A recent commentator at Eclectic Christian named “Christian Kane” has some really interesting poetry that he has written on his site.

Here is a taste of what you will read:

Bloody Love.
13 05 2009

My eyes lifted upwards,
no angels, colors, or shooting stars I see,
But a bloody mess nailed to a tree.
Fixed between Heaven and Earth
Love stretches it’s arms wide.
If I take the embrace it will stain my shirt,
But that man’s blood will heal my hurt.

So deep a wound requires remittance
Yet the earth is blissful of its debt
For its worthless appetites does it whet.
Strike the band and sing a chorus,
You who are about to perish.
You failed your calling and your maker,
Now is the time to pay the piper.

Failure never tasted so sour,
Nor did a victory seem so unloved,
As the coming king who is dyed in blood.
The peoples fall beneath Him,
But his pace does not slow.
If you side with Him you will yet live,
Though the rest are sent through a sieve.

I hope you take the opportunity to visit his site, The Eternal Uprising, and sample more of what he has to offer.

By Michael Bell – Previously published on InternetMonk.com

You may have heard people say that the “average” sized church in the U.S. or Canada is about 75 people. You also may have heard someone say that the “average” sized church in North America is about 185 people. Who is right? It all depends how you define “average”.

Statisticians use three terms when describing populations. “Mean”, “Median”, and a third term that won’t really enter our discussion today called “Mode”.

I have borrowed, and expanded upon, an analogy from the The National Congregations Study that was released last month, to help us understand the differences in these terms and why they are important to our understanding of churches in North America. What you will read here is U.S. data, but the numbers are very similar for the Canadian situation as well.

Imagine you are looking down a very, very long street, and all the churches of U.S. are lined up along the left side of the street from smallest to largest. In behind each church are all their Sunday morning attenders.

If you counted the grand total of everyone standing behind each church and then divided this number by the total number of churches that you see on this very long street, you would come up with a “mean” or “average” size of 184. “Mean” is usually what we mean of when we think of “average”. But this number of 184 is a very misleading number.

Lets say you start walking down the street, passing the churches with 5 people on a Sunday morning, 10 people, 15 people, 20 people. You continue walking until you have passed half of all the churches in America. Half of the churches in the U.S. are now behind you, half are still in front. The “average” church that you are standing in front of is called the “median” church. You look to see how many people are lined up behind it, and you see 75 people. That is right, half the churches in the United States have less than 75 people.

The average or “mean” church at 184 is 2.45 times the size of the average median church at 75. Why is this so? If you continue walking, you will get a better understanding of how skewed church numbers are within the United States.

So, you continue walking, past the churches of 80, 90, 100, 110. You walk until you have passed 90% of all the churches. You look to your left and you see 350 people lined up behind this church. Much to your surprise, although you have passed 90% of all the churches, over half of the churchgoers are still in front of you! This is why the “mean” is so much higher than the “median”. While most of the churches in the United States are small, most of the attenders go to large churches.

You keep walking, past the churches of 360, 370, 380. It isn’t until you reach a church of size 400 that you will have the same number of people behind you as in front of you. This means that half of church attenders in the U.S. go to churches larger than 400. If we were to use the word “average” again, we would see that the “average” or “median” churchgoer was in a church of 400. Not only that, but this means that half of all those who attend church are in less that 10% of the churches!

So know we know the “median” and “mean” of the average church, along with the “median” of the average churchgoer. What about the “mean” of the average attender? Let me mess with your mind a little bit more now. Imagine that you can interview everyone, standing behind each church, and ask them what size church they go to. You then “average” their responses. The “average” or “mean” response from the perspective of an attender is… drum roll please… 1169! Just to help us understand this number, let me give you an example. If you have 1000 people attending churches of 75 in size, then you would also have 1000 people attending churches whose sizes averaged out to 2263 people each. If you average out their responses you get the average or “mean” number of 1169. ((2263+75)/2=1169)

To see what this looks like graphically I created a graph of 100 representative churches. If you took a cross section of 100 churches from all the churches across America, the graph of those churches would look something like this. The churches are along the bottom of the graph. Their attendance ranges from 10 for the smallest church to 4000 for the largest. In reality, we do have churches much larger that than 4000, but out of every 100 churches, you might have 1 megachurch of about 4000 in size. As you can see, most church attenders in America (and the same holds true for Canada), attend big churches. Half of them attend churches larger than 400 and many of these are experiencing church many times that size. In fact, out of every 100 churches, the one largest church (in my example 4000 attenders) would have as many attenders as the lowest 70 churches combined!

This has huge implications for denomination structures and for Pastors.

Lets take an extreme example, the case of the Brethren in Christ in Canada (not to be confused with the Christian and Plymouth Brethren). For those not familiar with the Brethren in Christ, their theological heritage and influences are Anabaptist, Pietist, and Wesleyan. Right now, as I understand it, they are part of a North American Conference for decision making. What would happen if the Canadian churches, for whatever reasons, needed to go their own way? In Canada, half of the attenders of Brethren in Christ churches are in associated with a single church, The Meeting House, which has experienced significant numerical growth over the past 10 years. Currently it has over 50 staff, spread over 9 locations, with most meeting in movie theaters. If half your denomination goes to one church, what do you do when it comes to denominational decision making? One church, one vote? You are then saying that half your people don’t really have any say. One person, one vote, or one pastor, one vote? Then one church wields an inordinate amount of influence within the denomination. And what happens if that one church doesn’t like the direction that the denomination is headed? If it leaves, you lose half of your denomination, half your support for you national office, half of your support for your missionaries, half your support for your educational institutions. (Note that I am using the B.I.C. as a hypothetical example of a separate Canadian entity which does not currently exist.) Such a disproportionate split between numbers of churches and numbers of attenders that are seen throughout the U.S. and Canada, cannot be healthy for denominations. But what should we do about it, if anything? I am interested in hearing your responses.

