Saying Goodbye to Church: Can it be Reversed?

The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? book by Jim Davis and Michael Graham

Church Audit for Addressing Dechurching 

Darrell Bock: 

Welcome to The Table where we discuss issues of God and culture. I'm Darrell Bock, Executive Director for Cultural Engagement at the Hendricks Center at Dallas Theological Seminary in Dallas, Texas. And my guests today are Jim Davis and Michael Graham, who are here to discuss, I guess what I would call the slow shrinking of the North American Church. They have a book they've written called The Great Dechurching: Who's Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? Three very good questions. And so we're going to work through this book and the issues that it raises and some of the polling that was done. That's really what we're interested in. So thank you Jim and Michael for being with us today. 

Jim Davis: 

Thanks for having us. 

Michael Graham: 

Glad to be here. 

Darrell Bock: 

And my understanding is this is not your first rodeo. In fact, this is interview number 130, we confirmed before we started taping, so I feel sorry for whoever's 131. Anyway, let me tell people a little bit about each of you. Jim is a teaching pastor, Orlando Grace Church, and got is MDiv at Reform Theological Seminary in Orlando. So you are a deeply entrenched in the middle of Florida, is that right? 

Jim Davis: 

That's right. We are. 

Darrell Bock: 

And Michael Graham is program director for the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics. Now we are all for Cultural Apologetics here at the Hendricks Center, something we are very concerned about. Also got his MDiv at Reform Theological Seminary in Orlando, is a member of Orlando Grace Church. So you're also deeply embedded in Florida as well, is that right, Michael? 

Michael Graham: 

That's right, almost my whole life. 

Darrell Bock: 

Okay. Well, it's been a long time since I've been to Orlando. Last time I went, I think it was a Disney World trip or something like that. But anyway, just that- 

Jim Davis: 

Tends to be why people come. 

Darrell Bock: 

Exactly right. Yeah. Well you got to experience the magic of the Magic Kingdom, right? 

Jim Davis: 

That's right. 

Darrell Bock: 

Anyway, okay, well let's dive in. So Jim, you first and then Michael. What are nice guys like you doing in a gig like this? 

Jim Davis: 

Well, it definitely wasn't the plan. I mean, this really started out as two pastors. Michael was actually on staff as a pastor at our church when we started this. We started just doing cultural exegesis. Trying to understand where God has placed us, what ministry here looks like. And we saw in 2018 a study came out with Barna and they examined what they called the Orlando Metropolitan area, which is bigger than most of us would call Orlando, but central Florida. And they made the statement that we had the same percentage of evangelicals as New York City and Seattle. And that really got our mind going because Orlando, if you know Orlando, it feels so much different culturally than New York City and Seattle. So how could we have the same percentage of evangelicals? And in the same study, it said that 42% of our area, the people who didn't go to church, used to go to church. 

That's about 2 million people who used to go to church and no longer do. And then it really started to make sense to us that these are people that still carry with them biblical values and in many cases are still Christians. And so we wanted more research. We couldn't find any research. There really was nothing out there. So that's when we found Ryan Burge and commissioned him and his partner, Paul Jupe, to do a nationwide quantitative, academically peer reviewed study. Actually the most comprehensive of its kind on dechurching. This was originally done for our podcast As In Heaven, and we wanted to prove or disprove this thesis. We are currently in the largest and fastest religious shift in the history of our country. And the study proved it. And we did two more successive studies to dive in more deeply as to where people are going, understanding evangelicalism specifically. 

And again, we just wanted to learn. We weren't looking to write a book at the time until we found ourselves possessing the sole data that proves that America's in the largest and fastest shift in the country's history. But one of the reasons that books like this don't get written is because it costs so much money to do the research before you even know what the research is going to say. We had to raise about a hundred thousand dollars just to do the research. This isn't a moneymaking project for anybody who sets out to do a book on research like this, but we were really thankful for everything that we got to learn along the way. 

Darrell Bock: 

And Michael, your involvement, how did you get involved in this? I mean, did Jim pull you in or were you there or were you guys discussing this as a group? What was going on there? 

