Our churches face a demographic crisis.
Young people are leaving, even the Southern Baptist Convention is starting to lose members, and when you drill down even deeper — comparing church attendance with population growth — the picture grows even more bleak. Simply put, when America’s fastest-growing religious segment is “nonreligious,” we have a problem. The Barna Group (the gold standard in evangelical research) recently compiled the results of a number of national studies and published a list of six reasons why young evangelicals leave the church: the church is overprotective, their experience of Christianity is shallow, churches seem antagonistic to science, the church’s approach to sexuality is judgmental and simplistic, they wrestle with the exclusivity of Christianity, and the church feels unfriendly to those who doubt.
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