Why People Are Leaving the Church

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Mike Graham: It’s good to see everybody here. My name is Michael Graham, and this is Jim Davis. We are co authors of the book The Great Dehurching. Thank you so much for coming to our breakout session here on what is going on among de churching in America.

Jim Davis: By a show of hands, I’m curious how many read the book. Okay, good, good. So thank you for reading. Rest of you are giving getting a primer right now on a lot of what we did, and a lot this part, actually, we don’t cover as much in the book, but how we began this project. So we’re, you know, I’m not a social scientist, I’m not a data guy. I am a pastor. Mike is a little more data oriented. He did have a conversation with the CIA after college to be an analyst for the CIA, and he chose ministry. As you know, if I had a nickel for every time I heard that story, I’d have one nickel and but we’re pastors in Orlando, and we began to just do cultural exegesis of our of our city. Now, how many of you have lived in Orlando before? Anybody? A few people. Okay, so if you knew anything about Orlando, we had a hot minute in the 90s and early 2000s where we thought that Orlando was becoming the Christian Mecca. You had, like on the church side, you had First Presbyterian Church, the second largest mainline church in the United States, First Baptist Church, pastored by the President of Southern Baptist Convention. You had Joel Hunter pioneering things in the tech space and advising president. You had RC Sproul there. You even had Benny Hinn down the road, slaying people in the spirit and so church wise like, pick your stream of theology, and it’s going well, you get something institutionally. Campus, crusade moves there, RTS moves there. Wycliffe pioneer, Ligonier. And it feels like this is really becoming something special in the Christian sense. Am I the one doing that? And but you fast forward to 2018, we both grew up in Orlando. I went back to pastor alongside Mike Orlando Grace Church, and we saw a study, a Barna study, that made the case that 40 that excuse me, that we had the same percentage of Evangelicals as New York City and Seattle, which was really interesting in the like, how did we get here? Conversation, but then the cultural conversation, because Orlando feels culturally different, very culturally different than New York City and Seattle. But we began to realize that the lion’s share of the people that we meet who used to go to church, who don’t go to church anymore, used to go to church, and they carry with them biblical foundations, and in many cases, they seem to legitimately be Christians. So we wanted to know more about what was going on. We wanted we wanted to understand more data, you know, for our local church, a little bit for our podcast, as in heaven. But the problem was there was no data. Like, we couldn’t find it. My wife was getting a graduate degree at RTS, and she wanted to do her apologetics final research paper on de churching. And the professor said, Well, that’s that sounds great, but there’s nothing to research. Like, there’s nothing. And then, anecdotally, one other thing happened. I was giving a 10 minute talk on dechurching at a donor, global donor event for a Men’s Ministry, and I was opening for Max Lucado. And I’m a nobody, he’s Max Lucado, and I opened it. He did his thing. And then afterwards, I had this weird experience where I had this line of people to talk to me, and I look over and Max is getting coffee by himself, which didn’t make any sense until I heard the stories coming through the line, and I realized, oh, in my 10 minutes, I’m talking about these people’s children and grandchildren and nephews and nieces and loved ones. And so this isn’t just a project about data. This is about real people. This isn’t about getting people butts in pews and money and coffers. This is about souls, eternal souls. And so this is a project we care a lot about. But again, we couldn’t find the data. We let’s see, how am I doing on the slide here? Okay, yeah. So we needed the data that existed was old data. It was not actionable. It was not actionable. Pastorally, we didn’t have data post fracturing. If you know anything about the fracturing that’s happened in evangelicalism, I’ll make a plug for the article Mike and Skyler flowers wrote called The six way fracturing of evangelicalism. We need to post COVID data. We need academically credible data. So what we did is we, we commissioned Ryan Burge, who, if you, if you’re interested in data in the Christian realm, he is the guy everyone should subscribe to his sub stack. It’s amazing. But we commissioned him to do the largest and most comprehensive nationwide quantitatively, peer reviewed, academically, peer quantitative, academically, peer reviewed study on dechurching that’s ever existed, which, now that you know, there was nothing that might not sound that impressive, but it’s like a legitimate it’s a legitimate study with over 7000 participants, 600 data points, and our thesis was simple. It’s. We don’t think this is an Orlando problem. We believe we could be in the largest and fastest religious shift in the history of our country, and this study that we commissioned definitively proved that we are so we are experiencing the largest and fastest religious shift in the history of our country, with 40 million people who have left the church, 40 million adult Americans, largely in the past 25 years. In terms of how big this is, in terms of numbers, it is larger than the first Great Awakening, the Second Great Awakening, and all the Billy Graham crusade combined, just going the opposite direction in terms of percentage of our country the previous, I don’t have this one on the slide up, but the previous largest shift was the 25 years post Civil War. Our shift is 25% greater in terms of the percentage of population just going the opposite direction. And now the way that we that we define the churching is very important. So you can see here the way that we define it is adult Americans who used to go to church on a monthly basis and now go less than once per year. The reason that’s important is because how many people only come to your church once a year? Maybe on Easter or Christmas Eve, they are still church people. According to our study, we wanted to go the most conservative and responsible route in our in our research. But you could make an argument that this, this problem, is a lot bigger than even our study shows.

