church on an ongoing, weekly basis? One great teacher heard once a year is just skimming the surface of the week-to-week needs in discipleship.

2. What Gen X and Millennial church leaders will step up and develop Bible study material on basic biblical doctrines of the faith in a style and language and methodology that Millennials gel with and are drawn to?

3. How can publishers and ministries incorporate Gen X and millennial writers that use the social networking tools of technology to provide churches -– especially new church plants and missionaries –- tools for teaching the Bible and biblical doctrine to adults, teens and children?

While it’s vital to raise these questions, the answers will come from Spirit-led Gen Xers and Millennials who become just as passionate about discipleship as they are about reaching the unchurched for Christ in tough-to-reach areas. This is my great hope for today’s passionate generation of planters, missionaries and young adult Christians: that 50 years and 100 years from now a few remaining Christians will not wonder, “What happened to the passionate church planters and missionaries of the early 21st century?”

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Bryant Wright is senior pastor of Johnson Ferry Baptist Church in Marietta, Ga.,

Want to offend a Millennial? You could just open your Bible and read it in front of him. But if you live out the teachings of Scripture, you just might win him over.

Earlier in 2014, I told you about some of the challenges in reaching Millennials for Christ, that is, young adults aged roughly 18 to 33. While 55 percent of Baby Boomers say they’re religious, only 36 percent of Millennials do. “Today,” University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox notes, “fully 29 percent of Millennials consider themselves religiously unaffiliated, a record postwar high. They are also much less likely to describe themselves as ‘religious’ compared with earlier generations of Americans.”

Well, how is this rising generation connecting to the Bible? In a word, poorly. According to a new study by the Barna Group, “Non-Christian Millennials hold ambivalent and sometimes extremely negative views about the Bible.”

How negative? The first thing to know is that a full 62 percent of non-Christian Millennials have never even read the Bible. Friends, that’s the kind of world in which we live — one with tremendous ignorance of God’s Word. It’s no wonder that the nation has gone so far downhill, so fast, because we can’t expect people to live like Christians if they aren’t Christians, and especially if they don’t even have a passing acquaintance with the Scriptures.

Non-Christian Millennials’ unfamiliarity with the Bible, however, has not kept them from forming an opinion on it — an extremely negative one. Barna says that nearly half believe “the Bible is just another book of teachings written by men that contains stories and advice.”

The most common words they use to describe the Bible are “story,” “mythology,” “symbolic,” and “fairy tale.” Fully 30 percent of Millennials allow that it’s a useful book of moral teachings, but nearly as many — 27 percent — agree that the Bible is “a dangerous book of religious dogma used for centuries to oppress people.”

Almost one in five say the Bible is “an outdated book with no relevance for today.” I don’t know about you, but those numbers kind of make me want to weep.

Although we obviously have a long way to go to overcome this prejudice, I’m glad to say that the survey gives us some pointers on how to do it — and how not to do it.

First, how not to do it: Barna suggests reading your Bible around a non-Christian Millennial is not likely to spark much spiritual interest — the opposite, in fact, is more likely to be true. According to Barna, “When they see someone reading the Bible in public ... they assume the Bible reader is politically conservative ... ; that they don’t have anything in common with the person ... ; that the Bible reader is old fashioned ... or that [he or she is] trying to make a statement or be provocative ... .Fewer than one in 10 non-Christian young adults indicate any kind of positive response.”

So what is a more effective approach among this group? According to Barna, “personal interactions” with people who have benefited from the Bible tend to bear the most fruit.

As we’ve said before, Millennials value relationships. We don’t need to be Bible scholars — although of course there’s nothing wrong with that. But we do, however, need to practice what the Bible preaches, and be neighborly.

And there’s more good news. The survey suggests that Millennials are fully capable of holding orthodox views about the Bible and the Christian faith. Nearly all self-identified Millennial Christians who attend church at least once a month and who describe their religious faith as very important to their lives believe the Bible contains everything a person needs to know to live a meaningful life and that it’s the actual or inspired word of God.

So when it comes to Millennials and the Bible, is the glass half full, or half empty? It all depends, gentle listener, on us.

