Why Have People Stopped Going to Church? Here are Some Possible Reasons
The decline in church attendance in recent years has been dramatic.
Why we ask?
The reasons of course are complex and the article and video below help us to understand some of the causes.
But when we talk of getting people back to church what are we bringing them back to?
I have said for a long time that the decline of churches and the failure of the church in America is because of all of US!
We Christians have become so secularized that we have allowed entertainment, sports and a thousand other things to take precedence of our faith and relationship with Jesus. In the same vein America is in moral decline not because of the deep state but from the dumbing down of the average American.
We are lazy and incompetent and increasingly so as time goes on.
So what do we do? We pray, confess our sins and actually repent. We place our faith, our relationship with Jesus first in our lives and we humble ourselves before His mighty hand!
The Misunderstood Reason Millions Stopped Going to Church
"Nearly everyone I grew up with in my childhood church in Lincoln, Nebraska, is no longer Christian. That’s not unusual. Forty million Americans have stopped attending church in the past 25 years. That’s something like 12 percent of the population, and it represents the largest concentrated change in church attendance in American history. As a Christian, I feel this shift acutely. My wife and I wonder whether the institutions and communities that have helped preserve us in our own faith will still exist for our four children, let alone whatever grandkids we might one day have.
This change is also bad news for America as a whole: Participation in a religious community generally correlates with better health outcomes and longer life, higher financial generosity, and more stable families—all of which are desperately needed in a nation with rising rates of loneliness, mental illness, and alcohol and drug dependency.
A new book, written by Jim Davis, a pastor at an evangelical church in Orlando, and Michael Graham, a writer with the Gospel Coalition, draws on surveys of more than 7,000 Americans by the political scientists Ryan Burge and Paul Djupe, attempting to explain why people have left churches—or “dechurched,” in the book’s lingo—and what, if anything, can be done to get some people to come back. The book raises an intriguing possibility: What if the problem isn’t that churches are asking too much of their members, but that they aren’t asking nearly enough?
The Great Dechurching finds that religious abuse and more general moral corruption in churches have driven people away.." from the article: The Misunderstood Reason Millions Stopped Going to Church
The Great Dechurching | An evening with Jim Davis, Michael Graham, and Bishop Justin Holcomb
Video from Cathedral Church of St Luke
"We are currently experiencing the largest and fastest shift in American religious history. It's bigger than the First Great Awakening, Second Great Awakening, and every revival our country has ever experienced combined. But this isn't a great awakening, it's a great dechurching. 40 million American adults have left church, and almost all within the last 30 years. Also, Central Florida is one of the fastest dechurching areas in the country. However, the good news is that 20 million of the dechurched are willing to return. These numbers come from the largest and most comprehensive study of dechurching in America. It was commissioned by Jim Davis and Michael Graham, the authors of The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back?" from video introduction
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