Mike Graham
There’s 60 million Christmas and Easter only types the

Jim Davis
Yeah, so it is funny, like when we got the data out, like where there’s a big spreadsheet, when it all came back and Mike and Ryan Burge are looking at the spreadsheet. This is incredible. I can’t believe what we’re learning. I can’t believe we’re seeing I literally felt like I was looking at the matrix like I had no they had the learning curve for me. On that side was large. Most of this de churching has happened in the past 25 years. And then here you can see, this is a this is a timeline, largely of the past 100 years, 110 years, and you can see the spike. The real spike begins to happen in the 1990s now, any social scientist would tell you, spikes don’t come out of nowhere, and they would be right. You can talk about 1776 you can talk about immigration policies, progressive theology. We’re not going to cover that in this talk, but there’s a lot that led up to it. But in the 1990s I have a laser pointer. Okay, so 90s, we’re talking about this section right here where it really begins to happen in earnest, and we’re going to talk briefly about why. But are you controlling it from here, just following? Okay, I didn’t know which if my clicker was working on. So when you get over to this graph, you can see there is this long held understanding, and so they’ve been well studied, the relationship between the economic development of a country and its religiosity. So the more economically developed a country is, the less religious it tends to be, and vice versa. So interestingly enough, you have this little island up there, this green island the United States of America. We don’t fit that paradigm. We are what social scientists call stubbornly religious. And if regression to the mean is a thing humanly speaking, and we know that it is. You can see how much further we have to go if we continue down this path. All right, why the 1990s very briefly, four important things. Who was alive in the 1990s All right, okay, so there’s a fair so I’m old enough to remember a time you look at the fall the Soviet Union. I remember a time where, if, if you, if someone were to say, I’m no longer a Christian, it wouldn’t have been crazy for the next question to be, well, are you a communist? Like that was the next. And like the younger people on our staff team, they can’t believe that that was a thing. That was a thing. Anybody else remember that? Yes, that was a thing, because we were the Christian Americans at you know, in a cold war against the godless atheist, there was no it’s no coincidence that it’s under the Eisenhower administration, as cold war propaganda that we got In God We Trust on our money and under God in our pledge. So when the Soviet Union fell. Now you could be both a patriot and and not a Christian, largely for the first time. Then quickly you have the rise of the Internet. You have 1994 internet cafes are available. 97 it’s in most of the schools and libraries. And so you could comfortably pursue other world views in a way that you couldn’t in most parts of the country, then you have the rise of the religious right. You have people who are highly syncretizing politics and Christianity. And a lot of people said, if that’s what Christianity is, I’m out. And then at the end of the 90s, really, the early 2000s 911 happened. And over. Night, our our national enemies, went from being godless atheists to being religious fundamentalists. And people said, if that’s what religion does, then I’m out. And now we would the churching you see in the 90s is largely on the secular left. It’s largely out of the main line in Roman Catholic tradition. And we would argue these people were probably not Christians, and these were excuses or opportunities for them to embrace what they already knew to be true inside of them. So why are people de churching now, you know, if you were, if your information diet is more to the left, you’re going to hear it’s the church’s problem, things like racism, misogyny, clergy scandal, clergy abuse, Christian nationalism, if your information diet is more to the right, you’re going to hear it’s the culture’s problem, secular progressivism, the sexual revolution. What’s interesting is both right, both are right, and both are very wrong. So they’re right in that, yes, you those stories are out there. They’re wrong in that neither story describes the lion’s share of de churching that is happening in the United States. The number one reason for de churching in the United States is simply I moved. That is the number one reason. So of the 40 million people who de churched, 30 million did so casually. They did so unintentionally. They moved. Attending was inconvenient. There was a family change, became a single parent, something like that. So these, these are they. They’re not leaving in the ways that one would want to get loud on Twitter about. So the other stories are loud and they’re on Twitter, but this is the lion’s share what’s going on. Now, of course, that leaves 10 million who we call the D church casualties. And there are pain points. They did the church intentionally. They didn’t fit within the congregation. There was suffering, there was church hurt, there was clergy scandal. And we wouldn’t want to just, you know, we wouldn’t want to dismiss that in any way. We’re just trying to put it in its proper proportion. So what we want people to know is that the de church in our midst, they are not a monolithic group. They they are going to need different levels of engagement. Some you are going to be able to nudge and they are going to come right back. One invitation is going to cause them to come back. Some people are going to need to be in your, you know, at your dinner table, before they’re going to be back in a church. And some are really going to be, need to be in your life for years or decades. And May, and very likely, need the Holy Spirit to do something in the heart that no none of us are able to do. But under the banner of the de churched are not monolithic. I’m going to hand it back over to Mike.

