Top 10 Theology Stories Since 2000: Part 1

The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.

0:00:00 – (Collin Hansen): You know, what’s interesting is what Mike’s talking about with the Great Dechurching is not primarily an erosion of belief in God or even people saying that they still pray or even that they believe in miracles, but it’s truly a disaffiliation from church and a de centering of God as the center of their lives or as any kind of authority in their lives.

0:00:32 – (Sarah Zylstra): Hello and welcome to Gospel Bound. I know that this is not the voice that you were expecting to hear. My name is Sarah Zylstra and I’m a journalist who works with Colin at tgc. And I am starting us off today because this time I’m asking the questions and Colin’s gonna have to come up with the answers. We also have another friend and colleague here with us today, Mike Graham, who is the program director at TGC’s Keller center for Cultural Apologetics.

0:00:59 – (Sarah Zylstra): Welcome, Colin and Mike.

0:01:01 – (Collin Hansen): Thanks, Sarah. Glad to be here on my own podcast with my good friends Mike and Sarah.

0:01:06 – (Michael Graham): Good to have you, Sarah.

0:01:07 – (Sarah Zylstra): Good to have you. So one of my favorite things about you guys is the way that you can think about the big picture. And Colin, you do this all the time on your regular Gospel Bound episodes, especially when you do year end wrap ups with Melissa Krueger every December. And since we are technically starting our 25th year in the 21st century and we’re also wrapping up our 20th year at the Gospel Coalition, it seemed like a perfect time to take an even higher view of what’s been going on in the church since the year 2000.

0:01:34 – (Sarah Zylstra): So instead of a 10,000 foot view, we’re going to go for a 30,000 foot view today. And this is why this is especially interesting to me, because since the year 2000, religion in America has changed dramatically. Back in the 1990s, religion was here was what Tim Keller would call thick, which meant like in general, many clergy were held in high esteem, churches were respected, a lot of people belonged to a congregation or they knew if they didn’t, they kind of felt bad about it and knew that that would be a good idea if they did.

0:02:05 – (Sarah Zylstra): That is quite different now. Since 2000, the percent of religious Americans has dropped and the number of nones, or people with no religion has jumped from about 8% to 22%. So this is really important to talk about because social commentators will make a big deal out of how much time we’ve been spending on our screens over the last 20 years and how our views on sexuality have drastically changed and how our politics have become sharply polarized and how our Mental health has tanked.

0:02:32 – (Sarah Zylstra): But what mainstream journalism almost always misses is that the thread running in and around and through all of these things is how we think about and react to God. So we are going to frame this as a top 10 list, top 10 theological stories of the last 25 years, and we will see how many of these that we can get through. If you guys are too interesting and we talk for too long, we may have to break this into two episodes.

0:02:54 – (Sarah Zylstra): So we’re going to see how we do. Colin, do you have any other thoughts for us before we jump into our list?

0:02:59 – (Collin Hansen): I’ll be a little surprised if we don’t do two episodes out of this. What Mike and I often do at the Keller center is just help people to think about, as you said there, Sarah, the big picture. And sometimes looking back on lists like this is a really helpful way to do it. It organizes your thoughts. It helps you to focus on things that you might have overlooked or taken for granted as the biggest trends that continue to affect us today.

0:03:26 – (Collin Hansen): But I also think about a book that really made a big difference in my Life, Hans Rosling’s 2018 book, Factfulness. He points out that we often focus on the problems, the things that have gone wrong, the big, dramatic, terrible things that have happened. But we don’t even look at the trends that have been incredibly positive, that have been very hopeful. The new inventions that have saved lives, the new medicines that have been produced, they just don’t make it into our media. They don’t make it into our political campaigns.

0:03:58 – (Collin Hansen): Often the focus is on what’s going to make us angry, what’s going to make us afraid. And so we end up taking for granted those good things. We end up focusing on the bad, and then no wonder we feel so miserable. We feel like everything’s terrible. So this will hopefully be a fun exercise in looking at this with you guys, but it also is going to be a heavy exercise because there have been a lot of difficult things. And, you know, we’re all roughly our careers, the three of us. That’s why I wanted to do this with you guys.

0:04:31 – (Collin Hansen): Our careers roughly aligned to this timeline of the last 25 years. So they’re related to times when we were pursuing education early on this and then starting in our careers and then advancing and moving into the middle of those careers. So this is something that we’ve lived, the three of us, and have a little bit of perspective on, and yet it’ll be eager to see, obviously, where things go from here and what these trends might portray.

0:04:57 – (Collin Hansen): For the future. But we’ve got a lot to cover. A lot to cover here.

0:05:00 – (Sarah Zylstra): We do. On note, let us jump right into number 10. We are used to hearing bad news out of Africa. I would say most recently, we’ve been hearing a lot about Islamic persecution of Christians in Nigeria. But, Colin, your number 10 has to do with Africa. You want to talk to us about that?

0:05:17 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah. One of the things going back to the beginning of my career when I was a journalism student, I had to write for a magazine class about just some major religious trend. And I identified a local Anglican church that was part of this new thing called the Anglican Mission in America. And the fascinating thing about this Anglican Mission in America was that they were led by bishops in Africa. This is an American Anglican Church, but led by bishops in Africa who were conservative on their views on scripture as well as also the implications of that, their views on their views on religion more broadly, but sexuality in particular.

