From Death to life

Life and Books and Everything

Clearly Reformed

Books, Religion & Spirituality, Arts, Christianity

4.6 • 635 Ratings

🗓️ 28 February 2023

⏱️ 8 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Church attendance is declining. In this episode, Kevin reads from his recent article for WORLD Opinions where he argues for including additional data for analysis and offers a word of hope.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Greetings and Salutations, this is Life and Books and Everything. I'm Kevin DeYoung.
0:14.0	Today I'm reading my latest from world opinions entitled, From Death to Life. Is there any way to reverse the church's declining membership?
0:23.6	What prompted this, I saw a tweet, which I'll reference here, come up on Twitter with some dire statistics about the leading Protestant traditions, the largest ones, and how they're all facing this precipitous
0:40.0	decline. And there is lots of bad news to go around, but looked more carefully at it and thought
0:46.1	maybe that wasn't the entire story. And so wrote this piece on death to life. Is there any way
0:53.9	to reverse the church's declining membership?
0:57.6	I don't think people fully grasp how much of Protestant Christianity is going to die off in the
1:03.1	next three decades. That's an exact quotation. That was the first line of Ryan Burge's tweet,
1:14.2	showing the age distribution of various Protestant traditions in America.
1:16.1	Burge, a Baptist pastor who teaches at Eastern Illinois University, often posts interesting and
1:21.7	useful graphs about religion in America.
1:24.3	This particular graph shows the age distribution for 26 Protestant traditions, from Lutherans
1:31.4	to Congregationalists, to Methodists, to Presbyterians, to Baptist, to Pentecostals, to non-denominational
1:36.7	churches. Brightly colored and easy to read, the graph demonstrates at a glance that Protestant
1:43.3	churches are considerably grayer than the population at large.
1:47.6	Hence, Birge's concluding line, quote, there's no major denomination where a majority are under 45 years old, exclamation point.
1:58.3	No doubt, church attendance in America is in decline. The rise of the nuns in O NES
2:04.4	has been well documented and younger generations are less interested in church than their parents and
2:09.9	grandparents were and less interested than their parents and grandparents were at the same age.
2:16.7	When it comes to the churching of America, there is plenty of bad news to go around and
2:21.0	plenty of challenges ahead.
2:23.5	And yet, Burge's helpful graph does not support Burge's exclamatory conclusion.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Clearly Reformed, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Clearly Reformed and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.