It probably slipped under the radar for most of you but today, May 31, 2009 I complete my twelfth year as the Senior Minister of First Christian Church. It was on June 1, 1997 that my family and I first sat among you and worshipped. At the end of that service we came forward and became members of this congregation.
A lot has changed in those twelve years. We are worshipping in a different place: Old Sanctuary vs. New Sanctuary. We worship in different ways: traditional service vs. contemporary service. And the most obvious change of all is there are more of us worshipping here today than did on that first Sunday. Back then FCC Nacogdoches had about 320 members and averaged 140-150 in one worship service. Today we have about 579 members and average just over 300 in two worship services. We have a lot for which to be grateful to the Lord.
But while we have been changing and growing here at FCC, the news isn't quite so encouraging from the rest of the country. I just finished reading an article that John Meacham wrote for Newsweek Magazine entitled "The End of Christian America" in which he documents the decline of Christianity in America.
In the twelve years that we have been ?growing' the Christian Faith in this country has been in a steady state of decline Here are a couple of statistics to support that assertion. From 1990 until 2009 the number of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 percentage points, from 86% to 76%. The fastest growing segment in every religious survey are those who check "none". It is up from 5% in 1990 to 12% in 2009. The prospects for the future are even more bleak when you look at the various generations that make up America. It's a generalization but it seems to be true that the older you are the more likely you are to identify yourself as a Christian and the younger you are the less likely you are to identify yourself as a Christian. A survey of "Generation Next" (that's 18-25 year olds) revealed that 20% of these folks identify themselves as having no religious affiliation or as atheist or agnostic.
The picture that is coming into focus for me becomes even more disturbing when you look at what I want to describe as the level of participation for those who self-identify themselves as Christians. Most of the surveys that I've seen suggest that only 40% of those who profess to be Christians actually attend worship with any regularity. Translated into cold hard number this means that 228,000,000 people in this country self-identify themselves as Christians but only 91,000,000 actually attend worship with any regularity.
And many people are suggesting that really only about 25% attend worship with any regularity. That means only 57,000,000 out of 300,000,000 Americans actually bother to worship the God in which they say they believe.
And that's still not the worst of it. There is a lot of evidence to suggests that self-identified Christians are indistinguishable from their pagan neighbours. Alcoholism rates, divorce rates, and the rate for premarital sexual activity among unmarried persons is the same or nearly the same for self-identified Christians and their pagan neighbours.
George Barna writing in 1984 had this to say about American Christianity. "There is strong support among Christians for the notion that an individual is free to do whatever pleases him or her, as long as it does not hurt others, Two out of five Christians maintain that such thinking is proper, thus effectively rejecting the unconditional code of ethics and morality taught in the Bible. Three out of ten Christians agree that there is nothing more important in life than having fun and being happy. One out of four believers think that the more you have the more successful you are. The fact that the numbers of Christians who affirm these values is equivalent to the proportion of non-Christians who hold similar views indicates how meaningless Christianity has been in the lives of millions of professed believers." (George Barna, Vital Signs,1984)
Elton Trueblood writing in 1983 said that "The single greatest weakness of the contemporary Christians church is that millions of supposed members are not really involved at all and, what is worse, do not think it is strange that they are not." (A Time For Holy Dissatisfaction" Leadership Journal (Winter 1983): 19.
To put it bluntly, the current state of affairs among self-identified American Christians is not pretty and it likely to only get worse.
It may be that I have overstated the facts. I don't think so. If anything I think I may have understated the case. The conclusion that many people are drawing from all of this depressing news is that in terms of its religious makeup America is becoming like Europe. Which leads them to conclude, if we don't want this to prophecy to come true, we must change the way in which we do church in America.
All of that is troubling but I want to move it from out there to right here. What does all of this mean for FCC, Nacogdoches?"
You heard me say earlier that in the last 12 years that FCC has actually grown. There are more people worshipping here on an average Sunday morning than there were 12 years ago. Does that mean that we have already made the necessary changes in order for a congregation to grow and that other churches should look to us for guidance in turning this situation around?
My answer to that question is no. I went back and looked and the majority of what we have described as growth here at FCC has been what I am going to describe as the shifting of eggs from one basket to another. The growth here at FCC can't really be described as growth of the Kingdom of Heaven/God because most of our growth has been by the transferring of members from other congregations. The size of the God's Kingdom hasn't really changed.
So the only conclusion that I feel justified in drawing is that we also need to consider changing the way in which we do church here at FCC. Exactly what those changes will look like has yet to be determined. It will take all of our best efforts to figure out what needs to change and what needs to remain the same.
What do you think?