Mike Graham
So in our study of the 40 million D church in America and just everybody who’s, you know, holding up their, you know, taking pictures and whatnot, hey, at the very end of this presentation, I’m going to give you my actual email address, and so I’ll save your I’ll save your phones and your storage on your iCloud, and you can just email me TGC, W presentation. I’ll send you a PDF for the whole thing. Okay, so of the 40 million people who you’re about to get a lot of emails, I’m used to it. It’s all right, all right. So the 40 million decharged people, 15 million of those people left evangelical churches. So I’m going to show you four profiles, and this is of the 15 million people who left evangelical churches. Now the first of these profiles the cultural Christians here. This is 8 million of those 15 million. The next three are basically two and a half million each. Okay, so just in terms of size now, the reasons why people left, their willingness to return, and all sorts of demographic information about each of these different groups varies extremely widely, and so how we relate to each one of these groups needs to be very, very different those levels of need, whether that’s nudge dinner table or years and decades and all sorts of relational wisdom. And just so you know, we’re going very high altitude here. You really ought to read the great D churching book. We’re covering maybe 5% of the insights in terms of what it looks like to to engage with these folks. So that being said, let’s talk about the cultural Christians first. Okay, the trend more male than female. You were talking about somebody who’s, you know, middle aged in their early 40s, and this group was almost monolithically white. Now, what’s interesting about our study is so you go and get this big data set, but how do you develop these profiles? Well, we don’t want to introduce bias, and so what you do is you use something called a machine learning algorithm. And that’s just a fancy word for saying. It’s something that puts mathematically similar people with have who have very similar answer choices together. And so one of the things we did not let the machine learning algorithm see was we didn’t let it see ethnicity or race. But what you’ll find is, when we look at these profiles, ethnicity and race actually cast a very long shadow in the data. And even though we didn’t even allow to sort on those things, it largely gets sorted on those things. And that makes sense. Okay, so this, this is a group of people who America was working well for them, the American dream was working well for them. And these people, they’re hitting the golf course, they’re doing travel baseball, they’re doing all sorts of other things in lieu of attending church on a Sunday, they had very high income, very high education. And they also, interestingly enough, don’t seem to be regenerate at all. Only 1% of this group. Look at this, 1% said Jesus is the Son of God, and you’re going to see in the very next, the very next group, it’s going to be 98% and so this is really important. This is probably a group of people who were probably never Christians to begin with, or certainly at the point when they took this study, whatever previous beliefs that they had is no longer there. Now, here’s what’s interesting. Of the 15 million people who left evangelical context, it looks like about five, 5 million of those 15 million still do hold to what we would call Nicene Creed level orthodoxy. And so what we’re talking about, when we’re talking about the D church, we’re not necessarily talking about people who have all left the faith. It looks like to us, at least one out of three of the people who left evangelical churches still seem to hold to the core tenets of the gospel. So that’s important for us to understand. You know, again, we’re not dealing with a group of people who is who’s monolithic, and so the this group trended center left politically. But what was interesting is they weren’t. They’re not terribly woke, so there’s look, data is always more complicated than the stories that we put around them, okay? And people are more complicated than the stories that we put around them. So we want to treat people in ways that, you know, with curiosity and so how we listen to, you know, and engage with people. Okay, so what does this group of people need? So they before we cover what they need, here’s why this group of people left. Number one, attendance was inconvenient. Two, their friends weren’t attending. Three, they moved to a new community. Four, suffering changed their life in some way, there’s some some things that show up here that don’t show up in some of the other profiles. Like I wanted to to be able to personally express my gender identity, I chose to worship completely online scandal and clergy in the broader culture and the church was too restrictive of their sexual freedom. Okay. Now what’s interesting is that half of those 8 million people said that they would be willing to return to an evangelical church right now, okay? 4 million people, okay, and these are the reasons why they said they would be willing to return. Number one, new friends, lonely and want to make new friends. Supernatural phenomenon, which is interesting, it’s the only time that shows up begin.