0:05:56 – (Collin Hansen): And I remember my magazine professor, he’s died a number of years ago. He was a veteran religion reporter and he was just horrified by this. He was a liberal Catholic. He didn’t know that any of this was happening and he was really scared about it. But this has continued to be a big deal. It’s just this number 10, to sum it up, the global church leadership, our global church leadership is moving south.

0:06:17 – (Collin Hansen): I’ll mention just a few of the specific events of what’s happened, just to recap some of that. Some of this is brand new. Just in 2, 2025, you saw this very defiant mode from GAFCON, this global Anglican Future Conference, led by African leaders, but representing conservatives from around the world with a new Archbishop of Canterbury that basically just said, look, we’re not listening anymore. You’re not in charge.

0:06:42 – (Collin Hansen): This, like I said, was a move that goes back to 2000, when EMEA, the Anglican Mission in America, began. But when we think about this within the broader context of other issues, Sarah, we also think about the way that movements that have been largely Western led have shifted to be more global south, especially leadership. We think about how the Third Luzon Congress on World Evangelization took place in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2010.

0:07:10 – (Collin Hansen): But there’s a couple angles here that are going to be really interesting to think about going forward. We do not know what’s going to happen with these. We think primarily about as this church has spread, as the church has spread in different evangelical expressions around the world, especially in the global South. We also see, as you’ve written about a lot, Sarah, we see that there’s a lot of prosperity gospel that’s mixed into this as well.

0:07:34 – (Collin Hansen): So we wonder, going forward, will orthodoxy, biblical, historic, creedal, confessional orthodoxy, will that hold or will it be subsumed under a broader prosperity gospel motif that’s, you know, exported from the early 20th century out of the United States? Then the other question you and I, Sarah, have gone back and forth on this a little bit, even just recently, is fertility rates. Now, to be clear, you’ve pointed out that fertility rates in Africa are declining just as they are in so many other parts of the world.

0:08:09 – (Collin Hansen): Yet when they’ve been declining over the last 20 years, Africa had still been holding strong with much higher than the rest of the country, those fertility rates. That means that in some ways there is simply an unavoidable demographic future that indicates that many things will be shifting toward Africa or its broader global diaspora in future years because of what’s already happened in the last 25 years. So you can see this in a lot of debates over immigration, a lot of debates about technology as it relates between the global south and its production there in the West. But there’s no doubt that no matter what happens, Africa will play a bigger role in the next 25 years because of what’s happened in the last 25 years just with those fertility rates. So number 10, the global church leadership has been moving south.

0:09:02 – (Sarah Zylstra): Yeah. And what’s interesting about that is that theological education, though, has not been moving south. So while Africa has the people, more people and maybe more Christians, certainly it feels like that’s sort of the, the center or the growing center of Christianity there. The real education is not keeping up. Yeah.

0:09:20 – (Collin Hansen): The resources for education and for publishing are still, are very Western focused and also with a, a more widespread and historic history with education and literacy across many different countries. So within that network. So that would definitely be the next step. If we saw a trend in the next 25 years of the declining number of Western theological students choosing to study in Africa, that would truly be a transformation from what we’ve seen in the last 25 years. We’re allowed that education, not all of it, because there have been very significant moves to Africa in this last 25 years.

0:09:55 – (Collin Hansen): But still a lot of those leaders have been studying in the west and are reading books out of the west, even as some have started to try to shift that narrative.

0:10:03 – (Sarah Zylstra): Yeah, that makes sense. So if the future of the church is perhaps African, maybe it is also non denominational. Tell us about number nine, the rise of non denominational congregations.

0:10:15 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah. Once again, this is probably one that a lot of people just aren’t really thinking about, but has been so very, very different. One of the largest churches in the country, even the world, is right here in my backyard in Birmingham. It’s a non denominational church, multi site church network. A lot of people have shifted out of Southern Baptist congregations, even Presbyterian, Episcopal, Methodist, all sorts of different churches into that church.

0:10:44 – (Collin Hansen): Right now, 25 years in, this place is called Church of the Highlands. 25 years in, we take that for granted, but that’s been a significant shift. So you see a few denominations, the Presbyterian Church in America would be an example, that’s really increased in these last 25 years. But overall, proportionately, it’s still very, still very small. And then Southern Baptist Convention had peaked during this period, but then also declined substantially, especially in the last decade.

0:11:14 – (Collin Hansen): Now, part of what confuses people though, Sarah, about the implications theologically here is people will think, well, that means then that this expression of conservative and evangelical theology then must itself be in significant decline. But what you actually see is that the vast majority, I mean the overwhelming majority of these non denominational churches are both conservative in what they teach from Scripture, but also are even more conservative in their political views and political expressions than any other denomination that you’re going to find.

0:11:47 – (Collin Hansen): So before I kick it over to Mike, because I’d love for Mike to be able to offer some numbers here, but we need to also think about how the Internet, which only entered a majority of American homes in the year 2000, the way that that significantly influenced this trend. So one of the reasons non denominational churches are so much larger and influential is because you don’t have to stick within your own network for resourcing.