There is a potentially a greater problem when it comes to bible college and seminary graduates, most of whom will eventually aspire to become solo or senior pastors. As previously shown, if these students come from churches in the same proportions as church attenders, then 50% of seminary students, come from roughly 8% to 9% of the churches. Their life experience in church is with larger churches. If they are initially placed as an associate, they will be building on their experience in other large churches. Yet, 90 percent of senior pastoral positions are in churches less than 350 people, and 50 percent of senior pastoral positions are in churches less than 75 people.

So they get placed in inappropriate situations: In places where people enjoy their church of 50 and don’t really want it to change. In places where power-point is a dirty word. In places where words like “missional” and “emerging” don’t really compute. In places where three piece suits still rule the day on Sunday morning. In places where you still can hear, “If the King James was good enough for the Apostle Paul, it’s good enough for me.” So the church gets frustrated, and the Pastor gets frustrated, and unless there is some give and take, it is a relationship that doesn’t last long. Some Pastor’s will get so frustrated that they will be out of ministry within a relatively short time frame.

Has this been your experience, either from the perspective of the church or the Pastor? What are the solutions? What can we do to prepare our Pastors and our churches better? I would love to hear some of your ideas?

I have just touched upon one aspect of the The National Congregations Study. I would also encourage you to follow the link to the original report and read some of the other interesting information that they have gathered about American congregations. Compared to most statistical studies that I read, this one is particularly well written.

By Michael Bell

Mission Baptist Church

In no particular order:

1. A website that is kept up to date, and has all the key information of the first page. if you were to google “Hamilton Ontario Baptist Church”, you would find us among the first few entries. I am a web developer, and while I am not responsible for the development or maintaining of the website, I appreciate the fact that it is effective and well done. Many of the new people who have come to our church have found it because of the website.

2. A church that, while seeking to be contemporary, has not neglected the traditional. I have had a couple of newcomers comment to me that we still sing some hymns and have a choir that sings during significant times in the church year.

3. A church that was willing to embrace change. The church was founded as a German church, by German speaking Canadians, with German services. They realized that they would have to change if they were going to continue to survive as a church, and change they did. At our recent church retreat, half of the congregation attended (despite the fact that it was a four hour drive), and half of those attending were between the ages of 5 and 17.

4. A church that is welcoming. The church has picked up quite a few families over the last two years. All of them have been warmly welcomed into the church, and I believe feel at home in the church. I appreciate the wide smiles and handshakes I receive on Sunday morning.

5. A church that cares about its students. We are close to a University campus, and the students from the University add a certain vibrancy to the church. I have noted that especially at the start of each semester, the church has made a special welcome to students. The church also provides a lunch for the students once a month.

6. Members who aren’t afraid to share the gospel. While this is not yet what I would call a strength, I like that fact that some of the newest attendees come from a beginner Bible Study that some ladies are running in their neighborhood.

7. A church that supports small groups. For those under the age of 50, there is quite a high involvement in small groups (the older ones still have their own German study). The Pastors and leadership team promote them from the pulpit, and held a small group fair to encourage involvement.

8. A church in which worship music is consistently “well done”. As a former worship leader, I am discouraged when not enough of an effort is put into planning services. At Mission Baptist, the worship team has a philosophy of “If you don’t practice, you don’t play.” I wish more churches would have this philosophy.

9. A church that has very good leaders. Both the Pastors, along with the Elder’s board, are quality people, dedicated to Christ, and are good examples for the rest of us to follow.

10. A church that values both men and women in leadership. I am an egalitarian. This is important to me.

11. A church that believes in a plurality of leadership. There is no “cult of personality” here. Instead the Pastors work in close cooperation with the Elders’ board.

12. A church that is not into legalism. Being followers of Christ is emphasized rather than rules and regulations.

13. In additions to number 12 above, we have a Senior Pastor who believes in: “In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, and in all things charity.” I appreciate the good things he has to say about other denominations.

14. An Associate/Youth Pastor, who leads the youth in meaningful Bible studies, and who isn’t content with “pat answers”, but is willing to explore some of the issues that youth face today.

15. A church that believes in second chances. Our Senior Pastor was divorced a number of years ago. For many churches that would automatically exclude him from ministry. Our church recognized God’s calling and gifting in his life, and was willing to call him as Pastor six years ago, a decision which they have not regretted.

16. A church that supports missions. Constant attention is given to our own missionaries who have gone out from our congregation. Support is also given to those serving at home in full time ministry, as well as those going out on short term mission trips. This is a church that does “Missions” well.

17. A church that encourages further ministry. Along with those ideas stated in the previous point, the church has been very active in encouraging an older youth in our church who is interested in ministry as a Pastor.

