I’m reading some books on the de-churching of America, i.e. the drop in church attendance over the last 50 years.
Research being what it is, I know that anything can be proven, but I have my own research tool: the IM readership.
Without going into great detail, what have you seen in your own extended family? Do more or less people participate in church now than in the past? What is your personal take on the de-churching of America?
From where you live, can you see the emergence of a post-evangelical (Or Catholic or Mainline) or post-Christian culture?
In my extended family there has been a significant loss of church attenders over two generations.
There has been only one relative- and that in my wife’s family- who has started going to church after not going.
Particularly noticeable are the baby boomers who were brought up in church and dropped years ago.
Some of the de-churched do make their way to church occaisionally for special events, but that doesn’t count.
So here in the buckle of the Bible belt, I’ve seen definite generational slippage, and one can easily see it in churches that were full of kids in the 70s. Now many are struggling and many are dying.
This issue honestly frightens and confuses me more than any issue facing modern Christendom.
Nobody but me in my immediate family (mother, father, 2 younger brothers) has been to Mass in 10 years except on Christmas. We used to go all the time but just stopped and never even talked about why. I’m still totally clueless as to my parents’ and brothers’ thoughts on the matter, they don’t want to talk about it. Very confusing to me, I don’t understand it.
In my extended family it’s pretty much the same, except for my uncle who is a deacon and his son who is going to be a priest. This is on my father’s side.
On my mother’s side my grandparents raised their children basically unchurched… baptised Methodists at their grandmothers’ insistence but no church beyond that. Coincidentally an uncle on that side became Catholic because of his wife, not sure what they practice now though.
My wife and I went through a terrible experience with our church about 5 years ago where we suffered a miscarriage and felt completely abandoned by the people we had gotten to know very closely over the previous two years. We stopped going to church completely after that, but have still stayed “in orbit” around Christianity.
In the mean time, I have essentially deconstructed my upbringing in the evangelical ghetto and only this last weekend went to a church again voluntarily for the first time in 4.5 years. Most of my close friends who are also in their early 30s have gone through a similar disillusionment with varying outcomes.
My extended family is so secular and splintered and has been for so long that my conversion alone constitutes an increase in religious faith. My wife’s family shows the trend you mention, in that the older generations appear more faithful. But I think this is a hard one to measure on a small scale or short time frame.
My son (age 25) goes to church occasionally, but it’s not a high priority. My daughter is 23 and has been turned off to church. She hasn’t been in a couple of years.
Here in this part of the Bible Belt, there has been a definite slippage in the number of people who go to church. We mostly have old main-line, mega-church wanna-be, or traditional fundamentalist Baptist.
From a UM perspective I see it in our denomination, but not only ours. If Barna is right, and he probably isn’t off much, only about 20% of Americans attend a worship service on a typical Sunday. It very much concerns me too. Our children seldom attend other than at holidays. I keep wondering how this whole thing has happened when we have the Good News of Jesus Christ. We have all read literally dozens of speculations, but, the bottom line is in spite of all the analysis that we do, the decline continues.
I was in Oxford, UK, in September ’07 and attended an 8:00 a.m. Communion service at St. Michael’s at the Gate where I was the only person along with the greeter and the priest. At a later Methodist service, the Wesley Memorial Church was 25-30% full with a number of American tourists. I wondered how long it would be before that’s typical of America?
Do we in the church try to keep people so programed/busy that they just get tired and drop out because they don’t really get the spiritual “food” that they need and don’t know how to apply the spiritual disciplines in their lives?
To me there is a loss of mystery and awe in our church. It is so geared toward the pragmatic side of life. Each time I step foot into our church building I hope to have a corporate time of connection with our God however, the 15 steps to dealing with predominates the service. This kind of service makes it easier for me to stay home.
I have 31 cousins (surprisingly few since my parents were both the youngest of seven) and not one of them regularly attends church (that we know of; I don’t talk to all of them on a regular basis, but none are the active, go-getting soul winners the SBC wants) while all of their parents were regular church-goers and they were raised in church. Neither I nor my parents have attended (sick of the constant demands for money) for years, and while my sister and her husband/2 kids go, it is to a Joel Osteen-style church, and they even skip that when my nephew has hockey practice.
My girlfriend is from a hyper Dutch Reformed background (from Holland, and only 5% of the church is going to heaven) and their churches think they are doing well if half the kids brought up stay. Compared to the US stats, that’s probably correct.
