Latest / The Speak Life Podcast / Why Are People Leaving Church? || Jim Davis and Michael Graham || SLP489

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Why Are People Leaving Church? || Jim Davis and Michael Graham || SLP489 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Hello and thank you for downloading the Speak Life podcast, episode 489.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: My name is Thomas Thorogood, media producer at Speak Life, and in this episode you're going to hear a conversation that Glenn had with Jim Davies and Michael Graham about their latest book, The Great De Churching.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: Who's Leaving?
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: Why are they going?
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: And what will it take to bring them back?
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: So they have done a lot of number crunching, looking at data about people leaving the church in the United States, and they have written this book sharing their findings.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_02: Hello, I'm Glenn from Speak Life.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_02: We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus, and I'm joined on the line by two authors of a new book called The Great De Churching.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_02: Who's Leaving?
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_02: Why are they going, and what will it take to bring them back?
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_02: So I've got Jim Davis and Michael Graham on the line.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much for joining me.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for having us.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for having us, Glenn.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's so good to have you.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think your book is quite a myth-busting book for a lot of people.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_02: I I spend far too much of my time on that website that shall forever be known as Twitter and shall never be known as X, but I spend far too much time uh on that platform in which the narrative is often a narrative of yes, there are very many people leaving church, uh, but the reasons why they are leaving church are largely because of church abuse and largely because of theological reasons.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_02: And so the hashtag Xvang Exvangelical kind of gets out there and and uh and yet you guys have done uh the really hard work, and together with Ryan Burge done the really hard work of doing some statistics about uh who's leaving church in America and why they're leaving.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um tell us what what prompted you to write this book.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: So it was really born out of our Orlando experience.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: We we began to notice in our own cultural exegesis that most of the people who didn't go to church in our in our context used to go to church.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so we saw a Barnes study that came out, I think, in 2018, that talked about that stated that Orlando had the same percentage of evangelicals as New York City and Seattle.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that jaunt it was it was kind of jaunting because we're trying to understand why then do we feel so different contextually than New York City and Seattle.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: And this study also claimed that 42% of our context used to go to church and now longer, now no longer does.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: So that's two million people, making making dechurched people the highest demographic in Orlando outside of male and female.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: And so we wanted to understand this phenomenon more, more for our local church, or initially for our local church.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, it took on a larger scope, but there really was no data to be found.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: So this is when we were so thankful to run into Ryan Burge, who is a social scientist, a Christian.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: He's just outstanding at what he does.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody should subscribe to a Substack.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so we commissioned the most comprehensive study on dechurching that that exists, and we wanted to prove or disprove this thesis.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: We are currently in the largest and fastest religious shift in the history of our country, and we proved it.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: And it by percentage, well, the previous largest shift was the the 25 years post-Civil War.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: Uh our shift is 25% times greater than that, just going the opposite direction.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: And if you want to go in terms of numbers, when obviously our population is larger now, it's larger than the first and second Great Awakening and all the Billy Graham Crusades combined, just go in the opposite direction.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: So that's that's the impetus of the study.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_02: And can you can you tell us a little bit, Michael, about how you went about this?
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_02: Because you you weren't just surveying Orlando uh Americans, you you you went across the nation.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_02: So what what were some of the ways that you were going about getting this data?
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so we went we wanted to go uh with a study that was done uh by a joint clergy and academic um kind of partnership, and so that's why we contacted um Ryan Burge and he looped in uh fellow social scientist um whose uh expertise is in uh survey design, uh Paul Jup.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_03: And so we worked with those two guys.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_03: Paul helped us with our survey design, and then Ryan did all of our data analytics, and we did a uh three-phase study with increasing granularity with each of those successive phases.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_03: Um you just don't do those things in in one big study because you don't necessarily know where you need to double-click and zoom in.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_03: And so uh the first study um was basically just getting a size of uh how many people are we talking about here who have dechurched.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_03: And so that was a general population study.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_03: And then the second study was getting greater granularity on what was going on among just people who dechurched, and then the third phase of the study was getting greater granularity on what was going on among people who were evangelical before and have dechurched.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_03: So, all told, we surveyed 7,000 people, and the third phase of that study was the most granular, where we had about 600 data points per respondent in the third phase of that study.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_03: So just uh really tremendous granularity, particularly in phase three, of what's going on among dechurched evangelicals.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_03: So these studies are expensive, and so you you've got to be very smart about how you go about those things and know where you want to zoom in.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_03: But um, and all of those things went through the university review board process at Paul Jupes University so that there's that layer of um academic quality so that the results of those studies can be cited in you know by um by other scholars and by journalists.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_02: So 40 million Americans have left in the last 30 years, and that's one in six of the US population.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um how how many Christians are left in churches in the US?