18. A church that is multicultural and open to others. Along with the English services, there is a Bible Study in German, and an afternoon service in Spanish. The church facilities are also used weekly by a Korean church, as well as the Navigators campus group. Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship also uses the church from time to time.

19. A church that encourages those in their spiritual gifts. Despite being new to the church, and not yet a member (another story for another time), I have been given opportunities to use my teaching gifts within the church is ways that I probably would not have gotten in other churches.

20. A church that is not afraid of the charismatic gifts. Although the church is not outwardly very charismatic, there is an openness to what the Spirit might want to do, in ways that I have not seen in many Baptist churches.

21. A church with a plethora of volunteers. Having come from some very small churches, it is nice to be able to sit back a bit, and see so many people engaged and active in ministry so that the work load is quite well shared. It is also nice to see so many who are willing to invest time with my children.

22. A church where many work quietly behind the scenes. We have a great group of trustees, who while never very visible, get much done around the church in terms of maintenance and upkeep.

23. A church that assists the less fortunate through its monthly communion offering.

24. A church where youth are actively involved in the ministry of the church.

25. Finally, but certainly at the top in importance, a church where the “good news of Jesus Christ” is preached faithfully.

These are a few of the things that I have come to appreciate about the church. I am sure that I will have more that I will add to the list as they come to mind. All in all though, over the last two years, Mission Baptist has been a pretty wonderful place to be.

What are some of the things you appreciate about your church?

I previously published this post on Internet Monk

I have received a lot of interest and feedback on my last two posts on Internet Monk, concerning how and when people switch between their childhood religion and their current faith. For those who have not had the opportunity to read them, you can read them here and here.

The question that I have been asked the most is about historical trends in the data. For example, from the graph that I provided you can see that about 50% of adults who were raised non-religious, subsequently joined a faith group. How has this changed over time? (For the purposes of this posting I am using the word “religious” in the way it has been used historically, that is, someone is religious if they are an adherent to a particular faith tradition.)

Bradley Wright, who teaches Sociology of Religion at the University of Connecticut, was kind enough to pass on a source of data where this was analyzed:

Fischer and Hout, in their recent book “Century of Difference” (2006) used General Social Survey data to analyze historical data about religion and childhood. For the most part, the graphs that they provide match up quite nicely with the chart that I provided. Historically, the outflows from Evangelical and Mainline Protestant church have been pretty constant over the last 100 years. Evangelicals have done a better job at retaining member than Mainline Protestants, and so over time have fared better. Typically about 75% of Evangelical 16 year olds will continue their Evangelical affiliation into adulthood. 25% will switch out, a number that is quite similar to what is seen in my chart. Catholics retention is not as strong as it used to be, but according to the Fischer and Hout data is now similar to that of Evangelicals.

The most striking change was for the non-religious. If you were raised non-religious between 1920 and about 1950 then you were more than 70% likely to join a faith group after the age of 16. This started changing rapidly in the 1960s, and by the time Fischer and Hout collected their data and published their book in 2002, the rate that at which non-religious became religious was down to 25%.

My chart, by nature of it looking at all adults regardless of age, had an averaging effect of younger adults and older adults, so my percentage of outflows from the non-religious was quite a bit higher than the 25% currently being reported by Fischer and Hout. What this means that if we were to somehow update my chart, and look at flows that were happening today, Protestant and Catholic outflows would be very similar to what you see on the chart, but outflows from the non-religious would only be about half as wide as are drawn on the chart.

These numbers should not surprise us. As my wife said to me last night, there is so much more support for the non-religious in school, media, and society in general than there was 50 years ago. It is not surprising that they are now retaining 75% of their adherents. I should also point out the trend in the non-religious retaining their adherents has not slowed. It may already be significantly higher than the 75%.

I hate being a bearer of bad news. I really do. People who know me, know that I am a pretty optimistic kind of guy. I don’t like to see that the non-religious are gaining ground. I have a lot of neighbors and co-workers who are not religious. Most of them do not see any need whatsoever for religion, or faith, or whatever you might want to call it. This is certainly a wake up call that tells me how important it is for me to live a Christ like life, to at least show them, if not tell them, that Jesus Christ is something worth considering.

As usual your thoughts and comments are welcome.

By Michael Bell

I recently published this post at InternetMonk.com

In my previous post at Internet Monk, I looked at two surveys conducted by The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life: Faith in Flux: Changes in Religious Affiliation in the U.S. that was released a few weeks ago, and which was a followup to their U.S. Religious Landscape Survey that they released last year.

By working with the numbers of the surveys I was able to come up with a chart that showed how Americans have been changing from their childhood faith to their current faith. One of the key findings was that Christian denominations are losing adherents though the back door so to speak than they are gaining new believers through the front door. If you haven’t had a chance to check it out, please check out the original post, as it will help you understand some of the ideas behind this post, as well us understand the magnitude of the changes.

Today I wanted to focus on the “when” and the “why” this hemorrhaging was occurring, but as I have been pondering the data, the “when” seemed to really stand out as being important. I was reminded of my preaching classes back in seminary, when our professor, Dr. Peter Ralph, would constantly remind us to find the “big idea” that needed to be communicated from the biblical text. I think the same holds true when looking at survey data. Here is the “big idea” that jumped out at me when going through the Flux survey data and reports:

Most religious life decisions, even among those who have been open to change, has been set by age 23.