Michael Graham: 

Well, this originally started, as Jim alluded to, we knew that this was a major problem. And when I first saw that data, I'm like… We were talking with our elders about this and we're just like, "This is almost half of our city, and if we don't know why all these people left, then we can't be effective as people, as believer priests or elders or pastors in our city." And so we needed actionable information. Information that would be actionable pastorally and philosophy of ministry wise and contextually. 

And so I think for us it was just boiled down to two things. One, curiosity and two, really necessity. We needed this information because this is 2 million people in our area and we want to see these people at healthy churches. And so we need to know why they left and are they willing to come back and if so, under what terms and is there anything we can do about it? So I've been a geek my whole life and I've been a numbers person my whole life. I did science fair and all that. So the opportunity to work with such a top shelf researcher and data analyst in Ryan Burge is a total no-brainer. 

Darrell Bock: 

Well, that brings me on to something I was going to say towards the end, but I think I'll do it now. And that is, you guys talk about it towards the end of the book, the generational handoff, which is not happening in this go around, this generation. And it strikes me, one of the figures that I think a lot of people do know about what's going on is the rise of what's called the nones. And I always have to say that's not N-U-N-S. That's N-O-N-E-S and the fact that that number has hit about 30%, but if there's no generational handoff with that number being at 30%, that means we're going to be headed towards, or may already be there, environment here in North America where people are not biblically literate or biblically connected anymore. There is a completely different set of ways to see life, et cetera, which is I often talk about the loss of the Judeo-Christian net around our culture. 

This is evidence that it's not just freight, it's not even basically there anymore in many ways. And so your work, it seems to me is explaining the variety of ways in which people have chosen to no longer engage with the local church. And that is important for all local churches to be aware of, it seems to me. So I commend you for the premise upon which you launched upon this and engaged in obviously some expense to find out about it. It is important to say that this is a local phenomenon in many ways, it's something that's going on here in the United States. It probably is a reflection of something that has already gone on in Europe. 

And we're not talking a global phenomena here by any means. But what I found so interesting about your book was how many people who had left the church said they might be interested in coming back if the church wasn't what it was that they left, if I can say it that way. So let's dive into some particulars here, overview this. You have five groups that you looked at, which you called cultural Christians, mainline evangelicals, Exvangelicals, de-churched people of color, diversity in people of color, and then the de-church mainline Protestants and Catholics. And four of those five groups worked in somewhat similar ways, but one was exceptional. So talk about that a little bit. Because I think that's one of the most interesting findings of what you all surfaced. And this is for either of you, Jim or Michael, whoever wants to go first. 

Jim Davis: 

Yeah, I can start. And Mike, the data guy can fill in any of my gaps. Well, so this is really important that when we talk about these groups, this wasn't Mike and myself kind of putting our finger in the air and coming up with some creative ideas of groupings based on anecdotal evidence or our own filtering through the data. This was done by machine learning, by an algorithm that takes… We have over 7,000 participants. We have over 600 data points. So it's… Sorry about that. 

Darrell Bock: 

No problem. We all have pets. 

Jim Davis: 

My dog stays in my office. But we have all these data points, the algorithm minds and it came up with these groups based on common answer sets. And so we then had to look at these groups and come up with names. And so they are really interesting. This is evangelicalism. We're talking about 15 million people. And the first group, the cultural Christians that you talked about is about 8 million of the 15 million. And really this group is probably the people… Let me first say at a high altitude, one of the things that we wanted to communicate is that the de-churched people are not a monolithic group. They look different, depending on your information intake or diet, you might think because of what you see on social media that everybody leaving the church does so intentionally, they deconstruct, they don't like the church, they had a bad experience, but that isn't the case. 

I mean, they're there for certainly, and we don't want to minimize it, but many of these people, de-churched casually, many of these people have retained positive feelings of the church. And so this group of cultural Christians is a group that de-churched very casually and intentionally has a positive view of the church. But these people, it does not seem like they were ever Christians to begin with. Only 1% of this group would say that Jesus is the son of God. And so we look at these people and realize, we're probably not dealing with Christians in that group. So then you have the mainstream evangelicals, and this is another interesting group because they also de-church casually, but this is 2.5 million people, but 100% of them are willing to come back today. And 98% of them believe that Jesus is son of God. We measured their orthodoxy scores based on Nicene Creed, Christianity. 