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_03: It depends on how you define uh Christian, you know.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_03: So the the sociological categories for uh uh for these things are uh are about belief, behavior, and belonging.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_03: You know, and so you can create definitions that are you know, oh well, um and there's also affiliation.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_03: So you know, somebody says, Oh, well, I'm a Christian, but then you can you know kind of drill down on, okay, well, do you go to church?
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_03: You know, that's the belonging piece.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_03: You know, behaviors, well, what are your ethical standards look like and what do your rituals and practices look like in terms of that fli that faith being fleshed out?
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_03: And then what are your beliefs?
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_03: So is in terms of people who still go to houses of worship in the United States, it's a it's a little less than half now.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_03: At its peak, it was at about um 70 percent.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_03: Um and that was really just during the height of the the Cold War in the in the late from basically the late 60s to early 80s, that was the height of you know people going to houses of worship, and that's all religious traditions, but um the lion's share of America in terms of affiliation is um is Christian for those who are religious.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_03: So um it's it's not easy to say exactly how many Christians there are in the United States.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_03: It would just kind of boil down to you know how you would kind of define that term, whether you're looking belief, behavior, or belonging, all of the above, you know, and then you have categories like the invisible church and the visible church as well, which further complicate that if we want to get really uh really niche.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_02: And and you've gone back 30 years.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_02: Is is is there a very noticeable kind of sort of dew point where where things kind of take a turn?
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_02: And if so, like what do you put that down to?
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: The 90s was was the tipping point.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um you we have uh some graphs in our book that are articulate this, but really four things happened in the 1990s that accentuated what was going on, became the tipping point.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: Mike alluded to the Cold War.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: The end of the Cold War was a really uh big tipping point because in the United States, it to be up until that point, to be American was synonymous with Christian.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: We were in this battle, the American Christians versus the godless atheists.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: This is when in the Eisenhower administration we got under God in our pledge and in God we trust on our money.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's not a coincidence.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: And uh this may sound crazy to uh to an audience outside of the United States, but I can remember as a kid, if somebody were to say, I'm no longer a Christian, it was not uncommon then to ask, Well, are you a communist?
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: So in the fall of the Cold War, you you could, it was in in some parts of the country, you know, it was uh socially acceptable to be an uh an American but not a Christian.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: Then you had uh the internet.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: By 1994, we had internet cafes, by 1997, the internet is in most of the schools and libraries, so people can now engage other worldviews the way that they couldn't before.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: You had the rise of the religious right.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh some people really saw this extreme politicized version of the faith and decided that if that's Christianity, I I don't want to be in it.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: And then, which, you know, it's kind of fascinating to go to 2001, so just after the close of the decade, and you have 9-11.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: So now, overnight, our our our enemies are no longer godless atheists, our national enemies are religious fundamentalists.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: And so people said, well, that's what religion does.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want any part of any kind of religion.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: Now, admittedly, I think we can't prove this with our data.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: I I think the 90s was a time for people who already were not Christians to admit to being such.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: So that's our opinion.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: But then you fast forward, uh uh, you know, people were dechurching on the secular left, but you fast forward to now, and the right is dechurching the political right at almost twice the pace.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: So there's an evolution, but to your question, the 90s was the tipping point.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_02: And we'll we'll get into the reasons why people dechurch, and that will be caught up in your answer to this question.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_02: But but what happened with the pandemic and and and how has that affected the data?