Of those who were raised Protestant (Evangelical, Mainline, and Historical Black), and are now “unaffiliated with any religious group”, 85% left their childhood faith before the age of 24. Of those who were raised Catholic and were now unaffiliated, 79% left before the age of 24. The same holds true for those coming back the other way. Of those raised unaffiliated, but who are now affiliated with a religious group, 72% left the ranks of the unaffiliated before the age of 24.

I can’t emphasize enough how huge this is. I will state this again: Most religious life decisions, even among those who have been open to change, has been set by age 23. There is another much smaller group that will leave their Christian faith group between the ages of 24 and 35, but only 3-4% who will make the change after they turn 36.

Before I look at the implications of this, I would like us to consider some related statistics that also come from the Flux survey. Of those who were raised Protestant but are now unaffiliated, 64% attended weekly worship as a child, but only 29% attended as a teen. This too is huge. When we relate this back to our first set of numbers we can see that of those who left the faith before age 24, a large percentage had already made that decision by their teenage years. For Catholics, the decision to leave is somewhat delayed. Of those from Catholic backgrounds who become unaffiliated, 44% are still attending regularly as teens (down from 74% as children). As noted earlier, before the age of 24, most of those who will leave have already left, whether they be Catholic or Protestant.

So what does all this mean for us?

These numbers have significant implications for both discipleship and evangelism. While I have focused primarily on those leaving, it works both way. Those coming to faith make the decision when they are young as well. Let us look at the discipleship aspect first.

A friend of mine, Mitch, became a Youth Pastor of an Evangelical Presbyterian church a number of years ago. While the Church was of quite a decent size (about 300 attendance), they had no youth group, and almost no youth attending. I believe Mitch was hired as the church’s first ever Youth Pastor because the church knew that they had potentially lost one complement of youth, and were afraid of losing those who were approaching that age as well. As hard as Mitch tried, he could not get those youth who had left to come back, even though their parents will still attending the church. So instead he focused his energies on the kids in Sunday School and Junior High. By building into those kids lives, they had gone through significant discipleship well before they hit high school, and Mitch had the joy of working with them all the way through high school. Even after Mitch moved on to another church in a distant community as a senior pastor, he was invited back to participate in their weddings. It was wonderful to see those teens move into adulthood, still actively engaged in the church.

My point is that if we are not serious and intentional about engaging our young people before they hit their teens, then we may have left it too late.

After the teenage years comes young adulthood, and College and/or University have often been fingered as being culprits in the move away from the faith in young adults. Steven James Henderson in his 2003 study entitled “The Impact of Student Religion and College Affiliation on Student Religiosity” writes:

Railsback’s 1994 study of “born-again” Christian students… found that the vast majority of Christian students attend non-Christian colleges. As previously mentioned, of the group that attended public universities, approximately 52% either no longer called themselves “born again” or had not attended any religious services or meetings in over a year by the end of their college experience.

However it has been shown that those who do not attend College fall away from the faith in ever greater percentages than those who do attend. Regnerus and Uecker write:

The assumption that the religious involvement of young people diminishes when they attend college is of course true: 64 percent of those currently enrolled in a traditional four-year institution have curbed their attendance habits. Yet, 76 percent of those who never enrolled in college report a decline in religious service attendance.

So what do we do?

In Henderson’s more readable summary article, he points out that:

Students who attend institutions that are members of the Council for Christian College and Universities (CCCU) showed significant positive differences on almost all individual measures of religious commitment as well as an overall increase in that commitment compared to those who attended non-member institutions.

These numbers may be misleading because if I want to become and Engineer, I am going to go to a school that specializing in producing Engineers. If I want to become a Pastor, I am going to go to a school that specializes in producing Pastors. So it may be that those who enter CCCU schools are more intentional about their future Christian involvement, and as such score much higher in the surveys.

Even if the numbers are not misleading, this still gives me a bit of a problem, primarily I believe that Christians cocoon themselves far too much, and secondly, because as pointed out by George Wood, a leader in the Assemblies of God, only 15% of their students choose schools affiliated with the CCCU. His figures, based on the 2005 Church Ministries Report for the Assemblies of God show that there are:

315,000 young people between the ages of 13 and 17 in the 12,301 Assemblies of God churches in the U.S.

210,000 (two-thirds) will enter one of the 4,000 colleges or universities in America.

178,500 will enter a non-Christian college or university, while

31,500 (15 percent) will enter one of the 102 CCCU schools, including those affiliated with the Assemblies of God.

In nine years, after these 13- to 17-year-olds have been in college for four years (and if the same percentages hold true for those who don’t go to college) up to 189,000 of Assemblies of God youth – out of 315,000 – may no longer be following Christ.

So, while giving additional consideration to a Christian College may be of benefit to our students, we need to consider the large majority who are not going to go that route.

This is why I am such a large supporter of Christian Campus ministries like Navigators, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and what was formerly know and Campus Crusade. Church “College & Career” ministries are very important too. My wife and I were involved in three different Campus ministries while at University, and one significant Church College ministries. All four had a huge impact on our spiritual growth, as well as in establishing life long relationships with like minded Christians. I look at those I was involved with and so many of them went on to become Pastors, Missionaries, and leaders in their respective churches. It is for that reason that my wife and I give 25% of our tithe to Campus ministries, spreading it out over four campuses. Being able to contribute to the spiritual well being of University students is something I believe will have a lasting impact on both their lives and the future health of the church.