So we're talking about the basics of the faith and the orthodoxy scores of this group, the de-churched mainstream evangelicals is higher than the people who still go to church. So you're talking about people who really just need a nudge in… Mike, in my personal ministry, when we can identify in our neighborhood work, gym, whatever… Well, I say work, probably not our work, but our gym and neighborhood, one of these mainstream de-churched evangelicals and we invite them back to church. They come back, like they come 100% of the time. It's pretty amazing. Those are two of the categories. Mike, I'll hand you over for the other three. 

Michael Graham: 

Yeah. So we kind of developed these two categories of casually de-churched people who just kind of left unintentionally and de-churched casualties. These are people who left highly intentionally and with some kind of significant pain point or pain points. Some of those pain points were bad relationships on an individual basis, and some of them had to do with a bad relationship institutionally. So the third and fourth profiles are a little bit more de-churched casualty than the casually discharged of the two profiles that Jim just covered. So the third profile is the Exvangelical profile. We're using that term just a little bit different than how it might be used in the online discourse. In online discourse, Exvangelical typically means deconverted or at least significantly deconstructed. And where deconstructed means core doctrines of the faith, say certain parts of the Nicene creed are no longer being held to or certain key ethics of the historic faith are just kind of being abandoned. 

But what it looks like, that's kind of how that term Exvangelical has been used online. We're using it a little bit differently here. 0% of this group was willing to return to an evangelical church, but about four and five were willing to go back to a Christian Church of some sort. And so that was interesting to us to see a group of people that were very done with evangelicalism, but who had relatively high doctrinal scores, very high view of Jesus, relatively high view of the Bible, yet it seemed that probably four out of five of this group had not deconverted or not abandoned key doctrines of the faith, but instead were probably disenculturating or disentangling their faith from say, evangelical subculture more than they were just kind of leaving the faith. Certainly there were some, but this group trended very female, 68% female, and their average age was 53 years old. 

And this group was actually the least online. So I think what you actually have among people who were done with going to evangelical churches is you have a group of hyper online people who are younger and more tech-savvy and more educated who are deconstructing and deconverting. And then you have another group that's actually much, much larger of predominantly middle-aged women who are very much struggling in life, in education, in income and their relationship towards American institutions. And so yeah, there's just a little bit of additional nuance there in terms of looking at that. And we feel a real stewardship of telling more of the story of that group that isn't hyper online among that group of people who have been really legitimately hurt, but definitely still have a strong affinity for Jesus. So we don't want people to just assume because somebody's done with going to an evangelical church that they're done with the gospel itself. 

Darrell Bock: 

That's an important distinction. And this is the group that actually I had in mind as being somewhat exceptional to the others in many ways because of the selectivity with which they are willing to come back, if I can say it that way. So that strikes me as an interesting group. Go ahead and tell us about the other two. 

Michael Graham: 

Well, I mean the good news is there's plenty of traditions that are out there that are not in the evangelical denomination that still hold to Nicene Creed level Christianity. And we want people to do that. It's not the kingdom of evangelicalism, it's the kingdom of Jesus. And so we want people to… You don't have to go back to what you left. You can find a good healthy church and something that looks a little bit different in the different stream. So the fourth profile was the BIPOC group that stands for black, indigenous and persons of color. And so, one of the interesting things about the machine learning algorithm is we had the opportunity to, but we elected to not show it ethnicity or race when it was determining the different profiles and clusters of people who had highly similar answer choices. 

Because we wanted to just see what would happen if we didn't let it see that. And what was interesting, and this is Ryan's term here, he says that… Because what happened was the cultural Christians were 98% white. The mainstream evangelicals were 91% white. The Exvangelicals were 82% white, and then this BIPOC group was 0% white, not one. Well, I mean, how does that even happen? And so Ryan's take on this is that ethnicity and race casts a really long shadow in the data that even when you're not able to sort on it and you choose not to sort on it's still there. 

Darrell Bock: 

It still shows up. 

Michael Graham: 

It still shows up because it is a significant category even if race is a biological fiction. And it is, it's a sociological reality. And so the way that people experience America, our country, our institutions or even the church is going to have an impact because of the sociological reality that's there behind those things. And the way that many people experience America differently. 