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Copyright (c) 2014 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. “BreakPoint” is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

The number of Christians in America has dropped nearly 8 percentage points since 2007 while the number of religiously unaffiliated adults has increased by nearly 7 percentage points during the same period.

That’s the finding of the Pew Research Center’s 200-page study of “America’s Changing Religious Landscape” released today (May 12). The survey of some 35,000 adults drew a variety of reactions from Southern Baptist leaders.

“The results of the survey communicate growing evidence that the greatest need in America is a spiritual awakening,” Southern Baptist Convention President Ronnie Floyd told Baptist Press in written comments. “The time is now and the hour is urgent; our churches in this nation must come together in clear agreement, visible union and extraordinary prayer for the next Great Awakening and to reach America and the World for Christ.

“Simultaneously, we need to rise with the same urgency, having a vision to reach our communities, towns and cities for Christ, returning to the priority of evangelizing, disciple-making and planting Gospel churches exponentially,” said Floyd, pastor of Cross Church in northwest Arkansas.

Pew’s survey -- conducted by phone June 4-Sept. 30, 2014, in Spanish and English -- estimated a net decline of between 2.8 to 7.8 million Christians since a comparable survey in 2007. That translates to a drop from 78.4 percent of the U.S. population to 70.6 percent.

Most of the decline occurred among mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics, with each decreasing by approximately 3 percent as a portion of the population since 2007. For every convert to Catholicism in America, there are six former Catholics, according to the report.

Historically black Protestant denominations held steady between 2007 and 2014, and evangelicals decreased 0.9 percent as a portion of the population while increasing by some 2 million in terms of raw numbers.

“Generational replacement” as Americans from predominantly Christian generations died and “religious switching” were two primary causes of the decline among Christians, the survey found. A full 42 percent of Americans have a different religion than they did in childhood -- a percentage that accounts for switches between evangelical, mainline and historically black Protestantism.

Non-Christian religions have increased by 1.2 percentage points since 2007 to encompass 5.9 percent of American adults.

But the increase of the religiously unaffiliated population -- dubbed the “nones” -- was the “most dramatic” change, a Pew senior adviser told journalists during a May 12 conference call.

“This trend towards the unaffiliated has occurred among all age groups to some extent and among all the major racial and ethnic communities as well,” said John Green, a Pew senior advisor and distinguished professor of political science at the University of Akron. “In this regard, of particular note is a sharp increase in the percentage of Americans who self-identify as atheists and agnostics.”

While 25 percent of the nones claimed to be atheists or agnostics in 2007, 31 percent claimed those designations in 2014. Over the same period, the percentage of Protestants who identify with Baptist denominations dropped from 41 percent to 36 percent.

“This research reveals that which many of us have been suspecting for quite some time,” said Frank S. Page, president and CEO of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee. “We have seen the ever-increasing secularization of our culture and know that this is affecting those who call themselves Christians.

“Pastors and evangelists for years have said that we are always only one generation away from becoming a pagan culture,” Page told BP in written comments. “The importance of personal evangelism cannot be overstated. Our world needs Christ, and He has commissioned us to be the sharers of the Gospel. Let us recommit to telling those in our sphere of influence about the good news of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Ed Stetzer, president of LifeWay Research, underscored the survey’s finding that evangelicals now constitute a majority (55%) of American Protestants. He highlighted the steadiness of “convictional Christianity” amid the decline of liberal Protestantism.

“Christianity isn’t dying and no research says it is,” Stetzer wrote in a blog post. “The statistics about Christians in America are simply starting to show a clearer picture of what American Christianity is becoming -- less nominal, more defined, and more outside of the mainstream of American culture.

“For example, the cultural cost of calling yourself ‘Christian’ is starting to outweigh the cultural benefit, so those who do not identify as a ‘Christian’ according to their convictions are starting to identify as ‘nones’ because it’s more culturally savvy,” Stetzer wrote. “Because of this, the statistics show (on the surface) that Christianity in America is experiencing a sharp decline. However, that’s the path of those who don’t read beyond the surface. If there remains a relatively stable church-engaged, convictional minority, and there is a big movement on self-identification, that means that the middle is going away.”

Russell Moore, president of Southern Baptists’ Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, said he sees hopeful signs amid Pew’s report.