0:12:13 – (Collin Hansen): You mentioned, Sarah, that the Gospel coalition goes back 20 years, a little over 20 years now in 2005. Well, no doubt the Gospel Coalition has played a significant role of taking and developing resources from all different kinds of evangelical denominations and churches from around the world, pooling them into one source and then spreading them to all these different churches. So, but you’ve seen this in a lot of trends that we’ve covered and talked about so much. You see it in one of the best selling Christian books of all time, the Purpose Driven Life coming out of Southern Baptist Church at the time with Rick Warren, but spreading certainly far beyond that.

0:12:53 – (Collin Hansen): We also see this as a major factor in the spread of Reformed theology, not just in Presbyterian denominations, but back to a lot of Baptist and non denominational churches as well. Something we hadn’t seen in Baptist churches at a widespread Level since even before the Second Great Awakening. That’s how substantial this theological development is. We’re going back to the early 19th century there. I still go back within this time period to one of my professors in college and I mentioned that there were Calvinists and he just laughed at me and he said, no, they all died.

0:13:28 – (Collin Hansen): They all died before the Second Great Awakening. They don’t exist anymore. Well, he wouldn’t say that now, but that’s what he told me as an undergrad in college. This was before, of course, I wrote my book Young Us Reformed in 2008. But the last thing to point out here before I kick it over to Mike is just to think about the other theological debates that have transcended denominations that have crossed all those boundaries.

0:13:53 – (Collin Hansen): As the decline of those institutional denominational authorities has progressed these last 25 years. You think about the rise, well, debates and push back against the seeker churches of the previous 25 years. You think about the rise and fall of the emerging church movement, which in many ways was eclipsed by charismatic churches. And then also these new Calvinist churches just mentioned. Then I think about the debates about the new perspective on Paul or the social Trinity.

0:14:19 – (Collin Hansen): All those are significant within themselves, but all of them transcended these denominations because especially of, once again, these debates are not self contained within one group, within these journals, within these schools, but now are influencing all of them. But then also the significant role of the Internet in being able to spread those debates everywhere. So Mike, do you have a sense for kind of the scale or the scope of that shift in terms of non denominational churches?

0:14:49 – (Michael Graham): Yeah, so the, the rise of non denominationalism essentially over the course of our lifetimes is about five times as large as when, as a little bit before when we were born. So non denominationalism was about 3% in 1972 and it’s around 14 or 15% here today. And so anytime when you’re looking at religious trends, when something moves faster than a couple percent per year, um, it’s definitely a story.

0:15:19 – (Michael Graham): And when something goes 5x, you know, over the course of 50 years, that’s something, that’s a very, very significant trend. I think one of the things that has accelerated the rise of non denominationalism over the last, Certainly the last 15 years is during kind of the, the social media and smartphone era. One of the ways that the Internet functions, and we’ll talk about this, you know, in the, you know, in kind of the top five, is the Internet does function in a way that incentivizes the critiques of institutions.

0:15:53 – (Michael Graham): Some of those critiques are valid and warranted and good. And sometimes those critiques are maybe unfair or uncharitable. And so one of the challenges in the digital era of, you know, of denominational churches is something that used to be a feature has potentially become a bug. And so, you know, when you, it used to be that when you move from one community to another, it’s like, well, you know, I’m from such and such, you know, tradition and such and such denomination.

0:16:25 – (Michael Graham): I’m going to go and find, you know, the best type of that particular denomination in my new community. But that kind of thing, you know, when you become associated with all of these other churches and have this common identity together in the digital era now you can be, you know, your church that might not have anything to do with a church, you know, on the, you know, complete other side of the country or even the other side of the world is now becomes identified with, you know, with another church that may have some big scandal that’s very problematic for, you know, something that wouldn’t have become an issue and would have never been a topic of conversation for you and your church.

0:17:08 – (Michael Graham): It might be a problem now for you. So I think that’s one of those things, at least in the last decade or so, that has definitely accelerated the rate of non denominationalism, but certainly those were trends that were already well entrenched in the decades before that as well, for a wide variety of other reasons.

0:17:27 – (Collin Hansen): Another related shift there would be how many especially Southern Baptist churches have dropped Baptist names and Baptist identity in order to blend in a little bit more within that time. A lot of people, it may be hard to remember how contentious things were with the Southern Baptist Convention. Their debates in the 80s and 90s about the control, the domination, and then a really strong culture war ethos in the 1990s. Think about the Disney boycotts and whatnot. So there’s been a lot of ditching of that Baptist identity. That’s, that’s representative of some of how people are perceiving Baptists, which is not necessarily the SBC’s fault in a number of different cases, because we think about the most famous Baptist church, the church that goes around and protests at all these funerals and things like that.

0:18:15 – (Collin Hansen): It’s not an actual Baptist church in any way, shape or form. But that just lodged in these last 25 years into people’s minds of like, oh, that’s what it means to be Baptist is to be really hateful and to be really cruel and to go out of your way to be harsh. And again, that’s not what these actual churches are. But because of what Mike is talking about, the way that the media landscape can amplify that elsewhere, there’s a rush away from any broader association.

0:18:43 – (Collin Hansen): Because if you can just be blamed for what happens in your church, that’s not likely to get that much attention. But if you can be blamed in your church for what happens in every other church that has Baptist in their name, and even when somebody wants to just run around and just slap Baptist on their overgrown family cult out of Kansas, well, I mean, that becomes a major problem in this media landscape. And the last thing I think Sarah to point out in this category would be the influence of church planting networks during this time as well.