Darrell Bock: 

Yeah. Race may not be a real category, but we sure really talk about it. I mean, it's just the nature of the way we relate to one another. This is an important group because it is… As you noted, it's an exception in terms of its makeup to the three groups that you've already mentioned. So what's distinctive about it? 

Michael Graham: 

Yeah, so the most interesting thing about this group is they were the highest educated and highest income of the four different profiles. And this is two and a half million of the 15 million people who left evangelical churches. And they left the earliest and really kind of the late 1990s on average, a little bit before the turn of the millennium and before 9/11. But what's interesting is that a hundred percent of the cultural Christians, that's the first profile… Oh, sorry, 47% of the first profile are willing to return to an evangelical church. A hundred percent of the mainstream, 0% of the Exvangelicals, but almost two thirds of this group are also willing to return to an… Excuse me, an evangelical church. And that's fascinating. I mean, consider for a moment, what habit have you left behind 25 years ago and you're just willing to pick it up 25 years later? I mean, that's what these people told us. So there's a lot of mystery really in this particular group and a lot of complexity. 

Darrell Bock: 

So part of what I'm hearing… Tell me if I'm reading this wrong, is that the major reasons why people are leaving are not so much doctrinal as they are relational and how can I say this? The community implications of what we believe, how the community actually functions. And later I'm going to ask a question that goes through the variety of reasons, and there are many, as to why people say they disconnected from the church. This is a chart I think you guys have on page 166, and I've got what, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 23 different reasons that registered more than 4% or more to show the complexity of what it is that we're talking about. Am I right that these relational components or the applicational aspects of what the church shows what it believes is really a significant issue in why people are departing? 

Jim Davis: 

Yeah, people generally don't leave first because they believe different. So sociologists have categories of belief, belong, and behave, and generally speaking, your behavior changes first, then your belonging and then your belief. So if you dive more deeply into these categories that we're talking about on the whole, the longer you've been de-churched, the lower your orthodoxy score, but people leave the church generally for very casual reasons. The number one reason was, "I moved." They're not leaving largely because they disagree with the doctrine. A lot of people actually are leaving because they disagree with the way the doctrine has played out ethically. And so in some cases, the de-churched are looking back at the church with a high and reasonable expectation of how our biblical ethic should play out. 

Darrell Bock: 

So I'm going to read that between the lines and say the fault lies with the church communities as much as anybody. It isn't a case of the person leaving because they have departed from what they believe as much as they think the church is not reflecting what the church says it believes. 

Jim Davis: 

Yeah. I think you could acknowledge fault in various places. I mean, there's fault across the board, but there's different kinds of fault within the church. Sometimes the church has not been doing what the church is supposed to do in terms of its biblical ethic, but you also have to wonder why have 20 something million probably unbelievers existed in the church so comfortably for so long. I mean, that itself is something I think the church really needs to wrestle with and answer. 

Darrell Bock: 

So I wasn't intending on asking this question, but I think I will now. And so you guys did all this work and you said you did it as you were discussing with the elders what's going on and how it impacts your mission in your church. So let me ask that question. How does this impact your mission in your church? What did you do besides write the book? What did you do besides write the book that's impacted the way you think about your ministry? 

Jim Davis: 

Well, in the context of our local church, it's changed the way we look at a lot of different people. So we have identified… I should say, we are. We're learning as everybody else, didn't like we figured it out here and everybody else can follow suit. But there are some things that we're really trying to zero in on. There are seasons of higher risk for dechurching. So as we said, the number one reason is moving, in Orlando that we're on the receiving side of a lot of that moving. And so we want to identify new people to town and we want to mobilize Christian realtors and school teachers and administrators who are the first points of contact with people when they come. On the sending end of moving, we want to stay with our people when they move to a new city and help them to plug into a church. 

There's great kingdom value in that. The ages of between 13 and 30 is a real high risk season. So we want to… Of course, that's largely high school, college and young professional years. So we've been really trying to reassess and reevaluate our ministry from one to 18. And then there's some other implications depending on your context with college students and young professionals. And then really just realizing that dechurching is largely a lower income, lower education phenomenon. Contrary to popular belief, a higher education is not the boogeyman taking our kids away from us. 