“This study makes it clear ... that people who don’t want Christianity don’t want the almost-Christianity offered to them by traditions that jettison the historic teachings of the church as soon as they become unfashionable,” Moore said according to an ERLC news release.

“The churches that are thriving are the vibrant, countercultural congregations that aren’t afraid to not be seen as normal to the surrounding culture. This report actually leaves me hopeful. The Bible Belt may fall. So be it. Christianity emerged from a Roman Empire hostile to the core to the idea of a crucified and resurrected Messiah. We’ve been on the wrong side of history since Rome, and it was enough to turn the world upside down,” Moore said.

With numerous dilapidated buildings and only 323 residents according to the 2010 U.S. census, Organ, New Mexico, appears on at least one website listing American ghost towns. But Pastor Mitch Newton prefers to think of it as a Holy Ghost town because of the surprising work God has done through the town’s Baptist church.

Over the past three years, Faith Christian Fellowship has grown from five worship attendees to more than 25, or 400% growth. The congregation has baptized six people over that span, with three more baptisms scheduled for the coming weeks.

On one occasion, a man jumped in the baptistery while his 80-year-old parents were being baptized, professed that he also wanted to be saved and was baptized with them.

“God is so faithful,” Newton, 71, told Baptist Press. “ ... He is doing the whole work. I don’t do anything. I just open my mouth” after a week of study and preparation, “and we let the Lord take it from there.”

Mining of various minerals drew some 1,500 people to the southern New Mexico community by the mid-1880s, but the mines all closed by the Great Depression. A town renewal occurred when the first nuclear bomb was tested in 1945 at nearby White Sands Missile Range. Yet eventually the community dwindled again to its present size.

Faith Christian Fellowship likewise had a history of dwindling.

When a church of another denomination split in Las Cruces, N.M. -- some 15 miles away -- one of the factions ended up in Organ as Faith Christian Fellowship with about 65 members, meeting in a building owned by the Rio Grande Baptist Association. Faith assumed ownership of the building in 2003 and began cooperating with the association some five years ago -- though with a greatly diminished membership.

Things began to turn around in 2014 when Newton and his wife Ginger accepted a call to Faith, having retired from decades of pastoral ministry in Oregon.

The Newtons launched their ministry with a Fourth of July block party that reached a couple of new families, said James Underwood, director of missions for the Rio Grande Association. In the months that followed, the congregation increased in number and ethnic diversity, reaching Anglos, Hispanics and an African American.

One of the five members remaining at Newton’s arrival confessed he didn’t have certainty of salvation, placed his faith in Christ and was baptized. Amid teaching of basic Christian doctrines and a steady stream of outreach, the largely senior adult church has even begun to see families and children attending.

“Since Mitch Newton has come as pastor, things have really picked up,” Underwood told BP. “We saw the little church begin to blossom and grow and reach people they had never reached before ... [Organ] is an unexpected place for this type of growth.”

Underwood added, “It’s not like [Faith] invented something new. They have just taken the Gospel and sown the seeds, and it has borne much fruit.”

Baptist New Mexican editor Kevin Parker wrote that Faith demonstrates why churches should never say, “‘It’s over,’ even when a congregation shrinks and members age.”

“Yes, some communities die and their churches die along with them,” Parker wrote. “But, a more important question arises, ‘What does God want?’ Church locations may be viable for a new church plant, or for other purposes. God may even want to revitalize a congregation, like in Organ’s case.”

As for the future, Newton said he “look[s] for continued growth” as he continues “preaching and teaching and loving” the people.

In the near term, that growth looks to include the baptism of a man who was walking by the church one Sunday morning in early March and accepted an invitation to attend worship from Ginger Newton.

“That morning he came down the aisle and asked the Lord into his heart,” Mitch Newton said, “and he’s been bringing people to visit ever since,” including his two sons who also are scheduled for baptism.

Americans apparently don’t know much about theology, according to a study released today (Sept. 28). Most say God wrote the Bible. But they’re not sure everything in it is true.

Six in 10 say everyone eventually goes to heaven, but half say only those who believe in Jesus will be saved. And while 7 in 10 say there’s only one true God -- Father, Son and Holy Spirit -- two-thirds say God accepts worship of all faiths.

Those are among the findings of a survey of American views on Christian theology from LifeWay Research, who conducted the study April 14-20, 2016.