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, the the pandemic is is interesting and complicated.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_03: I I don't you know there it it certainly was significant.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_03: There's there's spikes that are there that we can see.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_03: But we're unclear you know, because when we when we got the data set, it was early 2022.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_03: So depending if you were in red America, so if you're outside the US, that's you know, kind of conservative America, um, which is often the kind of you know non-coastal flyover, you know, flyover states as some might call it.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_03: And then if you were in a blue state or uh a blue city, um sometimes the rules were a little different in terms of the COVID restrictions and whatnot.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_03: You know, in we're in Florida and we kind of pretended like the pr the pandemic didn't exist.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_03: I think our I think our lockdowns are like six weeks.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_03: But uh you know, in other states there was you know a year or more that you know many churches weren't able to meet by law.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_03: And so uh there's complexity that's there that I don't know how it will play itself out in terms of the long, you know, the long term.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_03: You know, in in psychology, you know, it takes 30 days to form a new habit.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_03: And so if you get out of the habit of doing something for 30 days, well, you know, it's only logical that it's gonna be difficult to get some of those things kind of restarted.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_03: And so there's no doubt that there's gonna be a long tail to people that you know just kind of left the church during that COVID season and they just never got back in the habit of going either back to embodied worship or they just got accustomed to doing, you know, live stream, you know, church, um, which I'm not really a fan of.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, unless there's like a r you know a good medical reason or you know, some other, you know, kind of seasoned thing that, you know, is is I hopefully not you know non-permanent.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_03: But yeah, it it it definitely had an impact.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_03: What the what the the the long-term implications of that would be yet are are not quite clear.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_03: You know, Ryan has some some thoughts on this where he doesn't think it's as significant um as as you know some might think it is, and then but you know, but then again, you know, in our data set, you know, there there definitely seems to be a spike there.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_03: I just don't know how permanent really it is, but it's not nothing, you know, particularly for the if you read the book, um, and in chapter four, we outline mainstream dechurched evangelicals, and they're the people who dechurched most recently, and their kind of bell curve is centered around 2020 of when they dechurched.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_03: So my hunch is is for that group um COVID played a pretty significant role.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I think for a lot of the other groups it hasn't.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_03: So um it's just it's nuanced and complicated.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_03: But I would not say it would be a huge misnomer to say that most of the dechurching that we're looking at right now is COVID-centric.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, most of people who have left left before 2020, even though you know 2020 was probably the highest single year of dechurching that we've seen.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_02: Right, right.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_02: So let's get into why uh people leaving, and you kind of broke that into different kinds of streams.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_02: So so let us know.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_02: What what are the kind of the the different reasons that people have had for leaving the church?
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: So if you you know, if you listen to the social media pundits or New York Times, you would think that everybody leaving the church in America has has deconstructed, hates the church, isn't a Christian, I mean, because that's what gets publicity.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: But the number one reason for dechurching in the United States is I moved.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: So it kind of goes that that alone goes against uh and even before some of the what we hear in media and online, but even before we did the study, uh Mike and I and some other friends, we were already realizing you have what we eventually ended up calling the casually dechurched and the dechurch casualties.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: So some have real pain points, and we don't want to minimize that.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: We don't want to gloss over some things that the church really needs to own and fix, but 30 million of the 40 million adult Americans who have dechurched in the past 25 years were casually dechurched with no pain points.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so what we want to look, what we want to say is it's not what we hear in the media and it's not monolithic.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: Dechurch people look very different, even within that large casually dechured.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: They look different.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: So I moved.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um dechurching in America, also, contrary to what you would think, is more of a lower education, lower income phenomenon.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: So life transition was a really big reason, which makes sense.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_01: If you become a single parent, however that happens, that's gonna hit the lower income harder than it is the middle and upper class.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um so life transitions, um people, the the highest season, that the season of life where you're high most at risk for deteaching is the ages between 13 and 30.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: So you have high school years leaving the home for most people, college, young professional.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so what we ended up doing, by we I mean our social scientists, is running all of this data through a machine learn a machine learning algorithm that processes massive amounts of data, compares common answers, and began and gave us profiles uh that we then had to understand.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_03: Um yeah, Glenn, just to build on that a little bit, I I think the the biggest kind of myth busting that's there is though the prevailing narratives from the left I think have already been covered here extensively in this interview, and that's basically uh blame shifting to the church.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_03: And certainly there's plenty that's there that's worth exploring, and I think there there's a lot of validity to those things.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_03: The the with respect to the right, and this is probably a little bit more of the the hard right in the United States, is basically blame that's going on to quote unquote the culture.