Only 3% of evangelicals with a master's degree have de-churched. So it's really hitting the lower income, lower educated class more and which makes sense because when life transition happens, who does that hit the hardest? It hits the lower income. So if you become a single parent, however that happens and you're not making a lot of money, well, you're going to have to work longer hours or more unusual hours, and that could impact your church involvement and attendance. So we've tried to really identify those people in our midst, but then so we think about the back door, but we also think about the front door and just… Front door and back door and equipping our people and thinking about how are we discipling our people? And we've really tried to make an effort to disciple the head, the heart, and the hands and comprehensively come up with a strategy in the church to be able to do that. 

Darrell Bock: 

Go ahead. 

Michael Graham: 

Yeah. On the same subject, there's work that needs to be done individually and there's work that needs to be done institutionally. And the Great Dechurching book is a little bit more of an individual resource than institutional. Certainly there's plenty there for institutions, but we wanted to build a second resource that was purely for local churches. And so if you're connected to a local church or your clergy or on staff at a local church, we built the website dechurching.com, super simple dechurching.com, and all that's on there is basically a 20 point audit for your local church that's there. That 20 point audits for free. And it's basically a checklist of how we're doing on 20 areas that deeply impact dechurching in general. And so in that audit, it's meant to be, you go through it with whatever your key stakeholders and your polity, whether that's elders or your session or your vestry or whatever the tradition. 

And you go through that checklist, how are we doing on each of these 20 items? And then for each item where either you don't have anything in that particular area or that area needs some work, then there's a paid resource there on that website that basically has worksheets to work through, project management worksheets to kind of get that particular area that impacts dechurching more in line with best practices. And so yeah, we wanted to build dechurching.com, particularly for local church pastors to be able to improve institutionally. 

Because at the end of the day, we want to make a difference on all these things. You can make a difference on a handful of individuals or even a couple thousand individuals across the country. Great, awesome. But I think the bigger difference that we can probably make is institutionally by helping our local churches be able to go about their ministry in a way that better understands and better relates in light of all of this particular phenomenon. And if we do that, then we're talking about making a difference for not just months or years, but we're talking about making a difference for decades. So firm believers in institutions and building healthier institutions, particularly institutions that are going to clearly show and teach that our gospel is true, good and beautiful all at the same time. 

Darrell Bock: 

I'm going now to this chart on page 166 of the book that I find to be one of the most fascinating pieces of the entire exercise. And I'm just going to read through some of the top percentage reasons. So I'm going to take anything that is 15% or more as expressed as the reasons for dechurching. "No longer believe what the congregation did, 23%." It'd be interesting to dig into that figure and just figure out how much of that is actual belief, which is what we talked about earlier, and how much of that is the application of that belief, which is a whole nother layer of what that might believe. "Didn't fit in. That's strictly relational, 22%. Doubted God's existence, 19%. Other priorities, 18%. Instances of misogyny, 18%. Disagreed with the politics of the congregation, 18%. Faith wasn't working, 17%. Messages not relevant, 16%. Disagreed with the politics of the clergy, 16%. And then moved 15%." And then there's a whole nother half that goes 14% and under all the way down to 4%, a huge array of reasons, variety. So you aren't going to solve this by picking on one thing, right? 

Michael Graham: 

Yeah, there's just a lot of complexity that's there, and that's the hard thing about data is it doesn't really always fit cleanly. Whatever preconceived notions or stories or narratives that we might have around things, the reality is always just far more complicated than whatever stories we told ourselves walking into those things. 

Darrell Bock: 

So what do you guys feel like you learned from doing this? I mean, other than the fact that this is very complex and multilayered and what surprised you about what you learned? What did you learn and what surprised you about what you learned? 

Jim Davis: 

I think we've learned a lot. One of the things that comes to mind is I've learned that I really do and my preaching and our church discipleship, we need to be teaching why it is that people need the church. I've realized a lot of people are just thinking, well, I'm a Christian, I have my bible study, have my quiet time. Why do I need the church? And so we've done a lot more teaching and preaching to why we need the church. We were called and baptized into? Why we need corporate worship? Why we need the sacraments? Why we need the community of believers? 

We've also realized that the need to help people prioritize, especially I would say demographics like me with middle schoolers and teenagers, life is very busy. And people in the study saw there were a number of people who are de-churched who said, "Well, when I got to about eighth or ninth grade, my parents stopped taking me." Because they got into athletic sports, things like that. So there's a lot of priorities that intersect with the value of corporate worship that need to be addressed. I think we've learned a lot. But Mike, I'm curious what you have to say. 