Jim Davis
The way we understand this is like, I go home and the Bible is floating in my kitchen like, that’s

Mike Graham
a friend invites me, spouse wants to go move and want to make new friends, a good committee. What’s the refrain here? What’s common among all of this? It’s relationships, okay? And look, is this rocket science? No, no, it’s not. This is very simple stuff. Okay, what does this group need? Number one, they need a sincere community. Number two, this group, even though they’re doing well financially in education and seems like in life, they’re really struggling in mental health and kind of that’s true all of when you compare people who are going to church versus people who are de Church. The mental health of those who are attending church is vastly better than those who are not. We don’t really we unpack that in the book you can read about. I think it’s pages 29 and 30.

Unknown Speaker
All right, this. I didn’t even know that

Mike Graham
this group very much needs sound doctrine and spiritual formation. Okay? It’s either they didn’t get it or they weren’t listening, and we need to engage them better in the 18 to 39 year old age range. Now here’s the second profile. Mainstream evangelicals couldn’t be more different than the cultural evangelicals. This is the most low hanging fruit, two and a half million people, 100% of this group is willing to return to an evangelical church today. And look at this. They left very recently in the last three years. Okay? This group predominantly female, also around that average age of 40, and they had a little bit less education. Little less income than the first in the first group, but look at this, 98% Jesus is the Son of God. Okay, their orthodoxy score was higher than people who still went to church, even though they’re more racially sensitive than the group before them. That was because

Unknown Speaker
they’re Christians.