Henderson has a number of excellent suggestions for students, parents, and Pastors, for ways that students can remain strong in their faith during their college years. It is well worth reading.

I would like to add a couple of other thoughts to his list as well as tie back to some of my original comments about teens.

I realize that I am about to pick on Pastors here, but I see Pastors as the key implementer of change withing churches. Pastors, how intentional are you at engaging youth and young adults in your sermons? Go over your last 10 sermons. How many of the sermon illustrations were ones that young people could really relate too? Have you ever alluded to a group like “Cold Play”? Do you have a visitation schedule? If so, have you ever included a teen or a young adult in that schedule? Have you ever taken a teen in your church out for a baseball game or even a cheese burger? When was the last time someone under the age of 18 did a Bible reading in the service? Ushered? Ran the sound board, or video system? Joined the worship team? Let a Bible Study? My son who is 14, does all kinds of complex presentations at school on all kinds of subjects that he has researched. Why doesn’t he get the same kind of opportunity at church?

My point is that many of our people have become disengaged from their faith at a very young age. It isn’t enough to tread water, but we need to become intentional at engaging them. You should note that I am not advocating that we become youth focused in our churches, but that we should at least become much more youth aware and youth inclusive. We need to engage them beyond the time spent in their Sunday School class or youth group, and make sure that they are an integral part in this bigger thing we call “church”

My final note has to do with Evangelism. As noted earlier in the post, of those raised unaffiliated, but who are now affiliated with a religious group, 72% left the ranks of the unaffiliated before the age of 24. My friend Tim immediately came to mind when I read this. When I was at University, he amazed all of us in our Christian campus group by leading his entire residence floor to Christ. One of the guys who became a Christian went on to become the President of our group three years later. Yet this is something that should not surprise us, because this is a stage of life when people are seeking, learning, and discovering so many new and amazing things about the world around them. We need to take the opportunity to introduce them to the most amazing person of all: Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.

As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome.<i

By Michael Bell

This post was originally published at Internet Monk.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin’.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’.
- Bob Dylan 1963

For years I have heard about the many changes that have been taking place within the Christian World. Churches and denominations growing, churches and denominations shrinking. We have had a pretty good idea of who has been growing, and who has been shrinking, but with birth rates, death rates and other factors, it has been pretty hard to pin down the source of the growth and decline. Have Evangelicals been growing? If so, has the growth come from the non religious, Catholics, Mainline Protestants, or other religions? What sort of outflows have they experienced that have offset the inputs? Is the back door larger or smaller than the front door? How are the Catholics, the Mainline Protestants, the non religious and others doing?

Well now we know.

A few days ago, The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life released the results of a survey entitled Faith in Flux: Changes in Religious Affiliation in the U.S. This was followup to their U.S. Religious Landscape Survey that they released last year.

I have been busy in the last week doing a bit of reverse engineering on the numbers to represent the shifts in belief as best and as clearly as I can. Here is the resulting chart. You can click on it to see the full sized version.

What you are looking at is changes in American adults, from their childhoods to present day. As such it eliminates such factors as birthrate and death rate, and strictly looks at who is changing to what. We should note that immigration is a factor in this chart as present day Americans may have been born elsewhere, and so their childhood would have been in a different country. More on this later in the post.

The NONE group

The red color, or None, stands for those with no particular faith. The temptation is to think of this entire group as atheistic, but that is not the case. It is currently comprised of atheists (1.6% of total adult population up from 0.5%), agnostics (2.4% up from 0.2%), and those of no particular faith (12.1% up from 6.6%). I like to think of them as the “no God, don’t know, or don’t care group”. Of those who have no particular faith, roughly half of them (6.3%) would classify themselves as secular, and half (5.8%) would call themselves religious.

The “None” group, now makes up a total of 16.1% of American adults today, a huge increase from the 7.4% who were in this group in their childhood. The interesting paradox is that of those who were raised in this group half now have a religious affiliation, with 1.6% of American adults moving from None to Evangelical (yellow) and 1.0% moving to Mainline Protestant (orange) religious beliefs. Yet, while the None group has had significant outflows they have had much more significant inflows. 4.4% of American adults have switched into this group from Catholic (green). This is 11 times greater than the move from None to Catholic. 3.5% have moved to None from the Evangelicals, more than double the outflow, and 2.7% from Mainline Protestants, almost triple the outflow. There has also been an inflow of .8% of American adults to None from people who classified themselves simply as Protestant, without being willing or able to be more specific. This is represented by a blank space on the chart as we don’t know specifically from where these moves came.

One of my co-workers, who is an atheist, had this interesting question: “If 8.7% of Americans have switched from some type of religious belief to None is one generation, how many generations will it take for religion to be extinguished in America?” This question can’t really be answered, it assumes too much, that rates of change will remain constant, that all religious groups will have the same rate of loss, that help won’t come from other countries, and that God won’t intervene. But the fact that this sort of question has some sort of validity must be of concern to Christians everywhere.