Michael Graham: 

Well, I think the number one thing that I learned in all of this was I was a little worried that going into this, that having a spiritual conversation with somebody or having a conversation where you invited somebody to church was potentially a relationship ending conversation. And what it really looks like is probably about three quarters of the people who have left, so about 30 of the 40 million people who've left houses of worship in this country, it really doesn't look like it's a relationship ending conversation. And I think really actually for some of those 30 million people, it looks like a conversation that they might actually appreciate and respect you for going there relationally, and they might see that as something that's actually building trust. I was surprised at how much also vestigial Christianity there is there, even among people who seem to have been gone for a very long time. 

Certainly those beliefs erode over time. But going back to the idea of it not being a relationship ending conversation, for everybody who's listening here, I want to inspire you to one thing, and that is take relational risk. You can know the difference between somebody who's had significant pain and somebody who hasn't. And so the people who… The casualty de-churched, the 30 of the 40 million people, take relational risk with these people in your life. Many of them might be very grateful to you for initiating spiritual conversation or just conversation, encouraging them to come to church with you. It doesn't have to be anything big or you don't have to make it any more complicated than what it is. It's just like, "Hey, I love my church. Here's two or three things I like about it. I like spending time with you. Would love get more time with you and encourage you to come to church with me. Would you be interested in going one of the next few Sundays and we can go grab lunch after?" 

It doesn't have to be anything bigger than that. Some people, they might need to be around your dinner table and you might need to have more relationship there then that. But you just exercise relational wisdom and knowing the difference between somebody who needs to have more time, more proximity, more relational intimacy, and the ability to process bigger or harder questions versus somebody who just… They just got out of the habit and just a lot of people, a lot of this stuff just came down to America, just got them out of the habit of going to church and they got nothing against it and are willing to return and would be excited to go with you if you just take a little bit of relational risk. 

Jim Davis: 

Well, and I'll say one thing that was surprising that we learned is we think of people dechurching being more on the secular political left and just how that was true in the '90s when this really began to see the uptick. But at this point, the secular right is dechurching at almost twice the pace and catching up almost in total number with the secular left. So the type of person, not only are the dechurched not monolithic, the type of person that has de-churched over the past three decades has changed too. 

Darrell Bock: 

So that raises this question and that is the person who's leaving for political reasons, leaving for a completely different set of concerns than the person who is not leaving for political reasons. In other words, is that a potentially significant distinction to be making as you encounter someone who's left the church and you're trying to figure out, so you used to have this association but you don't anymore. Is that kind of an initial differentiator that you need to be aware of as you walk into a conversation with someone who you might be trying to encourage to reconnect to a community? 

Michael Graham: 

Yeah. So there's two things. At least two things going on here. The first is people who are very turned off by people who are church going, but where the politics flag seems to be flying higher than the Jesus flag. So there's a large group of people that are very allergic to political syncretism. Those who are mainline de-churched, those who are Roman Catholic de-churched, the Exvangelical de-churched and the BIPOC de-churched all are in particular very allergic to people who are highly political. And that can be in either direction. I think there's a little bit more allergic-ness to those who are highly political on the right. So you have some people who are very put off and have de-churched because of either that friction between them and individuals, them and the congregation, them and the clergy or any permutation in combination of those things. 

The second group where politics comes into play are people who seem to maybe have had a… Pardon the pun, had a come to Jesus moment with themselves where they've come to realize actually the horse for them has always been politics, and they have found a greater home in the political community than what they have in the religious or church community. And originally probably, as Jim already alluded to in the '90s and aughts, that was probably more happening on the left. And now here in the 10s and the 20s, that's happening more on the right. And so you have people who are just catching up to speed really on the right where politics is king. And so I think that's… So you have, and- 

Darrell Bock: 

So those are two countervailing contrastive tendencies, right? One going in one direction, in other words, moving away from politics towards the church and the other moving in the direction of politics away from the church, right? 