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_03: And I think typically those are those are concerns about secular progressivism, um the LGBTQ plus type things, and various other kinds of forms of culture war.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_03: And so the the left is looking at the church, the right is looking at the culture, and both are partially right, both are partially wrong, and both are incomplete in some ways.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_03: So what it really kind of looks like is yes, there are things that are going on that are kind of own goals that are happening, you know, into the church.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_03: And the good news about that is, well, if there's areas that are needed for repentance, reform, and renewal, those are actually things that are within our control and we have agency on.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_03: We have less agency on things like the broader culture, and so those are more difficult things to, you know, kind of deal with and address.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_03: The the thing that I think that both of those narratives are missing is just the inertia of American life is not moving towards the benefit of those who are in church and those who are ministering.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_03: The inertia of American life is more towards um just consumerism and towards individualism.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_03: And these things are so the atomization of really everything and you know and hyper-individualism is resulting in uh pe and it just results in a form of consumerism.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_03: And so I think really those those forces are probably far more powerful than and all of that is exacerbated by technology and even further exacerbated by the way that algorithms are kind of you know embedded within technology, taking our inertia and moving us even further into our atomization.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_03: So I think those forces are probably more powerful than either the what's going on in terms of the own goals inside of our church institutions and what's going on in terms of you know, say, secular progressivism and those different kinds of things.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_03: I don't want to discount either of those, you know, things on you know, those perspectives from either of those wings.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_03: They're there, and it's definitely a piece of that, and you can't extricate that from everything else that's going on.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_03: But I think that that missing piece is what I would kind of you know, kind of hold up to both of those.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_03: You know, the internet functions like a fun house mirror, and so certain things, depending on your your narrative and your perspective, are going to look at like larger or smaller than what they are in real life.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_03: And so this is why you go and get quantitative data on things, so we can actually have a mirror that's flat.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_03: And a mirror that's flat that actually is going to reflect one-to-one, hopefully, closely what's going on.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_03: And so that's kind of what we wanted to do here in this book is you know, take a good look of okay, what is actually going on so that we can have actionable information in order to, you know, love our neighbors as you know, as ourselves better.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_03: And so, and on an individual level, and then at the on the institutional level, give people who are ministry leaders actionable information about okay, you know, what categories do I need to know from these different profiles, and how do we need to engage with different people more effectively.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: Hi folks, it's Thomas Thoroughgood here, media producer at Speak Life.
• 20:55
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• 20:59
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• 21:06
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• 21:10
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• 21:16
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• 21:21
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• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, back to the podcast.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_02: Just on that, the inertia of American life, and it's it's true throughout the Western world, I'd say, that we have become incredibly atomized, and there just is such a shrinking third space between home and work, where else is there, and every every other aspect of life, whether it's the you know political affiliations or rotary clubs or sporting clubs or scouting.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um is there data on that?
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_02: Because it that would that would seem to absolutely Confirm that thesis, if everyone is having trouble bringing community together in non-business ways, then that that seems to kind of confirm that suspicion that it's the inertia of American life.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, gathering and belonging is tough in American life.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_03: And certain things are doing better than others, you know, say like travel sports and stuff like that.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_03: But in terms of also a big a big theme in American life right now is the decline of institutional trust.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_03: So about two or three months ago, Gallup um did what they do on a on an annual basis, and that's track American trust in American institutions.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_03: And they've been tracking American trust in 14 different American institutions now for several decades.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_03: And uh in the last um, basically in the last two decades, there's only been one American institution of the 14 that they've tracked where American trust has uh increased, and that's our the U.S.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_03: military.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_03: All other 13 areas of U.S.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_03: institutions have declined.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_03: Um interestingly enough, trust in American religious institutions was not like at the bottom in terms of the collapse of trust.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_03: Um it was only the um the the fifth largest decline, so it's still in like almost the upper quartile of you know the erosion of trust in American institutions.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_03: There's complex reasons for why these things are going on, but um that's that would take a whole hour to kind of unpack.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I I mean just even your question, Glenn, it makes me think I I was a missionary in Italy actually for five years, and every time I would come home, it was so lonely.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: Because I'm used to walking to the store and seeing people um on the way, maybe grabbing an impromptu coffee.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not just, you know, it's even the smaller cities have that urban feel.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: And in the United States, I would be in my home and I would drive to Walmart, not talk to anybody.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: It was it was just it's a very I I think you're on to something about the inertia of our culture.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_02: And therefore, like how do we preach to Christians?