Mike Graham
Because, the thing happens to me, because the Bible encourages us to those things, yes, and then, okay, so why did they leave? Number one, they moved. Two, attendance was inconvenient. Three, COVID 19 got them out of the habit. Four, some kind of family change didn’t fit within the congregation. Didn’t experience much love was in the congregation. Okay. Now, most of these reasons of why this group of people left are in the casual variety, same with the first group two, I would say that most of these two groups are comprised of the casualty church. Okay. Now, why did this group of people say they be willing to return new friends. God tells them to go back in a significant way. They find a church that they like. They begin to miss church. They feel the distance from God. They find a good pastor, lonely and want to make new friends, and they find a church that takes doctrine and ethics seriously. There’s three things that are important about this group. What they’re looking for? They’re looking for the holy, you know, Holy Spirit’s moving on them. Okay, seems that, you know, when you look at these answer choices, God’s definitely moving. They’re feeling distance from God. They’re looking for a healthy local church, and they’re looking for a place where there’s good community. So this is not rocket science. What what Jim and I have experienced anecdotally is this person this profile is really easy to spot. They don’t they don’t dislike church. They they think that they’re going to go back to church. They just for whatever kind of silly reason, they’re just kind of out of the habit of going to church 100% of the time. The gym and I have run across somebody who’s in this profile when we just simply said, Hey, would you like to come to church with me? You know, this Sunday, and maybe we’ll go out to eat after 100% of the time they come, this is the person that just needs a nudge. So if you don’t hear anything else for the rest of this time, just like, know this profile, know when to spot it. And just, you know, we want to inspire you to take relational risk. Okay, take relational risk, especially for this profile right here. You’re not going to lose your relationship over this, over inviting somebody like this. Okay, so what do they need? They need a nudge. They need a church that’s going to take doctrine and ethics seriously. We ought to challenge their the distance that the that they’re experiencing from God, because they’re, you know, they’re out of the habit of, you know, being with the ecclesia in the church and the gathered church. And then again, we need to engage better this group in the 18 to 39 age range. All right, this is one that’s interesting. This is not what you think it is, okay, exvangelicals. So when you think about evangelicals, you’re probably thinking about people who are highly online, maybe younger, maybe more educated, probably female and probably in the kind of influencer kind of thing. What we found is, while that that is a thing, okay, and they’re in most of those people are also either deconstructing key doctrines of the, you know, of the faith, things of, you know, the Nicene Creed level, or kind of falling apart by and large. That’s not who this group is this. Group is comprised primarily of older females who are struggling in American culture and society, and they are the least online of any of the groups, and they’ve been forgotten by just about everybody. Okay, American institutions are not working well for them, income is not working well for them. They have below average, below average income, education, very high rates of single parenting, divorce, these different kinds of things. Here’s what’s interesting. Look at this. 97% Jesus is the Son of God. Okay? Their orthodoxy scores are actually pretty good, the second highest of all the different profiles that we looked at, and very high view of the Bible. Now, most of them are politically independent, because America is not working for them and neither of the neither the political parties this, group is extremely allergic to racism, misogyny, political syncretism and Christian nationalism. In particular, they’re very similar to the main line in Roman Catholics in with those same allergies. Okay, why did they leave number one? I didn’t fit within. You’re going to see these are almost. All de church casualties. Okay, the pain is there. Most of these people are battling either suicidal thoughts or suicidal ideation on a weekly basis. Okay, so and you you know these people? I know that you’re already thinking, you know, as you’re sitting here? Yeah, I know, yeah, this is this person and that person, okay? Number one, I didn’t fit within the congregation. I moved to a new community. Attendance was inconvenient. Didn’t experience much love within the congregation. Disagreed with the politics of the congregation. Negative experiences that you had personally in an evangelical church. No longer believed what the Church believed, and then you disagreed with the politics of the clergy. Now, here’s what’s interesting. This is why we called this group exvangelical. 0% of this group is willing to return to an Evangelical Church, 0% as opposed to 100% for the mainstream group that we just did just before this okay. Now, here’s what’s interesting. Many of these people are willing to go to a different to a non evangelical expression of the faith, whether that’s black Protestant, mainline, you know, other kind of Christian traditions. And so one of the things that’s really interesting in our city is Jim and I have a really good relationship. And the reason this entire book even exists is in some ways, Justin Holcomb. He’s the Bishop of the Episcopal Church, the Episcopal Diocese of Orlando, and they’re one of three diocese in the country that are dissenting from the National denomination on the sexuality matters, and it’s it’s a really good diocese and a number of very good churches there. Well, we, you know, we’re good friends with Justin, and we’ve sent a lot of people who fit this profile into those kinds of churches. Now, you know, we’re, you know, we’re unabashedly, you know, evangelical and but I would rather have somebody, you know, going to a non evangelical church that is gospel preaching, then you know, then be de churched. Okay, so find those churches in your city, you know, develop relationships with those. Know who those you know, know who those clergy are, and so you can help find a place for for these folks now, so many of them actually want to go to church, and this is what they’re looking for. So God tells them to go back in a significant way. They find a church that they like a good pastor, yes, I’m never going back. Understand, feel the distance from God. Find a church that cares about justice and compassion for vulnerable people. Good community. Begin to miss church. So what do they need? They need a non partisan church community. They need a church that’s going to take doctrine and ethics seriously. They need serious mental health help, and they need an empathetic community and clergy. Bipoc group, fascinating group, 100% non white, predominantly male. This group had the highest income and the highest education of any of the groups. So these are mid six figure earning group of people that over half of them, 52% are affluent, highly educated, black men, fascinating group of people now. They left in the in the late 1990s the longer somebody has been de churched, the more that they’re the kind of nice and creed level Christianity is going to erode. So the fact that they’ve been gone for, you know, almost 30 years, and there’s still some people here that Jesus is the Son of God is not a bad sign. But this is a very interesting group of people. We talk a lot in the book more about kind of what we think is is going on here with this particular group of people. So in terms of why they left. Number one, they moved. Two, faith wasn’t working. Three, other priorities for time and money. Four, suffering, doubting God’s existence, scandal involving clergy in their congregation didn’t see the congregation doing enough good in the community, messages not relevant to their life. Now, almost two thirds of this group are willing to return to an Evangelical Church. Can you imagine being out of the habit of doing something for 25 years and saying, you know, two thirds of a group of people saying, Yeah, I’ll do that again. I mean, think about that seriously for a second. Okay, all right. So this is very common here. You’re going to see something. It’s kind of like the first one, new friends. Lonely. Want to make new friends. Moving. Want to make new friends. Child wants to go. Friend invites me. Good community. Spouse wants to go. Feel distance from God. What’s the common story here? It’s relationships. Okay. So what do they need? Cultural, emotional intelligence in terms of how we’re engaging them. They need deep friendship, sound doctrine and spiritual formation. This group in particular needs needs better engagement in the 13 to 30 time frame. I’m going to I’m going to let those of you who email me cover the the main line profile, the. Mainline profile looks very similar to the evangelical profile. The Roman Catholic profile also looks very similar to the main line profile. You guys can read more. You’ve got whole chapters on these things in the book. In the interest of time, I’m going to skip through the main line.