Michael Graham: 

Yes. And the lesson there for all of us is that Christ is the King. Christ is King, and we worship him and his kingdom alone. Now, that doesn't mean that we don't care about culture and society. It doesn't mean that we don't vote or don't exercise persuasion in the civic sphere, but what it does mean is Jesus is King and he must always be first. And we must exercise kingdom ethics and that we must exercise kingdom ethics regardless of where that puts us in terms of the political binaries that we're forced into in our particular system. And I think too, there's value for us in examining the merits of the kind of historic exilic posture that the church has historically had, whether that's the early church or the various periods of exile. 

And when we look at the Old Testament and the people of God or the various parts in church history where Christians have exercised their influence from the margins of society rather than from the seat of power. So I think there's lessons in there for all of us, not that we're just kind of abandoning our country's institutions or throwing them to the wolves of things, whether that's the secular left wolves or the secular right wolves, we don't want either of those things, and we don't want a country that isn't thriving and doesn't have some level of shalom and prosperity. At the same sense, we're citizens of a different country and that other country is of much higher importance and of paramount importance. 

Darrell Bock: 

So that's the kingdom of heaven, which is multinational and multi-ethnic at all, that the scripture is clear that we have been called out to be distinctive from the world. Those kinds of ideas. I'm highlighting some of the scriptural themes here because I think that in the syncretism sometimes that gets lost, and… Go ahead. 

Jim Davis: 

Well, just to say, the gospel comes with an ethic and ethics are inherently political. So there's this overlap but at the same time, neither political party… We would both say neither political party has the market on kingdom ethics. And so in our context, we would say something about race and people would say, "Stop getting political." And those same people would want us to do more about abortion and hand out right wing voter guides, and we'd have similar things in the opposite direction. But we have to realize the gospel comes with an ethic. Those ethics are going to be polarizing because they are political, but no political party has the market on biblical ethics. 

Darrell Bock: 

Which means that there are conversations to be had in all directions. 

Jim Davis: 

That's right. 

Darrell Bock: 

And an awareness and a respect for the fact that that is part of what goes on. I mean, this is a podcast in and of itself, what we've just talked about. So I'm going to try and avoid diving into what would become a black hole. But let me ask you one kind of… I guess it's a final round of questions. You talk about the challenge at one point between confession and mission, which I think is an interesting contrast. I think it's the challenge of the church. The more confessional they are, the more they're built for discipleship, I'll say it this way, the more they're built for discipleship and insiders, the risk is they lose the mission of the great commission. 

The more they're built to reach out and try and create the seekers… We went through this in the '90s, the more danger is they'll lose the discipleship piece. So these seem to be in tension with one another. It's not the only tension, the gospel. I often tell people the gospel itself has a tension built into it. That is the challenge of dealing with sin, which the gospel message does. But then the invitation that there's a different way to live in a much better life going through that recognition than it is to pretend that it either doesn't exist or that there's no way to handle it. So I think Christianity has… Because we live in a fallen world, we live in a tension setting faith, if I can say it that way. Talk about this commission and mission relationship because our… Confession and mission relationship, because I think that's another interesting observation you guys were making. 

Jim Davis: 

Yeah. I think this is a really good and important question that you're asking. So when we talk about confession, it's what do we confess to believe? And some people might say, no confession, but Christ. But that's a confession in itself, and we see it through in the Bible, Moses, Paul, we see the creeds, the reformation confessions. So we have something that we confess to believe. And then we are also called into a mission, like you said, the great commission. Churches can… And I would argue that no church is perfect. So we're all going to err on one side or the other. We're going to care more about what we believe in terms of the confession and the headspace or our heart's going to be more in the reaching others for Christ, do what you will with theology. But what we're arguing is being confessional… The confession is missional, and we absolutely have to do both. 

So when we stray to the side of having caring more about the confession, we become heady. We become cold, we become overly didactic. We tend to build more walls around ourselves than… Our churches then are helpful when we drift to the other side, that's when we get to Coldplay and a Ted Talk. We develop entertainment because that's what's bringing people in without realizing what you win them with is what you win them to. The discipleship is lacking, the spiritual ceiling is low. And what we would argue, no one has ever embraced confession and mission more than Jesus. There's never been a more missional person. He left heaven to come to earth. He took on flesh, and he came bringing us the perfect manifestation of God's character. Sorry about that. 

Darrell Bock: 

It's all right. The theology's barking at us. Go ahead. 

Jim Davis: 

Yeah. That's my dog saying, "Amen. That's right." 

