Main Menu
Home Programs Resources Blog
About
About Me Contact Me My Work My Services Ministries

Resources

Recommended Resources Progressive Christianity The Exodus Racism and Critical Race Theory Jesus Calling NAR

Summary of the rest of the information on the page:

  • As of 2007, 45% of young Christians leave the church and do not return.

  • As of 2018, 32% of Americans qualify as practicing Christians.

  • As of 2021, only 6% of Americans have a biblical worldview.
  • As of 2022, only 37% of pastors have a biblical worldview.

Mama Bear Apologetics

  • Most studies indicate between 45%-48% percent of youth leave church after their freshman year in college and never return.2 The percentages vary based on denomination, but the problem is the same. David Kinnaman found that after age 15, almost 60% of young Christians had disconnected from their church.3 More than half (54%) of high school students attend church. But once they hit college, the problem gets worse. Frequent attendance drops from 44% in high school to 25% in college; nonattendance goes up from 20% in high school to 38% in college. In a 2006 Barna study, 61% of twenty-somethings who had attended church as teens were no longer spiritually engaged.5 One study showed that 70% of teens who attended youth group stopped attending church within two years of their high school graduation!6

    • 2 A Lifeway study reported that while 60% leave, around two-thirds of those finally return. That sounds encouraging until you do the math and realize that still means we are losing 45% of our youth for good every generation. When you get to numbers that high, you start seeing exponential loss because those 45% are now raising their own kids, and those kids are interacting with your kids. See Lifeway Research, “Reasons 18-22 Year Olds Drop Out of Church,” Lifeway Research (August 7, 2007), https://lifewayresearch.com/2007/08/07/reasons-18-to-22-year-olds-drop-out-of-church/.

    • 3 David Kinnaman, You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church… and Rethinking Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2011), 23.

    • 4 Alexander W. Astin, Helen S. Astin, and Jennifer A. Lindholm, Cultivating the Spirit: How College Can Enhance Students’ Inner Lives (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2011), 89.

    • 5 Barna study, “Most Twentysomethings Put Christianity on the Shelf Following Spiritually Active Teen Years” Barna (September 11, 2006), https://www.barna.com/research/most-twentysomethings-put-christianity-on-the-shelf-following-spiritually-active-teen-years/.

    • 6 T.C. Pinckney, “We Are Losing Our Children: Remarks to the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee,” Alliance for the Separation of School and State (September 18, 2001), http://www.schoolandstate.org/SBC/Pinckney-WeAreLosingOurChildren.htm.

Ferrer, Hillary Morgan, and Nancy Pearcey. 2019. Mama Bear ApologeticsTM: Empowering Your Kids to Challenge Cultural Lies. Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers.

So the Next Generation Will Know

 

  • Gen Z has become the embodiment of an important (and disturbing) trend. Recent surveys and studies reveal that Gen Z is the least religious of all generations in America. In fact, “the percentage of teens who identify as atheist is double that of the general population.”  This data is consistent with recent historical data. The number of young people leaving the church over the past twenty years is staggering. According to one study at UCLA, 52 percent of college students reported frequent church attendance the year before they entered college, but only 29 percent continued frequent church attendance by their junior year.  A variety of studies report that 50 to 70 percent of young Christians walk away from the church by the time they are in their college years. 7 Even those who don’t leave find themselves struggling to believe Christianity is true. Approximately 40 to 50 percent of students in youth groups struggle in their faith after graduation.8

McDowell, Sean, J. Warner Wallace, and Foles Nick. 2019. So the Next Generation Will Know: Preparing Young Christians for a Challenging World. Colorado Springs, CO: David C Cook.

Cultural Apologetics

  • In a recent Barna poll, researchers tried to see why Millennials (those between twenty-two to thirty-seven years old) are abandoning the church and the faith. They identified six reasons for the exodus: (1) The church is overprotective and fails to expose people to anti-Christian ideas. (2) The church’s teaching is shallow. (3) The church is antagonistic to science and fails to help believers interact with scientific claims. (4) The church treats sexuality simplistically and judgmentally. (5) The church makes exclusivist claims. (6) The church is dismissive of doubters.

    Note that every single reason involves a failure to engage the life of the mind and employ apologetics to answer people’s questions. Last spring, I received an email from someone I did not know. The gentleman shared that he and a few others were working with about twenty-five Millennials. Some were atheists, but most were Christians on a razor’s edge in abandoning Christianity. When they shared their doubts in church, they were either dismissed (e.g., stop over-thinking things and get into the Word) or given weak answers. He asked me if I would come to his home and have a question-and-answer time with the group. I happily agreed, and the evening consisted of two and a half hours of question-and-answer with about twenty-five people. After our time, several shared with me that their faith had been restored by the evening.

    Our greatest need is to reintroduce believers to the value and practice of apologetics and to equip them to engage our culture’s ideas in a winsome and intelligent way.

Cultural Apologetics, by JP Moreland

 


Barna - State of the Church - 2018

  • Three-quarters of Americans (74%) say they are a Christian, but only about one-third of Americans (32%) qualify as practicing Christians—those who regularly attend church and say their faith is very important in their lives. About four in 10 Americans (39%) classify as non-practicing Christians. Almost one-fifth (19%) claim no faith at all, and a smaller percentage (6%) identify with other faiths like Islam, Buddhism, Judaism or Hinduism. More than four in 10 (42%) qualify as post-Christian.

Barna, State of the Church, 2018


Barna - American Worldview Inventory - 2021

  • The groundbreaking worldview research conducted by the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University in 2020 revealed that just 6% of U.S. adults have a biblical worldview.

Barna, American Worldview Inventory, 2021


Barna - American Worldview Inventory - 2022

  • “An earlier report from the American Worldview Inventory 2022 showed that just 37% of Christian pastors have a biblical worldview, with the predominant worldview among pastors (62%) being syncretism, a hybrid mixture of disparate worldview elements blended into a customized philosophy of life.”

Barna, American Worldview Inventory, 2022


If you'd like to add anything, or have corrections or recommendations, just reach out.