0:19:17 – (Collin Hansen): That’s a very new phenomenon in a lot of different ways. But when you combine an aggressive focus on non denominational churches, not that denominations don’t have their own problems, they do for sure. But you combine non denominational churches with an aggressive focus on church planting, a strong entrepreneurial spirit that was characteristic of these last 25 years in the church marketplace. And you’re going to get some situations like Mars Hill that will happen as well. You’re going to see a lot of explosion of growth and a lot of implosion as well. So that’s another major trend that’s, that’s taken, we’ve seen a few times. Mars Hill, the most prominent among them within, within the state of the church and theological discourse last 25 years.

0:20:00 – (Sarah Zylstra): Yeah, that makes sense. That is a lot, a lot to contend with. And we’re doing that in a country that embraces the freedom of religion. So we, we are free to make all these choices and, and changes. But number eight takes us to a different scenario. Where were over in China, Colin, what’s happening over there?

0:20:20 – (Collin Hansen): It’s so interesting when you decide to take a snapshot of history because we could go back well into this first quarter century, the 21st century, and identify maybe the number one story, or at least one of the top three or four or five stories would be about the rapid growth of the church in China, and especially with their increasing openness toward the west and their further embrace of a kind of hybrid capitalism to go with their particular kind of Maoist communism.

0:20:56 – (Collin Hansen): So just depending on where you take the snapshot, you might be looking on the one hand, this is one of the most amazing church developments that we’ve seen in centuries, if not the last 2000 years. And yet you also then would see especially since 2018 and the crackdown on early rain church that China has reverted to a much harsher posture, one that’s ongoing at this very moment, toward churches. This is a trend in China, a country of uniquely expansive influence, not only in history, just remarkable throughout history, but certainly today, let alone where things are going to be going in the future.

0:21:39 – (Collin Hansen): No doubt these conversations are going to be very, I mean, of our world, are very much going to be China centric for a variety of reasons. But China’s long vacillated between openness toward the west and being closed. We’ve seen both happen these last 25 years. We’re in that closed part right now. And so when it comes to not only church trends, but broader geopolitical trends, you can see now China emerging as a key figure in their ongoing opposition.

0:22:07 – (Collin Hansen): Think about, along with North Korea, Iran, Russia and opposition toward the west in general, but then the United States in particular. But that’s not the only place where we’ve seen this kind of response to the west and could be good things, could be bad things. But we’ve seen this also in India, the subcontinent, another massive change where you’re seeing a significant development of persecution in the last 25 years, especially in the northern parts. But you’ve seen an uprising of Hindu nationalism in India identity. And one of the most gripping stories of really all time missionary work and certainly missionary persecution, I can hardly ever get through it without just weeping, would be the murder of Graham Staines, the Australian missionary and his two sons in the 1999 in Northeast India. That’s right before this time period that we’re looking at. But it’s reflective of this vacillation between times of significant openness to Christian expansion around the world, but then often a harsh pushback against that. And as we look forward in the next 25 years, we can look to see, remember the Africa story that we started with here.

0:23:24 – (Collin Hansen): We can expect there to be a significant frontier of conflict across Africa between the spread and the growth of Islam as well as that growth of Christianity over the last 25 plus years. No doubt that’s part of the ongoing case in Nigeria. There’s more attention lately from celebrities, from politicians about this persecution of Christians in Nigeria. There appears to be nothing anybody apparently is able or willing to do about it. It’s just a horrible part of what we’re living with today or what our brothers and sisters in Africa are living in parts of Africa are dealing with today.

0:24:00 – (Collin Hansen): So I guess the question going forward is if we’re seeing a response of persecution to the large global Expansion of the church in the 20th century. Are we going to see that persecution lead more to situations like Iran, which replaced China as the fastest growing church in the world, or are we going to see the boot being stamped down again? And of course, as we’re recording this, that remains to be seen in Iran.

0:24:30 – (Collin Hansen): So it could go either way. I pray that we would not have the same dynamic we just saw in China and India. Expanse of the church response by the government to crack down substantially. But I fear certainly that it could be.

0:24:43 – (Sarah Zylstra): That’s such a hard story when there’s freedom and then it’s taken away. It also reminds me of Afghanistan, right, where you had some freedom under an American government, such that it was. And then crushing down after that. And then it just. It’s extraordinarily difficult for the Christians who are left there. That’s really hard.

0:25:03 – (Collin Hansen): Shout out to Sarah Zalestra’s podcast recorded Escape from Kabul. Certainly one of the most important pieces of media, one of the most important stories that we’ve told at TGC in these last 20 plus years.

0:25:15 – (Sarah Zylstra): Yeah, yeah. It’s just encouraging to see even in the darkness that there’s some light and God is still protecting and caring for his church. Even when it feels like, man, that’s really unfair. And why did history turn that way? It’s true. So we have also, we’re seeing a lot of challenges to the church around the world. We’re also seeing challenges to the church in western countries, most notably places like Europe, Australia and Canada.