Though it is interesting that half the kids from a church where only 5% are “heaven-bound” stay, while in easy-salvation America, the percentage is less.
Michael,
Off topic, I know. But I noticed you just jumped on the Twitter wagon. Et tu, iMonk?
Michael,
There is some good news. In Canada, between 1981 and 2001, Church attendance rose by 7.5%. This was as result of a rather remarkable rise in attendance in Evangelical Churches offset by a concerning drop in attendance in Mainline Attendance.
While looking at these numbers I also did a study into the statistical relationship between attendance and membership, and using the ratio between the two as a predictor of future attendance. I was able to find quite a lot of historical data on a number of U.S. denominations as well and was able to plot this data for 28 denominations.
I was most interested in the Southern Baptists at the time, as they had just come out with new attendance numbers. Their picture is not so rosy.
I captured all of my findings, along with my sources, in a post I entitled Southern Baptists in decline – Where will it end?” I encourage your readers to take a look and if they are interested in how their own church fits into the data they can email me at mike_kim_bell [at] hotmail [dot] com.
Couldn’t the drop in attendance amongst immediate family be also explained by religious attendance being more demographically dispersed than previous?
After all, there were – in the past – large ethnic groupings who wouldn’t have gone to church at all for whatever reason.
Rodney Stark in his book “What Americans Really Believe” has gathered a reasonable amount of evidence that purports to show that church attendance has gradually increased in percentage terms from 1776 onwards.
See this review:
http://setsnservice.wordpress.com/2008/10/28/a-summary-and-review-of-rodney-starks-new-book-what-americans-really-believe-01-05-congregations/
I’ve been to church twice in the last year. The main reason is work; my position requires me to work most Sundays. Even so, I’ve become discouraged because it’s been hard to find a church where I can hear the Gospel, and not this week’s numbered list on how to be a better person.
I’m pretty sure that assimilation has pretty much destroyed the lion’s share of Catholic culture. I’m one of the only single Catholic guy my age at my parish. For the most part, Mass consists of beleaguered parents and their screaming kids and old people trying to get ready to die. For me at least, this makes it really hard to figure out where my perspective and problems “fit in” to what I see going on around me. As for everybody else my age that would’ve been here, they stopping trying to make it work for them and left Christianity behind, abruptly and completely. Not having a peer group is probably the most difficult thing about the church these days.
On my mom’s side of the family, more or less everybody either became an agnostic or a Jehovah’s Witness, with one exception – my cousin abandoned his wife and two kids to become some kind of charismatic minister in Bolivia. On my dad’s side, only a handful of the old folks are religious. Even the most “religious” of us tend to just be cultural conservatives who like rituals. None of us are the kinds of spiritually transformed Christians that light up a church the moment we walk in.
For these reasons, I’m pretty sure Catholicism is going to decline precipitously in the US in the next 20 years. I even wonder if -I- will be Catholic in 20 years..
Also, since this is a thread about my favorite subject in sociology, I just want to show some love one time give it up for Rodney Stark, Finke and Stark everybody yes sirrr
Most everyone in my immediate and extended family go to Church, including my father’s mother and step-dad who used to not attend.
In my last two of years of high school (I graduated spring 2007) and the first couple of years of college I’ve seen the majority of my friends/acquaintances who claimed to be Christian leave the faith. I’m not sure of any people that have converted.
I attend a Christian College and you don’t see many people leaving the faith there. I met one guy who left the faith and he ended up transferring to a public school.
K from Saint Pete,
“Though it is interesting that half the kids from a church where only 5% are “heaven-bound†stay, while in easy-salvation America, the percentage is less.”
Actually, there are statistics that back this up. The aforementioned sociological ballers and shot-callers Finke and Stark gave us a rather amazing theory of religious economy that predicts that the more rigorous a church is, ethically, theologically and in terms of the commitments asked of you, the more likely it is to attract and keep people who find value in being there. Like a store that’s too Uptown for mere window-shopping, the clientele is going to be willing to make capital commitments pretty regularly in exchange for a higher quality, more focused communal and religious experience.
Rational Choice and religious economy are the jam.
The answers are simple, and complex. Lots of people have left. Of those remaining, there are basically two groups: those who are considering leaving and those who are in denial (and perhaps a few who are just unaware).
The simple answer – Over the centuries the church has morphed into a strange creature that only remotely resembles what it first was. For many, it is now an empty religion that does not meet them where they live.