Scott McConnell, executive director of the evangelical research firm, says most Americans still identify as Christians. But they seem to be confused about some of the details of their faith.

For example, he said, about two-thirds of Americans believe Jesus is God while half say Jesus is a being created by God. Those two beliefs don’t seem to match, he said.

“Contradictory and incompatible beliefs are okay for most people,” McConnell said.

The online survey on theology was sponsored by Orlando-based Ligonier Ministries. Researchers asked 47 questions on topics from prayer and the Bible to heaven and hell.

Among the findings:

Americans think God likes all religions.

Two-thirds of Americans (64 percent) say God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Twenty-four percent disagree. Twelve percent are not sure.

Americans of all ages hold this belief, from those 18 to 34 years old (62 percent) to those 50 and older (67 percent). More than half of African-Americans (69 percent), Hispanics (65 percent), whites (63 percent) and Asian-Americans (57 percent) agree.

The one holdout: Americans with evangelical beliefs (48 percent), who are less likely than Americans who don’t have evangelical beliefs (67 percent) to hold this view.

Evangelical believers say hell is for real. Other Americans aren’t so sure.

Eighty-four percent of those who hold evangelical beliefs say hell is a place of eternal judgment, where God sends all people who do not personally trust in Jesus Christ. Only 30 percent of Americans who don’t have evangelical beliefs hold that view.

Overall, fewer than half (40 percent) of Americans say those who don’t believe in Jesus will go to hell.

Many evangelical believers say everybody goes to heaven. They also believe that only those who trust Jesus as their Savior are saved.

Two-thirds of those with evangelical beliefs (64 percent) say heaven is a place where all people will ultimately be reunited with their loved ones.

That’s slightly higher than Americans in general (60 percent).

By definition, all those with evangelical beliefs affirm that only people who trust in Jesus Christ alone as their Savior receive God’s free gift of eternal salvation. Overall, about half of Americans (54 percent) say only those who trust in Jesus Christ alone receive eternal salvation.

Everybody sins but it’s no big deal.

Americans admit they aren’t perfect. But they give each other the benefit of the doubt. Two-thirds (65 percent) agree that everyone sins a little, but most people are good by nature. More than half (57 percent) say it would be fair for God to show His wrath against sin. But that wrath seems to be reserved only for the worst sinners.

Three-quarters (74 percent) of Americans disagree with the idea that even the smallest sin deserves eternal damnation. That includes almost two-thirds (62 percent) who strongly disagree.

The resurrection really happened. But not everything else in the Bible did.

More than half of Americans (58 percent) say God is the author of the Bible. About half say the Bible alone is the written Word of God (52 percent). Two-thirds of Americans (64 percent) say the biblical accounts of the physical (bodily) resurrection of Jesus are completely accurate. A quarter (23 percent) disagree. Thirteen percent are not sure. Almost all of those with evangelical beliefs (98 percent) agree, as do more than half of Americans who do not hold evangelical beliefs (56 percent).

Fewer than half of Americans (47 percent) say the Bible is 100 percent accurate in all it teaches. Forty-three percent disagree. Ten percent are not sure.

Americans are also split over whether the Bible is literally true. Just under half (44 percent) say the Bible contains helpful myths but isn’t literally true. Forty-five percent disagree. Half of Americans (51 percent) say the Bible was written for each person to interpret as he or she chooses. Forty percent disagree. Nine percent are not sure.

Americans believe in the Trinity. But it’s complicated.

Seven out of 10 Americans (69 percent) agree there is one true God in three persons: God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. Six in 10 say Jesus is both divine and human (61 percent).

But they’re fuzzy on the details of the Trinity. More than half (52 percent) say Jesus is the first and greatest being created by God. And 56 percent say the Holy Spirit is a force rather than a person. The Holy Spirit seems to be particularly confusing: A quarter (28 percent) say the Spirit is a divine being but not equal to God the Father and Jesus. Half (51 percent) disagree. Twenty-one percent are not sure.

Americans disagree about sex, abortion, homosexuality and gender.

About half of Americans (49 percent) say sex outside of traditional marriage is a sin. Forty-four percent say it’s not a sin. Seven percent are not sure.