0:25:41 – (Sarah Zylstra): Not from persecution, but maybe from this apathy that comes to. Seems to come with growing affluence. Right. We see this for decades. We saw the United States was actually an outlier. As countries got more wealthy, they did move more away from religion. But number seven on our list today is the dechurching of America. Mike, you wrote a whole book about this. What did you find?

0:26:05 – (Michael Graham): Yeah, so when we wrote this book a couple years ago and it was based on research in 2022, published it in 2023, and during that time we learned that 40 million Americans, basically 1 in 6 US adults, had stopped going to church. And that was primarily over the last 25 to 30 years. I do have new data on this. I’m in the middle of writing a new book on this, probably titled the Great Spiritual Migration.

0:26:35 – (Michael Graham): And we have updated data and this storyline won’t be going away. It’s actually more significant now than what it was. You’ll have to wait for that to come out to know what the new numbers are. But I Do know what they are.

0:26:49 – (Collin Hansen): I was kind of hoping you’re going to break big news on my podcast here, Mike. It’s okay.

0:26:53 – (Michael Graham): I’d love to wait for the book. Wait for the book. I can’t do that a year in advance. But the situation is very significant and it’s severe and it is getting worse. And so this dynamic, on the one hand, it seems scary, and it is. But what we found in that research was that there was actually a lot of hope in the middle of all the bad news. Most of the people who had left, about three out of four people is what we called people who were casually de churched, as opposed to 25% that we categorized and called dechurched casualties.

0:27:35 – (Michael Graham): The casually dechurched left not because of some significant pain point or church hurt or with some big baggage or bugaboo, but as opposed to people who left with a high degree of intentionality with hurt, with big issues. And so most of the people who were casually dechurched were more than willing to return to a local church, but the numbers were not as high for those who were d church casualties.

0:28:07 – (Michael Graham): So that trend of that movement of 1 in 6 U.S. adults, it’s the largest and fastest religious shift in our country’s history. It’s larger than the first and second Great Awakening and all the Billy Graham Crusades combined. And it was faster than all of those big moments in US religious history as well. And so this was definitely something that left an indelible mark in the history of our country. The churching of America was not peaked, contrary to popular belief, in 1776.

0:28:42 – (Michael Graham): Actually, not many people went to church in 1776. Only about 17% of Americans went to church in 1776. The peak churching of America was around the 1970s and peaked at about 70%. And we’re now kind of hovering in the mid, mid to high 40s. So call it 45 to 47% or so today, that has plateaued a little bit. But I think that that plateau of the churching of America is temporary because what happens every single day is you have people in Gen Z who are turning 17 to 18 and becoming adults.

0:29:24 – (Michael Graham): And every day you have people from the greatest generation and the boomer generation who are passing away. And even though there’s a lot of good stories, amazing stories about what’s happening among young people in Gen Z, as when you zoom out in an aggregate, they are far less religious and far less Christian than the greatest generation or the baby boomer generation. And so the net result of that generational replacement is that more decline is in our future.

0:29:55 – (Sarah Zylstra): And that’s really interesting because campus ministers tell me that they’re also less hostile. So it feels like we went through, as we went through sort of the exvangelical stage of deturching, which was angry, maybe also paired with like a wokeness on campus that would kick off your campus ministry or disinvite a speaker. That’s not what we’re seeing anymore. Maybe it’s just more apathy and oh, that’s cool that you want to do that.

0:30:22 – (Sarah Zylstra): I’m probably just going to keep scrolling.

0:30:24 – (Collin Hansen): TikTok for me, one of the major theological implications here has been the shift in apologetics. And that very much reflects the mission that we have at the Keller center for Cultural Apologetics. You kind of led off with this, Sarah, in the podcast, this recognition that not for everybody, as Mike is pointing out, but for a lot of Americans in this generational replacement, you see older generations that had some kind of experience with church.

0:30:51 – (Collin Hansen): And for some of them it was good. For others kind of take it or leave it. For some of them it was very negative. And so a lot of apologetics was dealing with a lot of people with very highly negative views reacting to something in their personal experience or their broader research or learning about Christianity. But what you see now more often are people who just don’t have any religious concepts at all.

0:31:19 – (Collin Hansen): They don’t have categories for sin, they don’t have categories for a creator, they don’t have categories for guilt. Now they might with shame because especially some of the things we’ve talked about with the Internet there. But this has required a major shift in our apologetics. Obviously no shift in what we teach from scripture, no shift in the Gospel message itself, but an awareness that in these last 25 years, we often have to start further back in our evangelism. We have to start further back in our apologetics.

0:31:51 – (Collin Hansen): I’ve shared this many times, but it remains true, especially as we are looking at a 30,000 foot retrospective since the year 2000. But one of the most significant apologetic books in the last 25 years would be Tim Keller’s Reason for God. But what’s interesting is that he then wrote a very different apologetic book in 2016 called Making Sense of God that was reflective of many of those shifts, recognizing we need to start having basic conversations about our cultural narratives, what stories we’re living by, what stories are replacing and then even replacing, supplanting the Christian story as one that animates us personally and animates our culture. More broadly.

0:32:32 – (Collin Hansen): But like you said, Sarah, while there are a lot of apologetic dimensions here, these are questions of philosophy, how we teach. There are a lot of other issues here that are much more mundane. We think you mentioned this earlier about secularization and affluence. That may look one way in a developing part of the world. It may look very different in a developed part of the world because there’s no doubt one of the major things that keeps people away from church would be affluence.