The religion is more concerned with tradition than Scripture. The people are more concerned with themselves than the poor & needy. Time, money and energy are spent mostly for properties, staffing and programs primarily for themselves. Most of us see it as a religious club at best, or as some kind of political movement at worst.
Read “UnChristian”. That book pretty well lays out what our culture, especially the younger generations, think about the church.
Probably a lot of the remaining people in churches don’t know what to do about what is happening. This is not because there are no resources available to point the way. It is because most church leaders either refuse to use these resources, or refuse to make the radical changes necessary.
According to “UnChristian”, two of our culture’s prevailing attitudes about churches and Christians are that they are hypocrites and anti-gay. After the recent election, and all the things that were said regarding California’s Proposition 8 and gays, I actually hear lots of people saying these very things about the churches and Christians.
Few of my extended family have anything to do with church any more. They just don’t see that it is relevant to them in any way. They don’t want to help pay for the fancy buildings and staffs. They do not want to be identified with what they think of as nasty, hateful, bigoted people. My friends and neighbors think even less kindly of the church.
As one friend exclaimed in the midst of a large group of people, upon finding out that I am a Christian, “You can’t be a Christian! You don’t hate us. You actually like us!” The group nodded and murmured in agreement. If that story is not telling, what one would be???
I’d love to spend more time writing on this, but I don’t see that it is doing any good or changing anyone. Instead, I plan to get up from this keyboard and get back to cleaning a bunch of the “stuff” out of my house so we will have room to invite invite in people from the neighborhood to eat together and share our lives together and talk about life and who knows what else. We need each other. The church only needs me to help them pay their bills and to volunteer to take care of their kids or hand out bulletins.
We’re not mad. We’ve just moved on, and so has much of the culture. We’re never going back to that. I’m guessing that most churches will either close or change dramatically. Of course a few will remain unchanged until the bitter end. Yes, there are people who still use the horse and buggy to get around, but if my research is correct their numbers have declined considerably.
I come from a slightly different perspective, having grown up in the a cappela Church of Christ. What I have seen in my family is a general moving away, denominationally, from that tradition, not away from church attendance altogether. That said, I haven’t been to a Sunday service in… ?? On my wife’s side (Catholic and Salvation Army background), there is, and has always been, a non-attending trend. No one really goes to church at all.
Cultually, I think there is a trend toward a “post-Christian” society. I think church attendance and this cultural trend are linked, but I’m not sure this is the place for that sort of rambling.
I just read the link provided by Chris E. Some very good stuff there.
I guess I need to say two things here. There are a lot of hurting people who are leaving church for a number of different reasons. In the midst of all of our statistics we can afford to lose sight of this.
But there are also churches which are vibrant growing places. We have a couple within 40 minutes of us that appear to be doubling every 2-3 years. By their calculations about 40% of their growth is from new believers.
The sky isn’t falling, its just overcast and a little foggy in a number of places. In others, the Son is breaking through.
(Hope that last line didn’t sound too corny.
)
It’s dropped, and it’s a problem – but not as far as the Culture Warriors would have us think. Church attendance sky-rocketed back in the 1950′s following WWII, right now we’re closer to what it was pre-WWII. The major difference is that we’re not longer living in a culture where Christianity is the nominal default among the populace.
I’m not sure this is necessarily a bad thing – in a culture where folks who call themselves “Christian” are a minority you can’t have the type of complacency that’s marked a lot of US Christianity.
I now realize I didn’t even answer the questions.
I’m the only one in my family who has attended church on a regular basis for as long as I can remember. A few of my aunts and uncles still attend regularly, but I don’t remember the last time my parents or my sisters and their families were in church.
At my old home church, there was also a dearth of young adults. Many teenagers, after graduation, just quit coming. They sometimes would return after starting a family.
Why the decrease? Maybe we need more Gospel and less practical advice. If I wanted that kind of talk, I’d listen to Dr. Phil.
For the sake of providing a frame of reference, I’m 29. All of my sibs/cousins are between 21 and 33. My parents and their sibs/cousins are all in their 50′s or early 60′s (they all had us young).
Within my generation of the family there is SIGNIFICANT de-churching, even among those who would describe themselves as religious. Of the 20-some cousins and their spouces, less than five of us attend regular services. Within my parents’ generation of the family, however, most are still regularly attending church.