Jim Davis
So as you’re skipping one of the things that I’ve done in my we have different techniques in our own personal ministry. But I have four questions that I asked to figure out, what am I looking at here. So did you grow up or so? Do you go to church? Would be my first question, did you if the answer is no, did you grow up going to church? If the answer is yes, then I know they’re de churched. And then I’ll ask them, why don’t you go to church? And I’ll know, are they casually de church? Are they church casualties? And I’ll ask, who is Jesus to you? Or Mike asks a lot, Are you a person of faith, and what role does that play in your life? And those four or five questions you can nail who you’re looking at. And again, we’re batting 1000 on inviting the mainstream, deep church. Evangelicals back to church. So one thing I want to do is spend a few minutes talking about myths that we have debunked, either in our research proper, or in adjacent research that we brought into this. So the first myth is that people leave because of negative experiences in the church. So that does happen, but we’ve already, we’ve already covered the lion’s share is not that they’re not leaving primarily because of negative experiences. Number two, young people are leaving because of secular university. We have definitively proven that higher education is not taking our young people away. Ryan Burge has done more, more work on this after, after we did this research, the actually the more education an evangelical has, the more likely they are to continue going to church. If

Mike Graham
you have a graduate degree and you grew up Evangelical, you are eight times less likely to de church than somebody who only had a high school graduation or some college Yeah,