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_02: Because um, if if the trajectory is all that, you know, people are going out the back door of church and we do feel the pull of a very individualized, atomized kind of culture, um, what should we be saying to our people about the the benefits of gathering and community and those those those kind of thick, embedded, embodied communities?
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_01: Well, this is something we feel very strongly about, and this is why we cut our live stream.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: We're not anti-technology, we put them up on Tuesday, the sermons up on Tuesday, we have podcasts.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, here's another analogy.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_01: When we were in when I was in Italy, we would every now and then get to go on a US Army base, and um, and and it was an odd feeling because you're not just technically on US soil, like like you're paying with dollar bills, people are speaking English, you we have food establishments that we recognize, like Taco Bell and Pizza Hut.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, the sirens on the police cars make the right sound.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_01: So it really feels it feels like home.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_01: So we're thousands of miles from home, but it feels like home, and we're a diverse group of people, and we all have the same feeling.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: And this is what embodied worship is designed to do.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_01: We we aren't home, but we have this sense of we're together, we're diverse, and we we can taste it, and we have the sacraments, and we're we're called to love each other and know each other in ways that are gonna increase our sanctification.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: So embodied worship is so important.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm we're we're doing this, you know, certainly in my sermons, I find myself incorporating more of this because I hear people in the de-churching conversation frequently saying, Why can't I just read my Bible?
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a Christian, why can't I just have my quiet time?
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I'll do what Bible study I want to do.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_01: Well, not only are you missing out on that corporate experience, you're living a very homogeneous life that is not going to challenge you to carry out the one another's with each other.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: So I could go a lot of different reasons from the top, that's what I'm doing.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: But we are still, you know, there are still pockets, whether it's it's not as much neighborhood anymore, I'm convinced, but work, uh, gyms have been a really good one, kids' sports, schools, those are the areas where uh we find the most natural avenues for both evangelism and let's call ministry to a cre to a D-church Christian discipleship.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, on this same vein, you know, obviously Jim's kind of covered the religious side of this, you know, this thing in, you know, of the 59 one another, over half of them you can't do unless you're in embodied community with other people.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_03: But on the Surgeon General in the United States, I think I want to say two or three months ago, issued a national public uh health crisis around loneliness.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_03: And so I guess the uh the Surgeon General had done studies to the effect that loneliness is the equivalent of smoking about 15 cigarettes a day and drinking some ungodly amount of alcohol um on a daily basis in terms of what it what it means to you negatively in terms of your overall health.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_03: And so it this is a huge problem.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_03: Um and the church has good answers for you know that loneliness epidemic that we're seeing, that public health crisis.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_03: Um we talk about this a bit in the book in terms of the the significant mental health benefits of those who are going to church on a weekly or greater basis.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_03: There's a Harvard professor, uh Tyler Vanderweil, um, who has done longitudinal studies multi-decades to this end, and the health benefits of uh weekly uh weekly religious belonging are really quite remarkable.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_03: And we're talking huge sample sizes from some of these studies, 75,000 females on one study and and these different kinds of things.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, you can read the book.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_03: I want to say it's on page 30 or 31, um uh that that section.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_03: So um yeah, there's just tremendous benefits to um religious belonging.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_02: So we've got um 40 million Americans have de-churched in the last 30 years.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um you've gone through the data and you've sort of sorted them into sort of five broad categories of the sorts of people that uh are de-churching.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_02: Now we I haven't got time to go into all of them.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_02: People can get the book, and it's a it's it's a great book.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_02: And what I particularly appreciate is you kind of putting flesh on the bones of what this particular person might might look like.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_02: So can you do that?
