If you had time last week, you might have heard about the Pew Forum’s publication of the findings from their nationwide “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey”. Apparently, they interviewed 35,000 or so people to get a feel for the current American religious climate. The results not only hit the blogosphere, but traveled throughout the major news media.
What really caught the “eyes” of most people was the statistic that 28% of American adults have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another denomination, religion or no religion at all! That shouldn’t surprise us when you consider a vast majority of the visitors to our congregations’ worship and outreach events are usually the “unchurched” or “dechurched” from other denominations.
Another statistic that brought a lot of attention can really be considered the sad result of our post-modern society. Of all the groups surveyed, atheists and agnostics are growing the most. The number of people who simply don’t consider themselves to have a denomination or religion (the “unchurched” or “dechurched”) is on a significant rise as well.
In the end, it seems this survey is simply proving what we’ve already known for quite some time–the love of most is growing cold and now is the time to share the Gospel with the growing number of “lost” in our communities and neighborhoods. Night is coming soon when we won’t be able to work!
Here are some links that might help you find and digest these findings…
- The Pew Forum’s U.S. Religious Landscape Survey findings
- An article on ChurchRelevance.com – a blog which has a rather Emergent Evangelical bent (so read the content with a big grain of salt), but occasionally provides something useful like the handy breakdown of numbers in the article
- A blurb from ChurchMarketingSucks.com on the need for church marketing amidst these findings (another site where you read its content with a grain of salt)
- Here’s Yahoo!’s article, America’s Unfaithful Faithful, when the findings were released last week – Most major news media did an article on the findings. You can Google them or go the individual news sites and type “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey” in their search box
One resource from our own circles that I think is extremely useful amidst these findings is Dr. Mark Braun’s recent two-part article in the Wisconsin Lutheran Quarterly entitled Religion and Religions in America.
The article was divided between the Fall 2007 (Vol 104:4) issue and the Winter 2008 (Vol. 105:1) issue. Braun’s conclusions and applications, especially in Part II, are excellent. He points out that we can make an impact on the American religious landscape by being what we are–Confessional Lutherans with a clear understanding of Scripture’s teachings and good sense of the history of the Christian church. In light of the release of the findings from the Pew Forum survey, I would strongly recommend checking out the entire article.
God’s blessings to you, dear Reader, as you go forth with the unchanging Good News of Christ to our ever-changing world!
Back in the late 1980’s, early 1990’s, there was a survey done in the WELS that went something like this:
70% of the child confirmands in our churches will fall away from the church. So if you have 10 students in your confirmation class, 7 will quit attending worship, while 3 will remain faithful. 35% of that 70% will return to the Lord later in life.
I would be interested to find out if these statistics have changed over the years.
Also our Lord tells us that the closer we get to Judgment Day, the “hearts of men will grow cold,” thus the rise in atheism.
We have lots of work to do in the Lord’s harvest fields.