6 Reasons Why Mormons Are Beating Evangelicals in Church Growth

Our churches face a demographic crisis.

Young people are leaving, even the Southern Baptist Convention is losing members, and when you drill down deeper---comparing church attendance with population growth---the picture looks even more bleak. Simply put, when America's fastest-growing religious segment is "nonreligious," we have a problem. The Barna Group recently compiled the results of a number of national studies and published a list of six reasons why young evangelicals leave the church:

1. The church is overprotective.
2. Their experience of Christianity is shallow.
3. Churches seem antagonistic to science.
4. The church's approach to sexuality is judgmental and simplistic.
5. They wrestle with the exclusivity of Christianity.
6. The church feels unfriendly to those who doubt.

These answers are just what you'd expect, because they correspond to many leading churches in modern evangelicalism that combine nominally traditional doctrine with shallow commitment and have been plagued by rampant divorce and extramarital sex---all against a backdrop of extreme cultural hostility. In other words, we're about 95 percent like the surrounding culture and hated for the 5 percent deviation.

But one religious group shows consistent growth year by year and decade by decade. Mormons, living in the same country and culture as evangelicals, keep growing their church. Why? I propose six reasons.

1. Mormons have bigger families.

This is the easiest and simplest explanation. But it's far from the entire story. In fact, if family size were determinative, then many churches in America would be growing at a rate that exceeded general population growth.  Continue at David French

Shocking Barna Statistic

*A new study shows that 100% of Barna statistics are skewed to lend credibility to his anti-church bias. 

I had a friend the other day quote me a Barna statistic.  My response was the above sentence.  I am not doubting that we can gain some benefit from Barna research and that some of it is actually legit and could be helpful.  However, I have become very leery of accepting anything that Barna throws at us.  First, because some of his findings have been shown to be off.  Secondly, because from what I have read of Barna he seems to be promoting a churchless Christianity.  

Bad Numbers

As Frank Turk has pointed out, there are a few secular studies—especially this one from The Wall Street Journal—that pulls the rug out from under Barna’s research.  Reputable statisticians from Baylor have shown that young people are not living the church in droves as Barna has reported and there is not statistical evidence that women are fleeing the church like lemurs on holiday.  

Further evidence is found in a book written by Bradley Wright entitled Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites…and Other Lies You’ve Been Told: A Sociologist Shatters Myths From the Secular and Christian Media.  Wright shows how many of the scare pollsters (like Barna) have bad numbers.  It seems that when those that are actually “born-again”, instead of those just claiming to be, are polled the numbers change dramatically. Continue at Mike Leake

Enough About Us Already: Our American Protestant Obsession with Being Loved by the World

“They like you,” according to Christianity Today‘s latest cover story (August 2011), by Bradley R. E. Wright, a University of Connecticut sociologist. Wright challenges the alarmist rhetoric of some in recent years who have created the impression that our fellow Americans hate us and we need a public relations makeover. Taking issue with George Barna among others, he argues that we have a persecution complex-or at least an almost pathological need to be loved. Actually, when asked to register their feeling in terms of warm or cold, the weather report for evangelicals is “generally sunny and mild”-somewhere between Jews, Catholics and mainline Protestants at one end and Muslims, Buddhist, and Mormons at the other. 

Admittedly, this could be the worst news of all. It’s like the anxious teenager who asks a group of peers, “What do you think of me?”, only to hear a nearly unanimous reply, “We don’t, actually.” As they say, no publicity is worse than bad publicity.

Introducing this issue, CT managing editor Mark Galli said he hoped that Wright’s article might help us to move on from self-obsession (“Inside CT,” page 7): “A movement that casts anxious glances to see how it’s doing in the eyes of others is in either childhood or adolesence…It’s time for evangelicals to put away childish things….The fact is that in the end, people don’t care if we are cool. They don’t think it an improvement to call ourselves ‘Jesus followers’ instead of ‘Christians,’ let alone ‘evangelicals.’”   Keep Reading...

I Am Unalarmed

In September of 2006 George Barna released what must be among his most influential studies. Following interviews with more than 22,000 adults and 2,000 teenagers from across America, he revealed that the majority of twentysomethings who are raised as Christians subsequently abandon the faith. The study found that “most twentysomethings disengage from active participation in the Christian faith during their young adult years—and often beyond that. In total, six out of ten twentysomethings were involved in a church during their teen years, but have failed to translate that into active spirituality during their early adulthood.”

Another survey, this one commissioned by LifeWay, found that “Seven in 10 Protestants ages 18 to 30 — both evangelical and mainline — who went to church regularly in high school said they quit attending by age 23.” Still another study from Church Communication Networks said that up to 94 percent of Christian teens leave the church within a few years of leaving high school. Keep Reading...

Grounded in the Gospel: Building Believers the Old Fashioned Way

Catechism had always been a foreign concept to me. Growing up I had Roman Catholic friends who went through “confirmation” but whose lives showed little or no fruit of spiritual life. Indeed, I only heard complaints from these friends about their dreadfully boring catechism classes. Catechesis was simply not a category in my evangelical upbringing nor was it something I ever felt was a necessity. However, with the passage of time and the knowledge that nothing should be judged by its worst expressions I have come to long for that which my church never offered.

This is why I am thankful for J.I. Packer and Gary Parrett’s new book Grounded in the Gospel: Building Believers the Old Fashioned Way. Packer of course is the dean of contemporary evangelical theology and has authored and edited more than 50 books. Parrett is professor of educational ministry and worship at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

In the 1990’s, my first years in vocational ministry, a book explaining the value of and offering strategies for implementing catechesis would have been ignored or even mocked as hopelessly irrelevant. Thankfully, things have changed. Even George Barna, one of the men most responsible for the popularization of pragmatism in the church, is lamenting the lack of biblical literacy and worldview among so-called evangelicals. So it seems that the soil is prepared for such a book as Grounded in the Gospel. Continue Reading>>>

The Revolution--Rubbish

...something has gone tragically wrong when a marketing researcher declares that the church of the Lord Jesus Christ is simply doomed--especially in terms of local congregations. "There is nothing inherently wrong with being involved in a local church," he argues. "But realize that being part of a group that calls itself a 'church' does not make you saved, holy, righteous, or godly any more than being in Yankee Stadium makes you a professional baseball player. Participating in church-based activities does not necessarily draw you closer to God or prepare you for a life that satisfies Him or enhances your existence. Being a member of a congregation does not make you spiritually righteous anymore than being a member of the Democratic Party makes you a liberal wing nut." Read it all HERE