0:33:04 – (Collin Hansen): Vacations, second homes, travel, sports, all sorts of different things that have really increased with that 25 years of affluence. But I also think it’s not an entire. Like you said, Sarah, both of you have pointed out, there are these mega trends, but then we also see positive things very locally. And I don’t know what you guys think about this. I’m interested to get your thoughts, Sarah, because you talk to so many different church leaders all the time.

0:33:34 – (Collin Hansen): We do know statistically that more Americans attend larger churches than before. Used to be that most of us attended smaller churches, but that’s been shifting toward more of us attending these large churches. Like I said, I mentioned places like Church of the Highlands here in Birmingham, Alabama, earlier. But I think just in general, the quality of, of what I see in what churches are teaching, of their educational responsibilities, their discipleship, programming of all sorts of different really positive metrics. If I just looked at my own community, I’d say there may or may not be fewer people in the church. I’m not quite sure, but I feel like the churches are stronger.

0:34:17 – (Collin Hansen): I know I can’t say that universally. Sarah, how do you think about that? You have such a big picture view on this.

0:34:25 – (Sarah Zylstra): Yeah, I definitely think that is true. I think even just looking at the resources, even when you’re just looking online, resources for Sunday school curriculum. I can remember looking for Sunday school curriculum like, you know, 15 years ago when I was running a program at a church and not being able to find hardly anything. That was before Trevin did Gospel Project. And so it’s just, yeah, the explosion of resources has been tremendous. I think the education in the seminaries has gotten better.

0:34:52 – (Sarah Zylstra): I live by Midwestern and you can tell in the water of Kansas City there is all kinds of good reform teaching and excellent pastors. When we looked for churches, we could have, you know, we went to six or seven of them when we first moved here a couple years ago, and we could have kept going. We just were finally like, we’re just gonna have to stop. Usually you’d be like, where’s the one church that we could get on with? I was like, we could go to any of these happily.

0:35:12 – (Sarah Zylstra): And so I do think. I think that’s true.

0:35:16 – (Collin Hansen): So it could be. So it is. It is a theological story of. I mean, you could. If we were doing the top 25, which I just want for everybody who’s watching and listening right now, you can thank these two from keeping me from doing a top 25 list. That’s a mercy. But if we were doing a top 25 list, you’d have places like Midwestern Seminary in that list. Now, a lot of the changes that we’ve written about, a lot, and I wrote about young Isis Reformed in Southern Seminary, that happened in the 1990s. That started there. It continued in the 2000s.

0:35:48 – (Collin Hansen): But the Midwestern Baptist story has definitely been in these last 25 years. And it is a story not only of growth. So we’ve seen some seminaries like my alma mater, Trinity in Chicago, changing and declining dramatically. But as you and I’ve done the research here, Sarah, we’ve talked it over quite a bit. The number of students in seminary preparing for even just pastoral ministry in the M divorce, that’s been stable during this time for evangelicals, especially for the seminaries that we work with. And that’s a very notable point because correct me if I’m wrong here, Mike, but evangelical identity certainly last 25 years as a percentage of the population has remained roughly stable. Correct. While mainline and Catholic identify affiliation has declined really substantially.

0:36:36 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah,

0:36:39 – (Michael Graham): I’ll give a little teaser of what’s coming. The retention rates among mainline Protestants, if you are born mainline Protestant, only 66 of 100 will continue with that through adulthood. And that’s 70% if you’re Roman Catholic and a little bit better at 73% if you’re evangelical. But what’s different about evangelicals from Roman Catholic and mainline is the percentage of people who are converts. There are, if you’re in a room of 100 Roman Catholics, only five of them are converts to that.

0:37:20 – (Michael Graham): The rate of conversion into evangelicalism is about five times that rate. So evangelicals are near replacement when you have 73% retention and then you have 25% who are converting. So you only have about a 2 to 3% decline there in evangelical identity. When you put retention plus conversion, that’s really interesting.

0:37:48 – (Collin Hansen): I mean, one last thing just to add on here, another major development that we’ve seen in these last 25 years. Theologically, you think of books like Charles Taylor’s the Secular Age, that have very much changed the ways that we think about unbelief. We think about it not merely as a rational category, not merely as a political category, but think about it. We think about in terms of social imaginaries, what becomes plausible in your society.

0:38:16 – (Collin Hansen): And it turns out that religious belief can be dramatically undermined by all sorts of different factors. Again, like I said earlier about your cultural narratives that exclude the Christian story. So secularism can take shapes where people are not necessarily opposed to God. So as you know, what’s interesting is what Mike’s talking about with the great de churching is not primarily an erosion of belief in God or even people saying that they still pray or even that they believe in miracles, but it’s truly a disaffiliation from church and a de centering of God as the center of their lives or as any kind of authority in their lives.

0:38:55 – (Collin Hansen): It’s not new to the last 25 years, but in the last 25 years, Charles Taylor certainly has been chief among those critics who’ve helped us to understand that dynamic as it relates to the dramatic changes that are reflected in the Great detourging.

0:39:09 – (Sarah Zylstra): Yeah. Which leads us perfectly into our next thing on our list. Number six is the Great Awokening, which runs from Ferguson to Floyd, and which certainly calls us to think about new social imaginaries. Right. Like what could be or what can’t be?