Now here’s an interesting exeption that proves the rule: woman I was dating earlier this year (same age as me) has seen her Catholic parish grow exponentially in the last few years due to their new priest. He shows the flock that he really cares and preaches accordingly. I heard one parishoner compliment him by saying that he preaches more like a Baptist than a Catholic. This growth has reached accross generational lines at that church. The Sunday night service is run by their highschool and college-aged kids (minus the stuff that only clergy can do). Every service I attended was full of folks from young children to seniors and everything in between. It honestly had me considering crossing the Tiber despite my concerns with major areas of Catholic doctrine.
I no longer attend any institutional system, and have no allegiance to any either. My parents are the only ones in my family who attend a meeting on Sunday.
Both my parents have stayed in the church, but my aunts and uncles have stayed basically generally religious. One of my uncles has basically turned into a classic Fosdick liberal. Interestingly enough, most of his children (my cousins) are openly opposed to Christianity in general.
I kind of wish the Midwest (where I’ve been raised) would be dechurched. Being in the buckle of the CHURCH belt (cause nobody reads the Bible down here), I’ve encountered way too much hatred toward Christianity, and much of it has been earned by old, bitter, complaining, probably unregenerate church members. I’m a server, and on the occasional Sunday lunch shift I’ve worked I’ve considered apostasizing. Every stereotype, every awful thing you’ve heard about the Sunday crowd I’ve seen. It’ll make you sick.
My LCMS congregation of about 300 (I’m a layman) has doubled in size over the last 10 years or so. It’s about 50 percent non-LCMS background. Many of those converts are from other denominations, to be sure, but many are new Christians as well. And lots of families with young children.
As for my own family — my wife and I both grew up in nominal/liberal Protestant families. We’re now fanatic Augsburg evangelicals.
My grandparents on my dad’s side went to church regularly. Neither of their children did – I’ve never been in a church with my dad. On my mom’s side no one went to church. My granny was raised Catholic but had a wretched experience in a Catholic orphanage as a child. Not too long before she took her own life at age 90 she proudly told me she didn’t believe in God nd neither did any of her kids. I became a Christian as an adult as did my husband. We raised our kids in the church and went on many side trips to find God-knows-what. We still go to church but none of our three adult children do. If I had to choose between not going and going to the church we mainly went to as we raised them, I wouldn’t be going either.
Over the past few generations, faith has been transformed into the activity of church. Rather than living by faith, day by day within our homes, our fathers before us have slowly left the Lord out of their daily lives. It’s habits I’m fighting as my wife and I start to raise our family. I can see it in the congregation where I attend. If God isn’t longed for in the home, he certainly won’t be welcomed by our nation.
Hmmmm. I think I have a preacher or two somewhere in my extended family, but I don’t know them very well. I wasn’t particularly raised in any Christian church, though I had some experience of many growing up (as well as a lot on non-Christian things). My mother (one of those boomers you describe) had … issues and did a lot of spiritual exploration. About 20 years ago she did convert to Roman Catholicism. One of her brothers converted to the Roman Catholic faith of his wife when they were married (very young). That part of the family tree remains Catholic. Her other brother is more or less Presbyterian. (Perhaps a little less than more.) My cousin on that side convert to the Judaism of his wife.
My father and many on that side are more ‘secular’ (though I’m not sure that’s the word that really fits). Not really atheistic. But not Christian really, either. My aunt is pretty clear on that point. My father is more ambiguous in his statements (and perhaps in his perspective).
My brother has remained pretty Christian his whole life. As such things go.
Most of my wife’s family are Roman Catholic, with some on her Dad’s side who are Baptist. (She grew up really only interacting as Roman Catholic.) Her brother is pretty close to agnostic or something similar. He also speaks softly on the subject of faith.
So far I’ve ended up Christian. My wife is as well. My older two children and quasi foster child (all adults) are not. My daughter-in-law is somewhat curious about Christianity. My youngest two are really the only ones who have essentially been raised their whole lives in one Baptist church. I’m not really convinced that, on balance, that has been a positive thing in their lives. I’m conflicted on whether I did the best thing for them or not. Sometimes I sense that it has done more bad than good for them.
My friends are all over the place. I think ‘post-Christian’ may be too specific a category and label. I see and have experienced the shattered glass of a deconstructed/deconstructing age. And I’m not sure many in the Christian realm, even among those who try to write or speak about it, really grasp that reality.