Jim Davis
only 3% of the evangelicals in our study had de churched. So graduate degrees. I said, Did I say graduate degree? What I say? You didn’t say anything. Who’s on First that? Yeah, 3% of Evangelicals with graduate degrees had de churched. Yes. So education is our friend. People leave the church because they left the faith. So we’ve already, Mike has already shown us that a lot of the people who have left the church, they have not left the faith. And it is very important, because the children of the de churched will statistically speaking, be unchurched. So this low hanging fruit. Again, it isn’t just to get people into our buildings and make them feel full. This is low hanging fruit to influence and reach generations. For Jesus, number four, people are leaving, primarily on the secular left. We tend to think it’s the Liberals leaving, it’s the progressives leaving. It’s the Democrats leaving. And you know, in the in the 90s, it was primarily the secular left that was leaving. But you fast forward to today, and the secular right is de churching at twice the pace of the secular left. And some people will say, Well, that’s because the secular left is already de churched, and you know, so it naturally is twice as much. Well, actually, the the secular right has caught up in total number with the secular left. And so there’s lots of lots of interesting ways. This changes church and politics. We’ve made the argument we’re trying to get overly political, but making an observation, you know, it would be hard to imagine the Republican Party of the 90s and early 2000s still reeling from Bill Clinton’s moral indiscretions, nominating Donald Trump as their candidate. So now you have a different now that you’ve had, you know, 40 million adult Americans leave since then, and so many of that them leaving on the secular right, it changes the landscape, including our primaries. Number five, people aren’t willing to come back. They’re gone. They’re not willing to come back. We’ve already talked about this. This is not true. There are about 8 million evangelicals and about a similar number of mainline who are willing to come back today. According to them, number six America’s peak religiosity was at the founding of our country. If we just go back to 1776 and regain what we had then, then, then we would be fine now. Well, so the high water mark of church attendance was in the tooth. It was in the 20th century, about 49% right now we’re at about 25 to 30% regular church attenders. Do you know what the attendance was in 1776 17% so we’re not looking to go back there. And we would make, we make the argument in the book that we’re pro constitution, but the Constitution is the watershed document into secularism in the west there, you know, you compare our constitution with constitutions of like Connecticut, it has Jesus in it. Andrew Wilson, some of you know he’s done some good work on Ben Frank Jefferson, the words, we hold these truths to be self evident, originally said, We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable. And Ben Franklin talked him into changing it because it was too Christian. So we were just, we’re we’re pro us, pro constitution, but we, this is a myth that we were all just, you know, perfect Christian nation in 1776, number seven. De churching is happening to the primary up, primarily upwardly mobile. It is not happening primarily to people of means. Dechurching is hitting the lower educated, lower income the hardest. And this makes sense, if you think about it, because if, if de churching is primarily happening in areas of life change and transition, well, who does that hit the hardest when someone loses their job, has to move, becomes a single parent, gets divorced. Who does that hit the hardest? Those who don’t have the financial safety net, they’re the ones who have to work longer hours, work more unusual hours, so de churching is hitting them harder.

Mike Graham
So something really cool that we wanted to do, I didn’t know that there’s going to be so many of you here. I found out two weeks ago, there’s going to be so many people here. So I’m like, I better put some unique content here. So I’m going to give you guys something that we we haven’t done anywhere else. Okay, so I want, we went back with Ryan and said, Ryan, we need to give, we need to give these ladies some custom data on what is going on among just de church evangelical women. So these next four things we’ve never given in any presentation anywhere before, so it’s totally, totally new and unique. So now we already covered this before. Some of these profiles were heavily female, so that was the mainstream evangelical profile. Those are the that’s the low hanging fruit, the evangelical profile, and then the main line, folks. And you can kind of see, here’s the breakdown, you know, you know, in terms of gender, in this, Orange is men, and blue as women. I didn’t make the colors, of course, he used Gator colors. I didn’t do that. Ryan did that. He went to FSU. I went to Florida the ministry of reconciliation. All right, what’s happening among de churched evangelical women? Okay, over two thirds, 68% of the people who de churched out of you’re talking Evangelical, de church evangelical women. 68% are between the ages of 19 and 45 if I asked you how many, how many of you know de church? You know people who left evangelical churches, who are women between 1945 I’m pretty sure everybody would raise their hand. Okay, so here’s what I want to tell you. Every single one of you here is on the front lines of this phenomenon, and every one of you has important gospel ministry, you know, on on this. And so I just want to just validate everybody who is here. You have important work to do. And we want to inspire you that when you engage in these conversations with people, I promise you, it’s not going to end the relationship, so take the relational risk. Okay, all right, so that’s the that’s the breakdown for that. Okay, here’s what’s interesting, women are more reluctant than men to leave churches, so over the course of their lifetime, women will leave less churches than what men will. And interestingly enough, and this is contrary to like even stuff that’s been published in the New York Times and the Atlantic in this last week, highly educated women are not leaving evangelical churches in the ways in which they’ve been kind of, you know, written about more recently here in the media. If you look at this, actually, more educated men are more prone to de churching than it is women. So, you know, again, data is often more complicated than the narratives and the stories that we put around them. So the whole point of, all you know, why do you go and get data so you can get good information, so that we can act based on reality, as opposed to, you know, caricature of reality. So, as I promised before, oh, Jim is going to talk about some low hanging fruit here on on this, but as he’s doing that, and to tee that up, I want to make everybody aware of and you can see this on the Keller Center website. We do have a cohort that’s coming up that’s very much geared toward that would be very relevant for this. It’s entitled How to disciple the next generation. It’s hard to see, but you can see that Melissa and Michael Kruger, who are very common names around here. There will be some of the people who will be leading that cohort, the, you know, in terms of low hanging fruit, you know, student ministry ages 13, particularly the time frame of 13 to 30 is just such a critical time frame. And whether we talking about, you know, you who have made. Be a teenage, you know, children, or you’re connected to student ministry in some ways, this is something that we, that we put together at the Keller center to train and equip. And so with that being said, Yeah, I