CATHOLICS

Catholics (green) have the most to be concerned about. They are experiencing huge outflows of 4.4% to the None group, 2.8% to the Evangelicals, and a smaller amount of 1.6% to the Mainline Protestants. This is without any real significant moves to Catholic from any other religious group. In total, 10.0% of adult Americans have moved from Catholic to one of the other groups, and only 2.5% have moved to Catholic from these groups. From other surveys we know that most of this loss has occurred in the North East. While other surveys, like A.R.I.S have shown that Catholic numbers have not fallen significantly overall, this is because the one thing that has kept Catholic numbers from falling significantly overall has been Hispanic immigration in the American Southwest. If you were to visualize this on our chart, you would need to imagine that part of the green column that extends from the top to the bottom of the chart is in fact an input to American Catholicism from Catholicism in other countries.

EVANGELICALS

Evangelicals are at best currently treading water. Their inflows have been matched by outflows, albeit coming from different sources. Much to my surprise, Evangelicals and Mainline Protestants have in fact been swapping members, I had expected much more of a move from Mainline Protestants to Evangelicals. This has not been the case as 2.6% of Americans have moved from Evangelical to Mainline and 2.5% have moved back the other way. More on this later in the post.

Evangelicals have gained 2.8% in moves from the Catholics, and 1.6% in moves from the None group, but have also had 3.5% of their group move to the None group and 0.8% move to Catholics. These moves have largely offset each other as well.

A total of 1.1% has moved to the Historical Black Protestant group (blue), which I will discuss in greater detail when discussing this group. 1.1% have also moved to the “Other Religions” (purple) group which has only been replaced by 0.5% coming back the other way.

As an Evangelical, I find the moves to and from the None group and the Other group quite disconcerting. One of the attributes of being Evangelical is being willing to share the good news of Jesus Christ to the “lost”. With apologies to the Eastern Orthodox (who I grouped with others solely for numerical reasons), the target for Evangelicals is primarily the None and Other groups. Yet, twice as many Evangelicals are moving to these two other groups than are moving from these other groups into Evangelicalism. Clearly Evangelicals have failed mightily in their call to be Evangelical.

Treading water is a dangerous place for Evangelicals to be, because studies like A.R.I.S. show that they are an aging group facing a serious generational horizon, similar to that which has already been experienced by the Mainline Protestants. With a slow leaking away into the None and Other groups and a soon to be experienced generation decline, the Evangelical group looks to be quite different and smaller a generation from now. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it will require the next generation of evangelicals to have a focus and a vision that the current generation does not seem to possess.

HISTORICAL BLACK PROTESTANT

This is the first time that I had worked with numbers that has a separate classification for Historical Black Protestant. This group is made up of a Black Churches from a number of different backgrounds, the largest of which currently are Baptist at 4.4%, Pentecostal at 0.9% and Methodist at 0.6%. A significant majority of the Black Protestants could also quite easily be also classified as Evangelical, so it is not surprising that their largest influx, 1.1%, comes from the Evangelical group. All other inflows were 0.3% or less. From the data that I was able to obtain I was not able to determine the outflows from this group, but I believe them to be less than the inflows. At 6.9% in total they are a significant part of the American landscape, and it will be interesting to see what role they play in future American society.

MAINLINE PROTESTANT

As mentioned above the Mainline Protestant group has been holding up much better than I expected in terms of its inflows and outflows. Their inflows and outflows with Evangelicals have been virtually identical. They have gained twice as many from the Catholics (1.6%) as they have lost (0.8%). On the other hand they have had 2.7% move to the None group, and only gained 1.0% from that same group. They have also lost 1.1% to the Other group, but only had 0.4% coming back the other way.

It is clear then that the declines that the Mainline Protestants have experienced over the last 40 years have not largely been because of people switching to other groups. Instead it is because they have gone through a very large generational horizon. I recently read an older study that argued quite convincingly that most of the decline in the Mainline Protestant group could be attributed to the birthrate within that group. What we have seen here in this chart would tend to bear that out. While the worst of their declines may be behind them, like the Evangelicals they have significant work to do.

THE OTHERS

For those who are fans of the TV show “Lost”, this group does not refer to those who battled the Dharma initiative, although they too were called “The Others”. Instead this group is composed of those who did not fall within any of the other classification, and whose numbers were small enough that individually it did not make much sense to show the moves in and out, even if that were possible. When taken as a whole however we are able to look at the moves in and out. Both inflows and outflows occurred proportionally from across the religious spectrum. With the exception of the Black Protestants, inflows were in the range on 0.7% to 1.1% from the Non religious, Catholic and Protestant groups, and outflows were roughly about half that number.

This group is composed of the following:

Eastern Orthodox, currently at 0.6%, and unchanged from the childhood numbers. My apologies to Internet Monk contributor, Father Ernesto, for grouping his church family in this group.

Other Christian, not contained in any other classification, 0.3%, unchanged.

Jehovah’s Witnesses, currently at 0.7% and up 0.1% from the childhood numbers. This group had relatively large inflows and outflows, but ended up with very little change.

Mormons, 1.7%, down 0.1%.

Other religions, 4.7%, up 1.2%. It is this Other religion sub-classification that is of most interest here because it is the only one that has had significant change. When we look at the details within this sub-classification we see that of the other major world religions, only Buddhism had an increase of 0.3% of Americans The other increases (0.9%) came in other religions which were not specified, but were not among the world’s major religions. All we know is that half of this change came from Protestants. The Protestant sub-grouping was also not specified. This is an area in which I would like to know a little more about.

DID NOT KNOW / REFUSED

On the expanded chart, you will see a little white column that represents the 0.7% (childhood) to 0.8% (current) who could not or would not complete the survey.