Forty-nine percent say abortion is a sin. Forty percent say it is not. Eleven percent are not sure. Almost 4 in 10 (38 percent) say gender identity is a matter of choice. Half (51 percent) disagree. One in 10 (11 percent) is not sure.

Forty-two percent of Americans say the Bible’s condemnation of homosexual behavior doesn’t apply today. Forty-four percent disagree. Fourteen percent are not sure.

Women (53 percent) are more likely than men (45 percent) to say sex outside of marriage is a sin. Those who are high school grads or less (56 percent) are more likely to agree than those with bachelor’s degrees (44 percent) or graduate degrees (40 percent). Those with evangelical beliefs (91 percent) are more than twice as likely to agree as those who do not have evangelical beliefs (40 percent).

Americans with evangelical beliefs (87 percent) are more likely to say abortion is a sin than other Americans (41 percent). They are also less likely (32 percent) to say gender identity is a choice than other Americans (40 percent).

Personal salvation takes work.

Three-quarters of Americans (77 percent) say people must contribute their own effort for personal salvation. Half of Americans (52 percent) say good deeds help them earn a spot in heaven. Sixty percent agree that Jesus Christ’s death on the cross is the only sacrifice that could remove the penalty of their sin.

Withholding communion is frowned upon.

Sixty-two percent of churchgoers disagree with the statement, “My local church has the authority to withhold the Lord’s Supper from me and exclude me from the fellowship of the church.” Twenty-nine percent agree. Nine percent are not sure.

Men are more likely to agree (32 percent) than women (27 percent). Churchgoers with household incomes over $100,000 (65 percent) are more likely to disagree than those with incomes less than $25,000 (56 percent).

Those with evangelical beliefs (38 percent) are more likely to say a church can withhold communion or exclude people than churchgoers who do not hold evangelical beliefs (25 percent).

Most Americans don’t buy the prosperity gospel -- especially if they have money.

Two-thirds (63 percent) disagree with the idea that God will always reward true faith with material blessings. A quarter agree. Twelve percent are not sure.

Men (28 percent) are more likely to believe in the prosperity gospel than women (22 percent). Poor Americans -- those with incomes under $25,000 -- are more likely (28 percent) to agree than those with incomes over $100,000 (20 percent).

Those with high school degrees or less (33 percent) are more likely to believe that God blesses the faithful with material blessings than those with graduate degrees (18 percent).

Americans with evangelical beliefs (37 percent) are most likely to agree with the prosperity gospel. Americans who do not hold evangelical beliefs are more skeptical (23 percent).

McConnell said Christian theology is both simple and complicated. Most Americans agree with simple truths like “Jesus arose” and “Jesus saves,” he said, but few believe they need saving or they are not good by nature.

“Basic Christian theology is easy to find on a church’s beliefs webpage, yet most Americans don’t understand how the pieces are related,” he said.

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Methodology: A demographically balanced online panel was used for interviewing American adults. Three thousand surveys were completed from April 14-20. The sample provides 95 percent confidence that the sampling error from the online panel does not exceed plus or minus two percent. Margins of error are higher in subgroups. Slight weights were used to balance gender, age, ethnicity, income, region and religion.

Those with evangelical beliefs were determined using the National Association of Evangelicals and LifeWay Research evangelical beliefs research definition.

LifeWay Research is a Nashville-based, evangelical research firm that specializes in surveys about faith in culture and matters that affect churches.

Bob Smietana is senior writer for Facts & Trends magazine.

Not long ago, I didn’t know that the Seven Churches of Revelation were all located in modern-day Turkey.

Then a coworker and I made a three-day trip to the region, flying into Izmir, Turkey, where we rented a car and drove to find the seven churches.

In the end, we saw a lot of rocks.

Don’t get me wrong. They were beautiful rocks. But they were rocks, ruins of ancient cities once teeming with people long gone. In the apostle John’s vision of Revelation, Jesus spoke to the Christians in these cities, commending some but warning most. In reading Jesus’ words to the seven churches and learning about each location, I wondered how these rocks should change my life.

Ephesus -- Selçuk

The amphitheater in Ephesus, which could hold up to 25,000 people, was the venue of the angry riot against Christians in Acts 19. In recent times, it has been the venue for concerts by Sting, Elton John and Diana Ross, among others.