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_02: Let's let's just pick um DCurch Mainstream Evangelicals, for instance.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um tell me about why they went to church in the first place and why they're not going anymore.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: So DCurch Mainstream Evangelicals is a fascinating group because they've de-churched casually, they've dechurched recently, and 100% of them are willing to come back today.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_01: Their orthodoxy scores are actually higher than those who still go to church.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_01: So this is the group that is the lowest hanging fruit.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: And they I mean, I in my own personal ministry, I've when I've been able to ask about four or five questions and understand this is the group you're in, it's about 2.5 million Americans.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_01: All they need is an invitation back to church.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's like they feel it, the Holy Spirit is convicting them, and 100% of the people that I meet that are in this category end up coming to church.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_01: We gave our our data to um a church in Columbia, Missouri, and they they saw this group and they created both digital and personal ways to identify this group and just nudge them back to church.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_01: And in about four months, they had 250, 300 new people in church.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: So it this is this is this is a unique group because in all what we're looking at are Christians who are not going to church, got out of the habit, and and it's not just about getting you know our rooms full.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: This is what I always want to make clear.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_01: This is the children of the dechurched will be unchurched.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so we're by engaging this low-hanging fruit, we're not just trying to make ourselves feel better on a Sunday, we're engaging generations here.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so it is it is a it's it's a big crucial missional opportunity.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_02: Tell me more about that, because because Michael, I heard you first deliver this material um for the Keller Center, the Keller Center for for cultural engagement, and we're we're very much wanting to think very carefully about the culture and where it's at and and how to reach secular and sometimes very, very secular people.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_02: And I remember you um telling me some of these uh facts and figures, and I started to think maybe we should just go door knocking instead.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_02: Like maybe maybe we should just if if there is such low-hanging fruit, how do you put together um some of these facts and figures with the desire to reach incredibly unchurched people?
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_02: How do you wrestle with that?
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so when we think about the dechurched the the group that Jim just outlined, you asked about the dechurched mainstream evangelicals, they just seem to need a nudge.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_03: So for some people that might be as simple as a text message, you know, hey, do you want to come to church with me on Sunday and you know go eat you know barbecue or whatever after, you know, um, can I pick you up at 9 30?
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_03: Um to you know a water cool water cooler moment or a phone call or an you know in-person invite, you know, for so that's the that's the nudge bucket.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_03: And I think there's three different kinds of categories in terms of relational engagement levels that the D church probably need from us.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_03: There's a second category there um of people who need to be at our dinner table, and you know, the dinner table just being metaphorical there as a you know, greater relational intimacy, greater proximity, um, because there's just more that needs to be processed, there's more trust that needs to be built or established.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_03: And then I think there's a third category of people who are decharged who just they're probably never gonna come back, or you know, but we you know, you could be engaging for years or decades and it probably still might not make a difference that's there.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_03: However, I don't think that you just focus on, oh, let's just identify all the nudge people and just you know spend spend our time only there.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think that there has to be sensitivity to the Holy Spirit of, okay, Spirit, who are you continuing to put in front of me time and time and time again?
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I think those are people that God wants us to be moving into their lives, whether that person is somebody who needs more of a nudge, somebody who needs more of our dinner table, or somebody who needs um really deep intimacy for years and years and years from us.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_03: And so I think that's that's what I'm thinking about, just in terms of the largest categories, is like, okay, does this person need a nudge from me?
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_03: Didn't they need my dinner table, or do they just need me consistently in their lives for a l really long period of time with you know tremendous, you know, obviously we want to have tremendous prayer over all of these things.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_03: So in some in some ways, yeah, there's a really there's some really low-hanging fruit out there.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_03: You know, the D-church mainstream evangelicals, these people actually want to go back to church.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_03: And so one of the things I want to say, you know, if you're listening to this in America, the there are some people going into this, we thought that inviting somebody to church was potentially a relationship-ending conversation to have.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_03: And the good news that we learned, at least in America, is at least half of the 15 million people who left evangelical churches, over half of them, are willing to return to church right now.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_03: And it looks like for some of those people, some of those people actually look regenerate.