CONCLUSION

There is a lot to digest here, and I am afraid that the tendency will be to jump to conclusions. Clearly some serious introspection needs to occur within the Christian community. Part of what will aid that introspection will be my next post where I will continue my analysis. The “Flux” survey includes what must be one of the largest series of exit interviews ever done, and I think this information is vital to where we need to be focusing some of our attention. Therefore, in my next post I will summarizing the reasons why all these changes have occurred.

As usual your thoughts and comments are welcome.

By Michael Bell

I had previously posted that because of the busyness of life, both for myself and Joshua Hearne, that posting to Eclectic Christian is going to be quite limited for the next few months. However, I am going to be posting infrequently at Internet Monk and I will repost those items here.

By Mike Bell

Ike made a comment on my recent piece on Recession and Church growth that I think deserves some further attention. Ike begins by quoting from Thomas Kelley who wrote:

The deepest need of men is not food and clothing and shelter, important as they are. It is God. We have mistaken the nature of poverty and thought it was economic poverty. No, it is poverty of soul, deprivation of God’s recreating, loving peace. Peer into poverty and see if we are really getting down to our deepest needs, in our economic salvation schemes. These are important. But they lie farther along the road, secondary steps toward world reconstruction. The primary step is a holy life, transformed and radiant in the glory of God.

Thomas R. Kelly, A Testament of Devotion, page 123.

Ike continues by writing:

Our economic recession began in a recession of the soul. If our hearts were filled with the Holy Spirit, we would be so freed from financial foolishness that we would not have established lifestyles, personally and nationally, that we now know are practically unsustainable, politically divisive, economically backward and perhaps even militarily risky.

The most relevant message to our nation today, and to ourselves, is personal repentance, confession of sin, newness of life and hope in the gracious promises of God in Christ.

Over the last few days I have been thinking about this, particularly as it relates to this blog. I don’t won’t to get so wrapped up in other statistics and other thing that I forget the focus that this blog was supposed to be about. It is about the good news of Jesus Christ, and how that is lived out throughout Christianity. Sure I find the numbers interesting and I am going to continue to put up posts along those lines. As much as possible though I want to try and tie them back to what it means concerning the good news of Jesus.

As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome.

Two blogs that I have been reading quite a bit recently are Girl in a Glass House and Willohroots. I don’t really care for either of the blogs’ artistic layouts, (sorry guys) but that is not why I go there. Girl in a glass house in an excellent writer who has written some wonderful stuff on her relationship with God. She has a wonderful way of weaving in quotations from other Christian writers. Willohroots tends to have interesting stories about being called into ministry in a small church. I feel a sense of kinship with him as he talks about how he is ministering to others.

Both of them have been a great encouragement to me and are among the most frequent Eclectic Christian commentators. If you haven’t had a chance to visit their sites please do so. I am adding them both to my blogroll.

By Michael Bell

The following post was originally published at InternetMonk.com.

Michael Spencer recently republished an article which looked at the problems that wealth creates for discipleship. He writes:

Have you ever thought about this? We are living in the most fabulously wealthy, excessively entertained and unimaginably prosperous nation in the history of the world. We have a standard of living, and a level of comfort, that much of the rest of the world cannot imagine…

The Jesus of the Gospel proclaims the promises of prosperity, real estate and parking places to be empty. If we will listen. He’s just as discomforting now as ever, unless we render him the harmless servant of our desires.

Rather than telling us about your best life now, Jesus talks over and over about persecution, sacrifice, voluntary poverty and laying down the images and symbols of success for the lasting worth and influence of the Kingdom of Jesus.

In the story of the rich young ruler, Matthew 19:21-24, Jesus makes it clear that it is very difficult for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven. It is so very true. When people are content in their present circumstances it is very difficult for them to hear the challenges of the gospel, and the demands of the Kingdom of God. This goes for both people with and without faith in God. For those with faith, it is a question of discipleship. For those without faith it is a question of evangelism.

Recession changes all that.

Recession turns peoples lives upside down. It helps them realize that they don’t have a sufficiency unto themselves. Not having a job, not being able to pay the monthly bills, wondering where the grocery money will come from, these are all things that cause even those that are furthest from God to question their own self-sufficiency. They come to a point where they realize that they can’t do it by themselves. And here-in lies the message of the gospel: We can’t do it by ourselves. Jesus had to die for our sins, because in and of ourselves we are unable to meet God’s holy standard. In times of prosperity it is a very hard message to communicate. In recession, your audience has a new appreciation of what that means.

Therefore, recession provides new opportunities for evangelism.

A number of years ago I watched a film about Jim Jones and his People’s Temple cult. One of the things that struck me when watching the film was how they presented themselves as a caring community. When someone came to the church without a job, at the end of the service they were introduced to their new employer. When someone came to church without a place to stay, they were assisted with that. Every week church members wrote hundreds of letters to visitors thanking them for being a part of their service, and what a wonderful church it was.

I can remember people around me shaking their heads and saying how terrible these techniques were. All the time I was thinking to myself, “Are you kidding me? If we did things like this our churches would be bursting at the seams!”

Recession and unemployment do impact our churches, and so one question to be considered is what sort of impact does unemployment have?