Ephesus was the fourth-largest city of the Roman empire in the first century. A thriving commercial center and port city, Ephesus also was the home of a temple to the goddess Artemis. The amphitheater in Ephesus, which could hold up to 25,000 people, was the venue of the angry riot against Christians in Acts 19.

This amphitheater also has been the venue for rallies and concerts. Sting, Elton John, and Diana Ross are among those who have performed there.

In Revelation, Jesus commended the Ephesian church for enduring hardships and hating the heresy of the Nicolaitans -- early Gnostics who wanted to blend Christianity with pagan practices like sexual immorality. But others in Ephesus had fallen from their first love of Christ and received a sober warning: “Repent and do the things you did at first” (Revelation 2:5 NIV). Some scholars think these Christians may have caved to pressure to worship at the cult temple of Emperor Domitian.

Over time, Ephesus physically shifted to what is now the small town of Selçuk, only a five-minute drive from the Ephesus ruins. Honeysuckle perfumed the air around the shops and streets I visited. The town is Muslim -- as is 99 percent of Turkey. Even so, a small Protestant church of former Muslim believers gathers in Selçuk for worship and fellowship.

Smyrna -- Izmir

Vertical columns that hemmed in a marketplace at ancient Smyrna contrast with the horizontal lines of a current-day parking garage in Izmir, Turkey, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities of the world, now with 4 million people.

The ruins of Smyrna’s marketplace are nestled in a city block of the thriving seaport city Izmir. One of the oldest continuously inhabited cities of the world, Izmir is now home to more than 4 million people. When we pulled up to the ruins of ancient Smyrna’s marketplace, high school students spilled out from their school. They seemed ambivalent to the millennia-old city ruins across the street from them.

Jesus’ words to the believers in Smyrna encouraged them in the face of coming persecution. “Be faithful, even to the point of death, and I will give you life as your victor’s crown” (Revelation 2:10). Indeed, not just in Smyrna but across the entire region, first-century believers who resisted the pressure of imperial cult worship endured persecution. Some scholars think this persecution was often economic, like the loss of a job or financial wealth (1). Probably for this reason, Jesus reminded them they are spiritually rich even though materially poor.

The early church father Polycarp was the bishop of Smyrna and a disciple of the apostle John. At the age of 86, he was burned at the stake for refusing to renounce his faith in Christ. Some of Polycarp’s last words were, “For 86 years I have been his servant, and he has done me no wrong. How can I blaspheme my King who saved me?” (2).

The modern city of Izmir is filled with secular modernists -- officially Muslim by name but sincerely disillusioned with Islam and the current political climate. They may know that Christians “used to” live in Izmir but most are unaware of the thriving Christian community of up to 500 believers scattered among at least 12 churches. Although many of these churches are historically Catholic or Orthodox, there is a growing number of evangelical Protestant believers as well.

Pergamum -- Bergama

The acropolis and an ancient amphitheater that seated 10,000 people overlook the city of Pergamum, now modern-day Bergama.

The ruins of Pergamum sit atop a hill overlooking the modern-day city of Bergama. A state-of-the-art cable car carried us to the top of the hill where we viewed extensively excavated ruins. Pergamum was a principal city of the Roman Empire in the first century. The most striking remnant is the steep theater built into the side of the hill that seated 10,000 people.

But it was the ruins of the temple to Zeus that sobered me. Some think this temple is why Jesus called Pergamum the place where Satan has his throne. Jesus had some serious warnings toward Christians in Pergamum who had fallen away from His teaching to embrace sinful behaviors. If they did not repent, Jesus Himself would come and fight against them. Jesus did, however, commend the few in Pergamum who stood strong and didn’t renounce their faith even when their friend Antipas was killed (Revelation 2:13).

Today, Bergama is made up of an “old city” of narrow cobbled streets and a more modern city. The locals I interacted with didn’t disappoint as they extended their famous Turkish hospitality. Happy to offer information, one man told me Christians visit the seven churches like Muslims visit Mecca -- to earn merit before God. My heart dropped to hear his misunderstanding of Christianity. Today, there are a few known believers around Bergama, but no churches.