Darrell Bock: 

Yeah. So I like to say about the Nicene Creed, it's a wonderful doctrine. There's not a word of ethics anywhere in it. And so the danger can be that I can have all this wonderful belief about who God is, which is certainly what the Nicene Creed is focused on the Trinity, and yet at the same time be vacuous in terms of practice. And what we're seeing in what you all have done is that the Praxis talks, it preaches, it walks, it pushes. And so if you don't have balance between what you teach and how you manifest that teaching, you're not going to be the kind of community that's going to bring someone back who has had an attachment to Christianity. 

Is that a fair summary of one of the things that you were contending for? Because to me, the surprise of the book was, we have all these people who've left, but they haven't left with the idea, I've shut the door behind me and I'm never coming back. They have left the door open as they've walked out and said, "If I can find a community that connects with what I think the consistency of the faith is all about, I'd be more than willing to come back." 

Michael Graham: 

I think at the highest level, it really is as simple as most of the people who left who are willing to return, which is at least half of the people who left evangelical churches, they're just looking for a healthy local church that's got good leaders and a good community. And what does that healthy church local church look like? It looks like a church that's preaching and demonstrating that there is a gospel through Jesus Christ, that is true, that is good, and that is beautiful all at the same time. That's what these folks are looking for. And so we got to build healthy local churches and we got to have healthy leaders. 

Darrell Bock: 

Whoa. Well, that's nice, short, crisp, sweet and simple. Well, maybe not so simple as we may need, but it certainly is an important combination of things. Jim, how do you put that together? 

Jim Davis: 

Well, not as concisely crisp as Mike just did, but I do think in the season we're in, I think Christian leaders who are getting pushback from both sides are probably doing something right. I think there are those that want us to live a Christian ethic. Now on either side, the left and the right, it can go to an extreme. Each side has an extreme. But I think the middle spot where we are closest to embracing and living out the ethics that Jesus demonstrated and teaches, it's not going to make the secular right or the secular left happy. It's not going to satisfy them the way… Because they're looking for satisfaction in something else. But Jesus isn't the only one who's satisfied. And that ethic is just going to look different than we see on the secular right or secular left or really anything else. 

Darrell Bock: 

So I want to thank you guys for taking the time to allow us to dip our toe into your great experiment, the Great Dechurching and the insight that you all have as a result of the work you've done. I wish you all the best as you apply what it is that you've learned. And I just want to thank you for taking the time to be with us and to give us a look at the fact that just because someone has walked away doesn't mean they've walked away permanently. And I think that's actually one of the big, big takeaways I got from reading your research. There are a lot of people who are still spiritually hungry who are not attending church every week. And if we can create communities that will reflect both a spiritual vitality and a relational… How do I say? Heftiness and a spiritual heftiness, then I think many of them will be drawn back. So thank you for that message. 

Jim Davis: 

Well, thank you for having us. And I also wanted just to be really clear, the goal here is not just to get butts in seats and money in coffers. Statistically speaking, the children of the de-churched will be unchurched, and then we will feel like Seattle and New York City. This is a generational opportunity where there is this low hanging fruit that will impact generations. So thank you for seeing that and for having us on. 

Darrell Bock: 

Yeah, no, my heart bleeds for the younger generation. They're my grandkids. And I watch what's going on, and I'm seeing the loss of people with an age group that has all kinds of proper ethical sensitivities, but just doesn't think they're finding it in the church. And that is a shocking conclusion to have to deal with. So again, thanks to you all making us aware of that and for having that motive, because I think that the abandonment of the youngest generation could be a really terrific mistake that the church will be dealing with on the other end. And I think we can look across the ocean in Europe and we can see what that looks like. So thank y'all again. 

Jim Davis: 

Thank you so much for having us. 

Darrell Bock: 

Glad to do it. I may have you back, you all, so duly noted. 

Jim Davis: 

We'd be happy to. 

Darrell Bock: 

Okay. Thank you all for being a part of The Table. We appreciate your being with us through this episode. If you want to see other episodes of The Table, you can go to voice.dts.edu/tablepodcast and you can get a look at the almost 600 episodes of The Table that we have produced over the last decade plus. And we thank you for being a part of this, and we hope we'll see you again soon.