Learning from the Great Evangelical Recession

So John, it’s a real pleasure to have you with us today.

But ultimately, God just made it clear he was calling me to give my life really the way Christ gave his life, sacrificed himself for the Bride, not in the same way, but to follow him in that way, to give up my ambitions, my desires, set those aside and serve his church. So that’s when I surrendered to be a vocational pastor.

And then when I started to really have this desire to make the Church aware; not that I’m the one source of truth or anything, but to help the Church understand how the culture’s changing and how we fit in, then it really all came together. Okay, here’s why God gave me these journalism credentials.

And so really after five years of doing that kind of work, I don’t know, you almost get – you just kind of get a feel for looking at a big system and trying to figure it out and finding expert sources, which is really I think what’s unique about the book God let me write, The Great Evangelical Recession, is that I didn’t commission any original research. I essentially found there’s more than enough research out there. The difficult thing is making sense of it all. The difficult thing is aggregating it, kind of wading through it.

And that’s sort of the age we live in. Aggregation is so important, whether it’s Google aggregating search for us or Facebook aggregating our friends [laughter], there’s so much information, but we need programs and humans who can make sense of it. So I started really by reading a lot of the experts who have done primary research, whether it’s Christian Smith from Notre Dame, or George Barna, dozens of others, and really started by spending about half a year just reading about 40 of the leading books at that time 2 or 3 years ago to just start to get a sense of the big picture.

We can’t really know exactly what percentage of the population we are. But what I found is four separate researchers who used four separate methodologies that were all really thorough. This isn’t just a phone survey kind of methodology. And these four researchers all found that we’re about 7 percent; one found 8.9 percent. The other three were in the 7 percent of the U.S. population, so less than 1 in 10 Americans who are actually an active evangelical Bible-believing Christian.

The market was correcting. Houses that were selling for $300,000.00 that are really worth $120,000.00 went back down to $120,000.00. And when markets that big correct, there’s a whole lot of ripples that go out as a result. And so we saw the stock market lose half its value. We saw millions of Americans lose their retirement and their home equity. Well, in a similar way, culturally, evangelicalism in the United States has acted and behaved and claimed in many circles from the early 1980s until recently that we are a majority in the country, or at least almost half the country.

One in ten Americans almost, that’s a lot of people, lot of resources. But not the same as being almost half the country.

And we know from multiple sources, from Barna to LifeWay to even UCLA that two and three who have been attending an evangelical church will stop attending, and other ones stop believing. There’s multiple surveys on this between the ages of 18 and 29. Now, the great hope is that a lot of them will come back. And there’s not a lot of hard data on how many do. One of the reasons is I just turned 31, so if I was the 18 to 29, well, how long will it take to know if I was a prodigal, if I came back. It might take another 30 years.

So you know, people get upset that there’s not more hard data on that, and we have to understand the constraints of research, that we don’t really know what the 31-year-olds right now will do until 29 years from now or something. [Laughter] But we’re definitely seeing anecdotally and from the research that does exist on it that it’s not the majority who are coming back. One suggests that it’s about a third of those who leave who do come back.

And we get into anecdotal anecdotes here as opposed to objective research because of what I described. But we see that the ones who do come back typically return not right where they left off. You know, if they’ve, for their 20s, been away from the Lord, they’ve made a whole lot of lifestyle choices during that decade that typically set a course for your life. So whether it’s alcoholism or pornography, just other really they’re sins that enslave, and so even the ones who do come back, it’s not like they come back and right away start leading a home group or [laughter] discipling other people.

They come back kind of wounded, limping in, and hopefully, we put our arms around them and restore them.

So theologically, I should couch this, that in Matthew 16, Jesus is so clear; “He will build his church. The gates of hell will not prevail.” There’s certain folks that come across my research and say, “Well, you obviously don’t trust the sovereignty of God.” Well, I do trust the sovereignty of God. I know his church is going to prevail.

And yet, I think we have to be careful about claiming the sovereignty of God as an excuse to not be honest about what’s going on in the country where God has placed us. So we know his church is going to prevail. But I think that especially those of us who are leaders in ministry, we have a responsibility to really be aware. The church has prevailed since the 1600s in the world. But it has definitely declined in England and in Scotland and in Germany.

And if we’re now on that track in the United States, what can those of us who God strategically placed in this country, first of all, what do we need to understand and then what does God’s word say about it?

And it’s an important concern, and it means that youth ministry is a very, very important and strategic part of the church. We tend to view it sometimes, perhaps, as just simply people maintenance or kind of expensive form of entertainment and babysitting. But it actually is a very, very important part of the church program.

They saw a more nominal Christianity. They saw – and obviously this isn’t the case with everyone who walks away.

But they all run on one fuel in the American model, and that is dollars. And again, there’s nothing wrong with that. But I think we could argue that historically, compared to a lot of other churches, and even contemporary churches in China and India, places where the church is embattled but thriving, we could argue that we’re a lot more dependent on the dollar here, if you could have a dollar-to-disciples ratio. [Laughter]

So I really looked into how are we financially for the next 15 years, for the next 30 years; what are the giving trends generationally because I had seen, as probably most ministry leaders have seen in anecdotal experience, that the older generation givers are very consistent. The younger generation givers tend to be sporadic, tend to give emotionally. Many don’t give at all. Many younger generation American evangelicals are less consistent not only in their giving, but even in their attending.

They’re more likely to show up to church once or twice a month as opposed to three or four times a month for the older generations. So I worked really hard to find some hard data on this, and there’s not [laughter] there’s not much. But I did find this group called Blackbaud. They do non-profit analytics in the United States. And they had some figures and they – their figures that 46 percent of giving in Christian churches comes from the 65 and older generation.

Now, the next generation down, the next oldest generation, gives the next 20-some percent. So combined, it’s 68 percent, almost 70 percent that comes from these oldest two generations. Now, we know the oldest one, which gives almost half, in the next 15 years, most of them are going to be called home to Heaven. So there’s this huge transfer of wealth in America beyond our circles of about $2 trillion a year. So the question is as their children and then grandchildren inherit this wealth, are evangelical ministries, whether it’s a church or a para-church, going to see as much as they’re used to.

And so as a result of this rapid cultural change, we’re all trying to figure out how do we respond to this; how do we adapt. And that’s, I think, where a lot of these divisions are coming from. Some people believe more than ever that we should get out of politics because that hasn’t worked, while other good people who believe and follow the same Christ from good motives believe more than ever, “Hey, the window’s closing. Now’s the time to get more involved in politics.”

So that’s just one example of these divides. And that divide, that leads to very different philosophies in ministry.

And so you’ve got that division as well also operating.

The last one is sputtering. What’s that one about?

And we are not. And one of the reasons we’re not is that we are not converting adult Americans. Obviously, we all know from our ministries, we have some converts. But we’re not converting them at a rate that would keep us –