Thyatira -- Akhisar

An apartment building overlooks the crumbled walls of ancient Thyatira, now modern-day Akhisar with more than 100,000 people. The ancient coins of Thyatira show a multitude of guilds including linen weavers, bronze workers, potters and bakers.

In the book of Acts, Lydia was a wealthy benefactress and convert to Christianity. A seller of purple cloth, Lydia’s original home was the city of Thyatira. The ancient coins of Thyatira show a multitude of guilds including linen weavers, bronze workers, potters and bakers. Thyatira was the only city of the Seven Churches built on flat ground without natural defenses, making it vulnerable to attack. In John’s vision, Jesus is described with feet like burnished bronze -- a metaphor Thyatira citizens would have easily grasped because of its bronze workers.

Jesus warned those in Thyatira who were tolerating the deceptive teaching of “Jezebel,” an unrepentant influencer or perhaps a symbol for the licentiousness that led people into Satan’s “deep secrets” (Revelation 2:20,24). Few in Thyatira had remained true to the faith, and Jesus encouraged them to “hold on” (Revelation. 2:25). He promised authority over nations to those who persevere until the end.

The scant ruins of Thyatira are unearthed in the modern city of Akhisar with more than 100,000 people. Contemporary apartment buildings line streets teeming with busses and cars. There is no church in Akhisar and no known believers.

Sardis -- Sart

The Jewish synagogue in ancient Sardis was in use for up to 600 years. Today, the town of Sart has nearly 5,000 residents -- with no known followers of Christ.

We parked our car -- the only vehicle in the gravel lot at the ruins of Sardis -- and climbed out to view the extensive excavations. The legendary wealthy King Croesus, who amassed gold from a nearby river, reigned from Sardis in the 500s BC. Ruins from the Temple of Artemis -- originally dating from the fifth century BC and rebuilt by Alexander the Great 100 years later -- still stand today. A stadium, shops and ruins of the largest ancient Jewish synagogue in the world, which was in use for up to 600 years, were a short jaunt from the temple. At the time of John’s vision in Revelation, Sardis was one of the wealthiest Roman cities despite having been rebuilt multiple times after devastating earthquakes.

Jesus’s words in Revelation sliced through Sardis’s thriving “health” to the church’s spiritual realities. Although there were a faithful few, most people in the Sardis church were spiritually dead and dying. Christ summoned them to “wake up,” “remember,” and “repent” (Revelation 3:2–3). Ruins from a small, fourth-century Byzantine church stand on the grounds of the Temple of Artemis. I found the crumbling church -- built a few hundred years after John’s letter -- to be a hopeful sign that some in Sardis took the warning to repent.

The modern town of Sart -- only a mile from the ruins -- has just over 5,000 inhabitants. A nearby village, adjacent to the ruins, carries on with rural life. Children run in the dusty streets. Farmers drive tractors into the surrounding fields. There are no known Christians in Sart today.

Philadelphia -- Alaşehir

This broken archway, now with a mosque in the background, is believed to have supported a church dome in ancient Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love now called Alaşehir, the “city of Allah.”

Little remains from ancient Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love now called Alaşehir, the “city of Allah.” Not established until the mid-100s BC, the city of Philadelphia was the newest of churches Jesus addressed in Revelation. The modern city of Alaşehir stands on top of Philadelphia. You have to look carefully to find any signs of the city’s former life. Crumbling Byzantine walls blend into its cityscape. One neighborhood has preserved the arches and sarcophagi (decorated stone coffins) from a sixth-century church. The call to prayer from the adjacent mosque interrupted our perusal of the sparse ruins.

I felt uncomfortable with a spiritual weight in Alaşehir. I tried to reconcile that feeling with the knowledge that this is where faithful believers were praised by Jesus, who said, “I know that you have little strength, yet you have kept my word and have not denied my name” (Revelation 3:8 NIV).

Jesus also told the church in Philadelphia He would keep them from the hour of trial. Whatever that refers to, it did not mean they would be spared persecution. Accounts report that 11 Christians from Philadelphia were martyred alongside Polycarp in AD 156.

Laodicea – Denizli

The church of Laodicea is still under excavation. Before the city was named Laodicea, it was called “Diopolis,” the “city of Zeus.” Built on a major highway, it was a commercial and banking center. Today known as Denizli, it is a city of more than a half-million people.