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_03: And it looks like for those people, if we, you know, have that conversation with them, not only are they not going to think more negatively of us, they're actually gonna think more positively of us because um we did something that they would view as being positive.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_03: And so that isn't necessarily the case for everybody, but certainly for some people, they would think that would be a positive thing.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_03: That would be a form of moving into their life that they would that they would be happy about and welcome.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_03: Now, um, so I think that there is uh there is plenty there to be encouraged about.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_03: I I don't know about door-to-door, you know, specifically, you know, as a strategy, but we want to be working organically in the lives of the people that God um is kind of putting in front of us and just thinking and meeting those places with intentionality.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I think that folks, um, some folks like Dan Strange and James Eglinton and Grace Utanto, and some of the work and writing that they've been doing about um front porches, um, and kind of um, and Tim Keller, um, his uh I think his last um article in his Gospel in Life about uh you know front porches for the church are basically this idea of like third spaces where you know bridges from built from the church to the community.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_03: So I think there's a lot of opportunities there, and that's something that's really promising and in an area that needs to be worked on more and expanded.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_02: No, I I shouldn't have uh suggested door knocking to an American.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it it would require you to get out of your car, and um we we all know that you wouldn't do that.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_02: So we hate that.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_02: So asking about that cohort, the 13 to 30 year olds, and I I just wonder what does that say about um how we are discipling younger generations and and how we are raising up younger generations, what can we learn uh from those particular statistics?
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_01: Well, this is uh a passion area for for both of us, but I I've got kids right now, four kids from eight to fifteen.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so I you know, when when I look at how we're discipling our children, we're we in America especially, we can be so guilty of wanting just just wanting them to have fun.
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_01: And and to the point where many churches will silo off uh kids all the way through high school outside of congregational worship.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_01: And it's and I think even in churches with the best discipleship intentions, we lack a comprehensive discipleship plan.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so in in our context, we're beginning to think through how is it that we um what is our plan to come alongside the parents from age one all the way to 18?
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_01: When do we, as a church, generally come alongside the parents?
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_01: And when are they going to start hearing about uh gender and identity and their own walk with the Lord apart from the parents?
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_01: So that when we talk about 13 to 30, I'm isolating the 13 to 18 right now.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_01: But there are real opportunities for the for churches to engage discipleship, and I think the Great Dechurching is kind of exposing some of these entertainment weaknesses where there's a ceiling on what we've has become been come to been known now as uh Coldplay in a TED Talk.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think we're seeing that even though there has been historically a large front door, the back door is as big or bigger.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: So in that age range, the 13 to 18, I think churches need to think through discipleship plans uh comprehensively.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_01: But the other thing is when we get to that 18 and we're launching our kids, there's been this fear of higher secular education, this boogeyman taking our children away.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_01: And we've we've shown in our study, and Ryan Burge has really developed this as well.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_01: The more educated a Christian is an evangelical is, the more likely they are to stay in church.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: Only 3% of uh of evangelicals with a master's degree have dechurched.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so so we're kind of there's a little bit of fear in that transition that I don't think we need to have if we're focusing on uh on the 13 to 18 the way that we should be.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so now let's let's think about the dechurched casualties, and I I always have a a scripture kind of rattling around in in my head, which is in Isaiah.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_02: See, I'm contextualizing for you guys, Isaiah and in Romans, um uh God's name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you, people of God.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_02: Um so there are all sorts of um ways that we can point to cultural movements and shifts and just patterns of daily life and American inertia and all that kind of stuff.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_02: To what degree do we have to look at ourselves and and say that there there will be a sense of people are leaving church and God's name is blasphemed um because of us and what we've done?
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_02: What what what lessons can we learn there?