Jim Davis
don’t need that. I would just say, you know, you have in a church, you have a front door and a back door, and we tend to get really motivated and excited about how to open the front door more widely, but what we really probably the first step is to address the back door and to understand why people are leaving. And so I would just because we only have, like, three minutes left, we do have a number of pastoral thoughts in the whole second half of the book, but But recognize when someone is most likely to de church. Like, if we can, that would help a lot. So as Mike said, between the ages of 13 and 30, you have high school, for most people, college and then establishing your young professional career. That is the season age wise, you’re most likely to de church. There’s some things that we’re doing in our context to try and really reassess how we come alongside parents in the discipleship of their kids. We know they’re not outsourcing it to us, but we’re trying to come alongside. I actually heard an atheist sociologist recently make the case that because because of evolution, children are wired to leave their parents homes, and because of that, they’re less likely to listen to what they have to say between the ages of 13 and 25 and because of that, they need other men and women speaking truth into their lives the same things. And I was like, actually, okay, I your hair off, but mostly right, like I would say, God designed children to leave the home, and that design has been marred by sin, but everything else makes a ton of sense to me. Because our youth, I’ll say something. My kids, I got three teenagers and a nine year old, especially the teenagers, I’ll say something and say, Yeah, whatever. Dad, the youth guy says it, and he’s like, the coolest, wisest guy in their lives. There is something there. So in knowing those age ranges also likely to de church those who have less money and experience life transition. So I mean, if you have somebody who becomes a single parent, has a job change, this is red flag back door stuff for our ministry. I am curious how many of you are realtors, school teachers or school administrators. Okay, so remember, what is the number one reason for de churching I moved so in Orlando, it’s on the receiving end. So this is more of a front door thing, but we’re mobilizing our points of first contact, the teachers, the administrators and the realtors, to know that while you’re going to show them a home and a school, you might also be able to show them a church. On the back end, we have the responsibility to stay with people when they move away, until they find a new church. So those are some of the things. Again, there’s just not enough time to cover a lot of them, but looking at the back door is what we’re advocating and what we’re really saying on the whole we’re advocating not for something new. We’re advocating for a return to something very old, just in a very unique context, a return to healthy churches, evangelism, discipleship. We believe that what’s going on the United States today, there’s some aspects to it that are very good. Obviously, we have the hopefulness of so many people who are willing to come back. But in the 20th century, you went to church often because you wanted your business to thrive, because you wanted to run for office, because you wanted your kids to have good, clean fun. I don’t think it’s bad that now the majority of people who go to church are doing so only for Jesus. So that’s a good thing. There’s a purification happening. We also know in the global church, Christianity is doing just fine. There are more Christians alive today than there than the total number of Christians the first 1900 years combined. So and we also know how this story ends, so we can engage this conversation without fear. We can do it with hope. We can do it winsomely, knowing that God is sovereign over all of this. So with that said, thank you for coming. We hope we can be helpful here and anytime in the future.