0:39:26 – (Collin Hansen): Well, let’s just kind of establish the baseline of what we’re talking about here. This is another one of these rise and fall questions. 25 years is enough that some of these trends will continue. Some of them have come and gone, or at least they’ve morphed significantly. But we can go back at least to officer involved shootings in Ferguson 2014, to see a more widespread public protest related to the treatment of minorities and especially African Americans in our country today.

0:39:55 – (Collin Hansen): And also historically, one of the major trends here, and I meant to say this earlier as it relates to the. The positives with the church. I think the resourcing and discipleship part that you mentioned earlier, Sarah, that’s improved, has also been helped by the Internet. Well, in some ways, justice has been helped by the Internet because so many different things that we never saw before, things that we never would have known about, things that would have been covered up, we’re now seeing, I think, specifically very much about the death of Ahmaud Arbery, imagining that there would have been no possibility of justice being done or no likelihood of justice being done unless we had some of that video evidence. And that of course, is a product of the ubiquity of smartphones.

0:40:41 – (Collin Hansen): Even in the current situation we’ve been tracking lately in Minneapolis. It’s very much a story of having been documented essentially in real time by people with smartphone cameras, which that is an invention of these last 20, 25 years. Even as we look to Iran. What’s significant there is to be able to maintain any control, you have to shut down the Internet. You’ve got to close everything down. You’ve got to make, you know, eliminate cellular communication, because otherwise that’s what facilitates a lot of these protests as well as awareness of what’s happening.

0:41:17 – (Collin Hansen): I mean, we don’t know right now as we’re recording this at least what level of atrocities they could be on a scale beyond even what we saw in Rwanda, or they could be more limited. We don’t know which side is winning because of that blackout there. But when I look back on just this particular story, it certainly culminates in 2020 after George Floyd’s filmed death. You have there the largest race related or protest since the 1960s.

0:41:47 – (Collin Hansen): That’s very noteworthy in being able to talk about here, really. In a lot of ways, this 25 year period was bracketed by books like Divided by Faith, taking a sociological exploration of why racial integration is especially difficult for evangelicals. But then all the way to the New York Times bestseller the Color of Compromise, Jamar Tisby taking a more historical approach that hit those bestseller lists because of what happened in 2020.

0:42:13 – (Collin Hansen): But looking specifically, why do so many evangelical churches have a problem with this? But you also have seen a significant backlash at many different levels. The church level, theologically, and then ultimately politically as well. That pushback, specifically in the largest American denomination, the Center Maps Convention, that started in 2018 and 2019. And in many ways it actually feels as though what progress had been made in the 1990s before this 25 year period. It feels like a lot of that to me at least, has been undone, let alone what people felt like was a lot of progress after another major story that’s easy to overlook these last 25 years, the election of the first ever African American president in history, 2008, with Barack Obama.

0:43:04 – (Collin Hansen): So you’ve had these moments of hope, you’ve had these moments of pushing for change, of seeking justice. You’ve seen that mixed up with a lot of other things. So I want to get some thoughts here from Mike as well, but I think about a couple different books that we’ve covered at the Gospel Coalition over the years that have helped us to be able to put some context behind the cultural change. It gives some explanation.

0:43:31 – (Collin Hansen): You have, for example, Yasha Monk’s book on the identity synthesis and intersectionality. You can say the way that specifically the Gaza attacks on Israel October 7, 2023 undermined a lot of the premises of the Great Awokening. The idea there in the Great Awokening is that the oppressed essentially move to a position of prominence. There’s a focus on them. Their identity as the oppressed is something that gives them special credibility or authority or a credibility in our culture.

0:44:07 – (Collin Hansen): But the challenge was when you saw that confrontation of competing oppressions. It’s impossible to adjudicate who gets to win in that kind of battle between Palestinian identity on the one hand and oppression. But then on the other hand, Jews, especially with the history of the Holocaust. So that’s part of why this Great Awokening synthesis, these identity politics, why they’ve been in decline in the last several years. But then also a really significant contribution recently from the scholar Musa Al Gharbi in We have never been Woke, recognizing that going back to another major trend of these last 25 years, the Great Recession in 2008, identifying how in those moments of economic decline we produce too many highly educated people.

0:44:57 – (Collin Hansen): So in a competition for scarce resources, those people create new barriers to entry from people who are outside of the elite. And so he attributes, attributes that elite overproduction to the, to the rise of this woke culture. And this is distinct from, but co ops these officer involved shootings and these, these legitimate injustices as they express themselves. Like I said, the Arbery case would be a good example.

0:45:26 – (Collin Hansen): So there’s a distinguishing between those events and then the broader philosophies of what make them reach this point of cultural resonance. But he observes that what is left in the wake is not an actual material change for people who are oppressed. There’s not an actual pursuit of justice because that wasn’t the point of it in the first place. It was really a response to economic conditions and a desire to be able to exclude others from those elite positions.

0:45:58 – (Collin Hansen): There’s plenty to argue about there. But the point is there aren’t many things that have tripped the church up more in the last 25 years than the rise and fall of this Great Awakening. And like other awakenings, I wrote a book in 2010 called the God Sized Vision looking at historical revivals of Christianity. But what I observed in that book is that successful revivals consolidate institutions going forward.