The leader in analyzing this has been David Beckworth, Assistant Professor of Economics at Texas State University. His study, published in late 2007, was entitled “Praying for a Recession: The Business Cycle and Protestant Church Growth.” Unfortunately the study is quite difficult to read for those who do not have a statistics or economics background. However, it was picked up by the New York Times in December of 2008, and subsequently by bloggers like Ed Stetzer. David updated his study in January of 2009, adding additional information and analysis. I wanted to take a further look at it, and pull apart the study a bit more than the Times and others did, hopefully, to explain in fairly simple terms what implications the study has for the church today.

David analyzed three sets of data. The first set was from a survey done by the Pew Charitable Trust in 2001 that looked at weekly attendance. According to the study, the probability of person attending church on any given Sunday was about 42%. It should be noted that surveys where people self report church attendance always trend higher than actual counts of people in church. That being said, it gave a baseline that David could use to look at four groups of people: Employed Evangelical Protestants, Unemployed Evangelical Protestants, Employed Non-Evangelical Protestants, and Unemployed Non-Evangelical Protestants.

According to the survey, an employed evangelical was roughly 20% more likely to attend church than the general population, a number that we should not find that surprising. The interesting number is that unemployed evangelicals were roughly 27 to 29% more likely to attend church than the general population. In other words, evangelicals that were unemployed were 7 to 9% more likely to attend church than their employed fellow church members.

For other Protestants we saw similar results. Those employed Protestants who were not Evangelical were less likely to attend church. Their attendance was roughly 12 to 13% lower than the national average. However, unemployed non-Evangelical Protestants were 12 to 13% more likely to attend church than their employed fellow church members.

So unemployment definitely has a significant positive effect on church attendance, no matter what flavor of Protestant you might happen to be. We might want to ask ourselves, if the unemployed are coming to our churches in greater numbers, what are we doing to help the obvious needs of the unemployed in our midst.

Recession also brings opportunities and by examining historical data we can see what impact recession has had on church growth.

David Beckworth’s data for church membership comes from an annual publication, “The State of Church Giving”. He found that this publication had consistent data on 14 Evangelical denominations and 11 mainline Protestant denominations between the years 1968 and 2004. The graph of the membership in these 25 denominations is reproduced below.

As can be seen from the graph, the trend in memberships in Evangelical denominations is up, and the trend in memberships in mainline Protestant denominations is down. This is true for the entire time span. Close observation will note that growth in the Evangelical denominations is much steeper/faster in the earlier years than it is in the later years. This is a concern for the Evangelical Church that both Michael Spencer and I have noted in previous essays as other data has shown that the Evangelical trend is likely to reverse itself and we will start to see declines. Over the entire time span however, the Evangelical denominations averaged a growth of 1.1% per year, while the mainline denominations averaged a decline of .94% per year. These are the base numbers that David Beckworth uses for his analysis.

When we divide the growth in Evangelical denomination between years in which there was no recession and years in which a recession occurred, we have another interesting observation. Growth for Evangelicals in non recession years was .98%, where as the growth rate for Evangelicals during years of recession was 1.52%. In other words Evangelicals grew 55% faster (1.52 / .98) during years of recession than in years of non-recession.

What is interesting is that mainline denominations did not see this same effect. There was statistically no real difference between recession and non-recession years. Why they did not see the same “bump” as the evangelicals is hard to ascertain. Perhaps it is easier to build on growth, as in the Evangelical case, than it is to reverse decline.

What about other economic shocks?

Beckworth found that for Evangelical Protestants, other economic factors like the unemployment rate, oil prices, real stock prices, and the difference between short and long term bond rates (an economic predictor) all impacted in a significant way on Church growth.

For mainline churches, most other economic factors did not have that much of an impact. The exception to this was stock prices. With stock prices, the effect was the opposite of what you might expect. As stock prices rose, membership rose (or actually declined less), with the converse also being true. This was the opposite effect that stock prices have on Evangelical congregations. Beckworth surmises that this is the case because mainline Christians on average are in a higher socio-economic class and as such are able to benefit more (in terms of available time) from the income and wealth effects that a rising stock market brings.

How long do these impacts last?

From the previous set of data along with 57 years of quarterly data that Beckworth had for the Seventh Day Adventists, he was able to show that the impact of the economic shocks were significant and generally lasted one and a half years beyond the date when the shock had ended. In the case of an increase in the unemployment rate for example, the greatest effect on membership/converts occurs one year after the initial shock and last another six months beyond that. So with the rise that we are now seeing in unemployment rates, our Evangelical churches may see a positive benefit from it until at least the end of 2010 or the beginning of 2011 (depending of course when we hit bottom.) From both the data from the Evangelical denominations along with the further data from the Seventh Day Adventists, it can be shown that one third of all church growth can be directly attributable to economic shocks.

So what does it matter?

As we are know in the midst of a full blown recession, there are great opportunities for both Evangelicals and mainline Christians to reach out to those who are hurting. As Michael Spencer said in his original post, “Jesus talks over and over about persecution, sacrifice, voluntary poverty and laying down the images and symbols of success for the lasting worth and influence of the Kingdom of Jesus.” I have heard the expression before that “people want a hand up, not a handout.” A recession is our opportunity to come alongside those in difficulty and show them that not only does Jesus care, but we care too. It is also our opportunity to tell them about about the ultimate sacrifice that Jesus was willing to make for a world that could not help itself.