Of 4 grandparents, all died in the Faith. My grandfather even died of an aneurysm while saying the Rosary. Of 13 aunts and uncles, one still attends Mass, one is Pentecostal, and the rest have apostatized. In my generation, I believe I am the only one who attends a weekly religious service of any sort.
I’m 50 and family experiences and attitudes towards church virtually the same as IMonk listed above. If there were relatives younger than me who were zealous for the faith I wouldn’t know it. Not to be snobby…… One cousin my age who is a preacher has kids, I’m sure, who are churchgoers.
For relatives preceding me, everybody went to church and two generations removed were openly faithful. These were the relatives you didn’t smoke or drink in front of.
For those remaining in church,they seem to be growing in their faith. For the semi-goers, it’s about culture.
I’ve personally deemed it ,the anti-revival.
I’ve also failed at any seed planting coming to fruit bearing from others. My wife is about all whom I may have been instrumental in “soul winning”.
The two sides of my extended family are very different. On my Mom’s side, there are a lot of “spiritual but not religious” types dispersed all over the western half of the country. This hasn’t changed much in the last two generations, except for one Aunt and Uncle who became Mormons and then had a lot of kids, most of whom still go to their services. (For reference, I’m 24; my cousins are all between 16 and 30)
My Dad’s side of the family are farmers in Indiana, and those few who have stayed in the area are regular churchgoers. Those who have moved away (which is most of those near my age) I haven’t seen in a while, but they seem mostly not to attend church regularly. I suppose this is a clear-cut case of church attendance dropping with urbanization.
This thread makes me sad.
=(
I am one of 56 cousins. We spring from strong Welsh Baptist roots. Out of the nine siblings who are our parents, one has gone to church steadily and now an Aunt comes to my church to here me preach. Of the kids, 2 of them are serious Roman Catholics. At family get togeathers we group up and talk about the reasons to read Maccabees [or not]. We share a common faith divided by religion. Most of the others are social Christians, not attending anything.
I understand not going to church. When God called me to the ministry I refused, I told Him I was not fond of his people and had never been in a church I liked. Guess I told Him!
In my area RC churches are up for sale all over. Some new works buy them, but churches that once held hundreds now hold tens.
We have to face it. We failed to feed the flock.
Of our five grown children who were raised to be regular church-attenders, only two attend church now. Two are apathetic and one has fallen away from the faith completely.
Good question. It will be interesting to see what people say.
For my grandparents, their major connections to life outside their own home were extended family, job, and church, and not much else. That was true even of my one grandfather who was a holiday-only attender.
My aunts and uncles were by and large church attenders and supporters, but not to the level of my grandparents. (It could be argued that the grandparents overdid it, though.) Of my several aunts and uncles, I can think of only one uncle who stopped going. Though he was a nice guy, he had a longstanding reputation of being a bit irreverant, even from his youth. I can think of two uncles who started going again later in life after “rededication”.
In my generation, including my siblings and cousins, I think about half of us are going to church now. The ones who aren’t going just never ever “got it” as kids, and when they grew up, they saw no need to keep going. Why they didn’t “get it”, I don’t really know. (Also, I presume that there were kids in earlier generations who didn’t get it either. I don’t know why they kept going.)
Looking at my cousins’ kids, I would guess that, without some kind of “conversion experience” or whatever, less than half of them will be going to any church once they are grown.
Two of my three brothers and my one sister are still active churchgoers. My parents were raised Lutheran but left for non-denoms during the Jesus Movement. It seems like my nieces and nephews are staying active in their 20′s, though some are drifting into theological liberalism.
I’ve mainly attended church plants for the past ten years, so I can’t say if more people are going or coming. It seems to me that most church growth I see is from people switching, not new conversions. I blogged on this subject today:
http://livingtext.wordpress.com/2008/11/17/is-the-church-exhausted/
I’m assuming that in this thread, ‘church attendance’ means some kind of formal gathering involving some combination of Worship (praise songs, liturgy, whatever) and a sermon, along with the possibility of some sacramental observance.
Given that definition, my wife and I have pretty much given up on “church attendance” in any traditional form.
Why should I get up early on Sunday to go sit in an uncomfortable pew for an hour to sing songs I don’t like and/or don’t mean (or try to keep up with liturgy I don’t comprehend), and listen to some guy (who may not be all that well spoken or intelligent) tell me things I already know?