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_03: I think for anybody who's listening to this who has experienced uh significant church hurt um and that has set them on a path of a of a crises of faith, you know, I just I don't know if you'll ever get an apology from whatever person or institution or both that was the primary cause of that.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_03: You probably won't, but I just want to hear you know, I want you to hear from me as somebody, you know, as you know, from two pastors that um I'm sorry.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_03: Um Jesus loves you, he cares.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um there's all sorts of metaphors in church uh in word pictures about um you know uh I don't want to be too graphic, but you know, you you can look throughout scriptures and ways in which God has spoken about, you know, uh Israel as a whore um and these kinds of things.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_03: Uh if you spend any protracted amount of time in church, uh you you are gonna be hurt.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_03: It's just a matter of how much and and and by whom and and why.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_03: Um that shouldn't be the case, but it is, um, because of the you know our fallen condition.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_03: But uh and but a lot of this is just also just not acceptable as well.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_03: And I think a lot of these things are also preventable.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_03: You know, we should not have you know clergy going out and sinning spectacularly.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_03: Um we shouldn't have sexual abuse, you know, in our you know, you know, in our churches.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_03: You know, there shouldn't be racism or misogyny um that that's there, but the we know now that these things are are there um from time to time.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_03: It might be less prevalent than what you know some you know some might think or say.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_03: And it might be more prevalent than what's there for you know for others, depending on pr you know your perspective and you know what kind of circles you run in.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_03: Um I I do I do want to say, you know, uh it's like look, I I've experienced some pretty horrible things uh myself.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_03: And probably I would be somebody who you would consider at risk for dechurching given the gravity um and volume of foolishness and really hurtful things that I've seen in in both in church and while also as a pastor in ministry.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_03: I think about the you know the passage as well about you know with you know Jesus and Peter primarily interacting, there's others present, but just like Lord, who else has the words of life?
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_03: And so that's what I want to say to you know, if there was another place that I could go for you know for salvation and an atonement for sin, and uh to go and have a right relationship with the God of the universe, and where you know all of creation is being redeemed, and a place where truth, goodness, and beauty, you know, will will all dwell in it in a kingdom that was better or greater than that, then I'm all ears, but I don't think that that exists.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_03: And so we have to do the hard work to lean into our own stories and our own experiences.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_03: And I I find in in my own story that there's just tremendous healing at the foot of the cross, and Jesus wants us to take the burdens and our pains and our hurts and and put those things there.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_03: That doesn't mean that there aren't, you know, also places and needs for you know things like you know counseling with you know licensed mental health counselors and those different kinds of things.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_03: We have a high value of that, you know, Jim's wife, you know, is is trained in this.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_03: Um so you know, those are other pieces, you know, to all of that too, depending on how significant the you know, the things that aren't the how significant the brokenness is in in the stories.
• 43:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I actually that raises a really interesting thought because the way that Paul uses that passage in Isaiah, he's it he's pointing toward unbelieving Israel.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_01: So people who are in the physical community of God but are not actually believers.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I think there's a real indictment on American culture because we've had this cultural Christianity, but clearly everyone who claims to be in is not in.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_01: This is the parable of the weeds and the wheat.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone who looks like they're in the king, they may look like they're in the kingdom, but they actually might not be.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think we are seeing a purification of the church in the United States, and and calling what is actually true true rather than deceiving ourselves and other people, that's a good thing.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_02: That's a very good point.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, not all Israel are Israel.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um and yeah, in the same Romans that that that uh makes use of that verse about uh God's name being blasphemed, yeah, not all Israel are Israel.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_02: That's very interesting.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna ask you one more question about politics and class uh after the break.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_02: That will just be uh for those who are YouTube partners and those who are regular supporters of Speak Life, it'll show up on our Discord server.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_02: Uh but Jim and Michael, where can people get this fantastic book?
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_03: I I I actually don't know if you're in the UK, because I'm not sure if it's on Amazon UK or Amazon Europe uh yet.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_03: Um so I would try that.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_03: I would try it there first.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_03: Um if not, um just Google it.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you can Google it and I'm sure there's probably yeah, just Google the Great De Churching, and there's probably a book partner somewhere if it's not on Amazon, you know, over there.
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_03: If you can't find it, just um my DMs are open on Twitter.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_03: It's just M S G Rights, W-R-I-T-E-S, M S G Rights.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you can hit me up on DMs and um we'll we'll figure it out.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and follow them both for for more of such insights.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_02: But uh Michael and Jim, thank you so much for joining me.