Ongoing excavations of the city of Laodicea began only recently, in 2003. The work continues to uncover an expansive wealthy city. Laodicea was built on a major highway and became a commercial and banking center. It was known for ear and eye medicine and for its black wool. The water was tepid and unpleasant, but nearby Hierapolis gushed hot thermal springs. Also nearby, Colossae was the home of pure cold water. Before the city was named Laodicea, it was called “Diopolis,” the “city of Zeus.”

The churches in Hierapolis, Colossae and Laodicea were relatively close and seemed to have a relationship with one other. The apostle Paul instructed that his letter to the Colossians be read also in Laodicea (Colossians 4:16) and he was encouraged by their strong faith in Christ (Colossians 2:5). Something seems to have changed, however, in the 30 years after Paul’s letter when John penned the book of Revelation. Wealth and independence had weakened their commitment to Christ.

In Revelation 3, Jesus used language and imagery familiar to them: riches, eye medicine, white clothing and tepid water. He said, “I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm -- neither hot nor cold -- I am about to spit you out of my mouth. You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked” (Revelation 3:15–17).

Most citizens of Laodicea resettled into the city of Denizli after a devastating earthquake in AD 600. It seems the ancient city of Laodicea fully died out after the Turks came through in the 11th century. Today Denizli is a bustling city of over a half-million people. Out of that number, three or four former Muslims have stepped out to profess faith in Christ.

Lessons from rocks

In the subsequent days after our trip, I’ve processed a few lessons to learn from these ancient ruins and from the letters to the seven churches.

• Remember Jesus

This Jesus of the first century is the same Jesus of today. He is described in these letters as the one who walks among the churches (Revelation 2:1), the First and the Last, and the One who was dead and came to life (Revelation 2:8), the one who has the sharp, double-edged sword (Revelation 2:12), the one whose eyes are like a fiery flame and whose feet are like fine bronze (Revelation 2:18), the Holy and the True One (Revelation 3:7), the Amen, and the faithful and true Witness (Revelation 3:14).

Although these letters occurred at a specific point in antiquity, they bring so much more than historical facts to those who are listening. They are the words of the Living One, and they bear weight on our devotion to Him today.

• Beware of falling

Jesus couldn’t make it any clearer: following Him requires our all. The believers of the first century felt the constant social pressure to compromise their faith by worshiping the emperor in cult worship, tolerating false teachers, and leading lifestyles that mirrored the pagan world around them.

Has anything really changed in the past 2000 years? We may not have neighborhood temples, but Christians today feel pressures to compromise in similar ways. Discipleship of Christ is serious stuff that requires an unrelenting commitment to our only Lord. We must always choose the way of the cross.

• Endure to the end

The Christian life is one of mountains and valleys. If we don’t keep a long-term perspective, we will become quickly discouraged and fall away. Christ speaks often of endurance in His letters to the churches. “Be faithful until death,” He encouraged the church in Smyrna. Those who endure to the end are called victors and will share in Christ’s glory (Revelation 3:21). Let’s take heart from the faithful examples of those who have gone before us and persevere in fidelity to Christ until our final breath.

• Expect God to raise up others

The people of Turkey are not the same ethnic people of the first century. A Muslim people, Turks are proud of their final overthrow of the Christian Byzantine Empire in AD 1453. Yet God’s church is growing. Throughout the many small towns like Bergama scattered across Turkey, men and women are searching for God. In 2017, nearly 10,000 individuals answered an ad to receive a New Testament in the mail. God is raising up His church in this ancient land.

Many of the ruins we visited were desolate. It was just my coworker, me and the lizards among the ancient stones. I remembered Jesus’ words to the Pharisees who wanted Him to rebuke those who cried, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord!” Jesus told them, “If they keep quiet, the stones will cry out” (Luke 19:38,40).

And so they do. Even stones built for pagan worship cry out that Jesus is King. He is building His church, and I want Him to find me -- find us -- faithful in the end.

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Footnotes:

(1) Christian Origins in Ephesus and Asia Minor by Mark R. Fairchild, p. 146.

(2) “Biblical Turkey: A Guide to the Jewish and Christian Sites of Asia Minor” by Mark Wilson, p. 311.