0:46:29 – (Collin Hansen): It’s what we’ve tried to do at the Gospel Coalition with this young, restless Reformed revival. But the similar thing has happened with this great awokening, the way that those viewpoints, those ideologies, have been then inculcated in or been instituted within corporations across America, as well as especially within higher education. So even as we could see that that same fervor that we saw a peak in 2020 has really dissipated, it doesn’t mean the effects are somehow all gone.

0:46:59 – (Collin Hansen): And underneath it all, we’re left with an ongoing challenge of how do we handle these issues in the church when we seem to have taken so many steps back, and how do we work together to pursue real justice for people who need help? Mike, what am I missing? What would you add to that? Just something we’ve all lived in tense ways these last years.

0:47:20 – (Michael Graham): Yeah, I think from a personal standpoint, I’ve had to navigate four different paradigms of how people navigate the race in America conversation. So around my Thanksgiving dinner table, I would hear my grandfather, who grew up in downtown Detroit, who was overtly racist, who would use the N word at the dinner table. That’s one paradigm. My mother had a colorblind perspective. She was the only white girl at an all black middle and all black high school.

0:47:52 – (Michael Graham): And, you know, her perspective that she tried to inculcate to me and my brother was, well, we don’t, you know, we don’t see race. You know, we’re all part of the human race. And then that was the perspective that I held for most of my lifetime. But I did not have a whole lot of proximity and, or direct, you know, relationship or intimacy, particularly in the, in the black white navigation of American culture and society.

0:48:22 – (Michael Graham): And so, but, you know, when I was older and in grad school and in the years after grad school, particularly doing church planting in a downtown area, there was another perspective that I found helpful and that was the historical perspective. So the historical perspective would be a blend of the biblical theology that we see from the, you know, why does God create all these different ethnicities? And what is the future of the eschaton? And what is the hope of the gospel for the entire, you know, for the entire world.

0:48:59 – (Michael Graham): And so when you combine that with the complexities of the racial history of the cities to which we live and the communities that we live and those backstories, those are helpful context for, okay, why is my community the way that it is? You know, in the city of Orlando, I was never taught about the Ocoee massacre. The Ocoee massacre was larger than the Pulse nightclub shooting that killed 50 people.

0:49:28 – (Michael Graham): And so, you know, These were things that just weren’t taught in our school. They were relevant and they were helpful to understanding why. Why our community and why our city was the way it was. And that same story can be told in, obviously, your city of Birmingham. And then during this last decade, you also see the rise of. Some people might call it some things or other things, and this is where kind of parsing and putting a technical term on this is a little trickier. But that fourth perspective might be.

0:50:02 – (Michael Graham): Some might call it anti racism, others might call it woke up, other people might call it dei, other people might call it cultural Marxism. Depending on different technical terms have been used in different years to kind of describe that. And you already touched on this, I think, particularly with Yascha Monk, is the idea that oppression imputes secular righteousness. And so that’s kind of where the problem is.

0:50:33 – (Michael Graham): And that’s where obviously, Christians, we can’t go down that path of, yeah, no, we all have the same fallenness and we all have to deal with these things. And so the challenge of when it comes to the great awokening and particularly the fracturing of evangelicalism, obviously race has been one of the biggest wedge issues that evangelicals in particular have struggled to navigate this conversation with deftness and with unity.

0:51:05 – (Michael Graham): And I think what I’ve observed is that most people in categories 2, 3, and 4, so colorblindness, historical, or DEI, would all roundly reject that first category, people like my late grandfather. But then there’s been big conversations of people who are in that colorblind perspective, who maybe want to think that the historical perspective and the anti racist perspective are actually one and the same.

0:51:38 – (Michael Graham): When I think there’s very significant differences between those, between those two categories. And so that’s been very hard, I think, for people to navigate. And I think that’s, you know, one of the biggest reasons why, for me, this has been one of the biggest challenges. And, you know, I was a pastor during 2020 and 2021, and anybody who was a pastor during that time knew how challenging it was to navigate all of that when the cultural temperature was very turned up.

0:52:09 – (Collin Hansen): It’s something that we could, any of us living through it, and especially in church leadership, could and would never forget. Which might be a hint, Sarah, at what awaits people on the other side of the next episode that they’re gonna have to wait for.

0:52:25 – (Sarah Zylstra): You are right. Like normal. This is too much for just one.

0:52:29 – (Collin Hansen): I warned you. At least we didn’t do 25. Yeah, those are great thoughts, Mike. Extremely helpful. You’re one of the most helpful people to teach on that topic. And you live it, you experience it. And thanks for helping to frame that. But yeah, there’s a lot more to cover. More to come.

0:52:44 – (Sarah Zylstra): There’s more to come. So let’s wrap this up for today. We will let our listeners finish their run, or their commute or their cup of coffee, and then we will pick this up again in next episode. We will come back with the final five of Colin’s top ten list of theological stories from the last 25 years.

0:53:10 – (Collin Hansen): Thanks for listening to this episode of Gospel Bound. For more interviews and to sign up for my newsletter, head over to tgc.org gospelbound rate and review gospel Bound on your favorite podcast platform so others can join the conversation. Until next time, Remember, when we’re bound to the gospel, we abound in hope.