I have much better alternatives for fellowship in small groups, worship in my own prayer closet in spirit and truth, and access to teaching form some of the greatest thinkers and communicators in Christendom via the internet.
I’ll have an iMonk podcast or an NT Wright MP3 any Sunday before I care to hear another personal rant about the “radical liberal agenda” from Pastor JimBo at First Evangelical.
Short list of reasons various churches turn me off:
1. Sermons that are more politically inspired than gospel inspired. (This week:”The End of American Family Values and Why Harry Potter will turn your child into a Gay-marriage endorsing Liberal Pagan”)
2. No sense of tradition & history. (Our faith didn’t start in 1978 in Chicago…)
3. Over-commitment to tradition & history. (But it IS 2008 already…)
4. Closed-communion. (“Oh, YOU’RE the one true holy catholic apostolic Church. So glad I finally found you…”)
5. Over zealous recruiting tactics (“You’ll be back next week, right?”)
6. Lack of invitation to participate in community (Presupposing you didn’t offend us too much with your sermon (see point 1) we’d like to know how we can take the next step in getting to know people here.)
In short, I know of no church organization that invites me to participate in a truly Christ-centered community in a way that acknowledges the real world as I experience it.
This might be, I suspect, the definition of iMonk’s post-evangelical ‘wilderness’ or ‘driftwood.’ Those metaphors resonate strongly with me these days…
COMMENTERS: Please remember the assigned topic. If you are about to comment, but haven’t read the post, please read it and respond to the questions above.
It looks like we’re not normal of iMonk readers.
Only one set of my great grandparents went to church. My mother’s parents went to church. My father’s parents didn’t. My parents go to church. My family goes to (house) church. My sister’s family goes to church about once a month. All of my wife’s family goes to church regularly (two older sister’s families), although none of her grandparents or great grandparents did. Her parents didn’t start going until they were in college.
A secondary question: I always hear of a decline among youth in evangelical churches, but an increase in Catholic and Orthodox churches. Is there any research to this end?
Very few people in my extended family attend church. And if they do, I wonder sometimes just how committed they are to what I would term sound biblical faith.
As a Pastor on staff at a large Assembly of God church, it amazes me how little doctrine our people know and adhere to. The Assemblies have always prided themselves on exuberant worship and what we term the baptism in the Spirit. But what good is speaking in tongues if you don’t live holy and change the culture that you live in.
Part of the dechurching of America to me is the erosion of doctrine and cultural change effected by the church. Instead of reaching the lost, we spend our time talking to Emma and other nonsense. I am picking on Pentecostals because I am one! Because there is no standard, we have lost our battle for the hearts and mind of a generation.
Still there are some bright spots. Yesterday my church which runs about 1000 joined with First Baptist which runs 2000 for a combined outreach to our community. This was the culmination of a combined service we had a few weeks ago where we pledged to put aside differences to transform our community.
Yesterday was great, but both of our staffs learned something. Most of our people have no idea how to witness Christ. But that is another subject.
Our family has gone the opposite direction of most iMonk readers.
My maternal grandmother was the daughter of pioneering missionaries in Africa. My maternal grandfather was the only practicing Christian in his family. All of their descendants and spouses (twenty in total) are active in the church, many as leaders.
On my fathers side of the family, he was the first Christian. Since then his whole family (we believe) came to Christ. His brother does not currently attend because of mitigating circumstances.
On my wife’s side of the family, her sister was the first Christian in her family. (Remember the Nicky Cruz crusades?) Since then my wife, her mother, and her father have become Christians and are all active church attenders. So, two generations ago in our family we had two people who attended church. This has multiplied into 24 active church attenders. (And if you added in the number of people that various members of our family have introduced to Christ and who are currently attending church, the numbers would be in the hundreds or thousands.)
For my family, or what is left of it.
Cousins on my stepmother’s side, hurt by the church as teenagers, with a father who left it after WWII, not going. Only one (of 3) is even willing to talk about spirituality. She does regret not raising her daughter in a church.
Nieces and nephew. Not sure about, but I doubt if they are active. One reason for them is that their parents were at the church everytime the doors opened. That can, (not always) lead to problems.
Me, active, with scars but probably giving a few also.
To Ranger,
About Catholic youth. I think that if they can get involved with a strong, orthodox group they tend to stay active, but otherwise not.
To Patrick Lynch: I know what you mean about the lack of singles. Fortunately my diocese does have a singles group that is in my age bracket. PS If you think that being a relatively young single in church is hard, try being a middle aged one.
Most of my extended family always attended church. Some of the less faithful in attendance have become more involved recently, so our church attendance had increased.
Most of the family attend various mainline denominations, and many are quite active. I’d say only a few are post-evangelical.
Good question about post-evangelical Vs post-Christian. I know that in our area, the trend follows the nation, so, about 80% of the churched youth don’t stay in the church. Many, I’m afraid are becoming “post-Christian†because they have no viable options. What they really mean by their exit behavior is wanting to be post-evangelical because they are fed up with the Evangelical subculture. But they become post-Christian because they have no where else to go, but the evangelical church. So they are caught between the rock and a hard place, pun intended.
We need to provide them options . . . new wineskins for a different expression of Christian community. We older people are still wondering in the wilderness trying to figure things out for oursevles. I wish I had taken my kids out of the traditional church when they were young, but introduced them to a much better expression of Christian community.
Our Evangelical church (which I attend out of commitment to my wife), is typical. If you are very, very honest, the only reason high school students go is because of guilt manipulation by the adults and a since of penitence. “I must go to church because if I don’t it will make Mom, Dad and God sad.†I think that is a poor retention factor for teens.
I’ve argued with our pastor and elders because they think the best way to stop the hemorrhaging of our youth is to add more guilt manipulation saying things like, “We need to confront them over their music, movies and tattoos when they are young because once they are taken in by the world, we loose them!â€
What about creating the most honest, loving and accepting place on the freakin planet? Where the kids can talk about anything and not be afraid. Where they can ask any question . . . even “Does God really exist?†and that question makes the adults smile with joy rather than cover their faces in terror. Why do should they smile? Because it is an honor that the young person trust them so much to ask such a revealing question. I could go and on. But, we can’t out-entertain the secular venues to keep the youth. There must be a better way.
A little background, I was born and raised in western KY Southern Baptist churches (2). I am an (inactive) deacon at the church I am a member at. I am 36 married (10 yrs) with two kids (boys). My family currently does not attend church services.
I believe the membership in the rural country church is declining, too much trying to live up to the expectations of the “perfect christians”. On the other hand I believe the Mega churches are growing. More people my age are attending the non-denom mega church. I think the reason be, it’s easier. You don’t have to go hear a guilt trip every Sunday, saying I’m not living up to my potential.
From my experience most pastors have become motivational speakers. The ones in the rural churches throw on the guilt to get you down the aisle, but the ones in the Mega non-denom. churches pick you up and get you pumped up to get you down the aisle.
I vote we just leave it in God’s hands, it seems to me He is more than capable.
Just my $.02.
Wow, I didn’t even read J. Michael Jones’ post before I commented, but right on!
I don’t think that people are becomming post-christian I just think that people are putting their faith in the church rather than in God.
I have 8 ppl in my immediate family and all of us still attend church somewhere. However, for myself and all 5 of my siblings, loyalty to the institutional church is quite low. My wife and I left the institutional church 2 years ago and I doubt if we’ll ever go back. Which brings me to a relevant thought, perhaps the “churched” number is under-counted if the statistics Barna is using come predominately from main-line and traditional type churches. From my perspective here in the Mid-West, there is a veritable groundswell of house churches that probably are hard to count and often do not end up in the final statistics.
The church attendence in my family has dropped. Among my extended family, my parents were some of the odd ones out that attended church. Between me and my brother, I was the preacher’s kid that became and a preacher also, he was the one that basically dropped out. I don’t think he has anything against church. We visited his church a while back. I think my brother represents a lot of Generation Y: there’s just too much other stuff to do. My brother has 3 kids, works too many hours, is often on call when not “at work,” is taking tech. classes, then has friends of his own outside of raising the family, coaching soccer, etc. etc. etc. When we travel back home, we basically make an appointment to visit. I think Americans being overbooked has something to do with the drop in church attendance. Surely those of us who attend church feel it too.
I think Clark is onto something when he writes “I think Americans being overbooked has something to do with the drop in church attendance. Surely those of us who attend church feel it too.”
When we surveyed our community a few years ago, the top reasons for not attending church were 1. Not enough time/too busy and 2. Too tired.
I see my family falling into the same trap and so on this past Sunday we took a day off from going to “Church” but instead had family devotionals, and spent the day unwinding as a family. The difference in the kids attitudes today was noticeable.