How the Local Church Can Minister to the Dechurched

White Horse Inn

Sola Media

Grace, Scripture, Christianity, Religion & Spirituality, Spirituality, God, Knowledge, Christ, Gospel, Jesus, Faith, Belief, Religion, Christian, History, Theology, Bible, Reformation, Horton, Discipleship

4.8 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 14 April 2024

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What happened in American culture and in the church from the 1970s-1990s? What were the conversations and big concerns of that time when White Horse Inn recorded its first episodes? In answering some of these questions, churches can get their bearings as to what trends have impacted those who no longer sit in their pews and what to do about it.

“The early 1990s was an inflection point for American religion. Between the early 1970s and 1990s, the share of Americans who had no religious affiliation had only risen two points. But from that point forward, the nones would grow by a percentage point or two nearly every year through the following three decades.” - Ryan Burge, “‘OK Millennial’: Don’t Blame the Boomers for Decline of Religious America”

Michael Horton, Bob Hiller, Walter Strickland, and Justin Holcomb discuss how modern historical events and trends have impacted church attendance today and how to respond.

CHECK OUT THIS MONTH’S OFFERS:

The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? by Jim Davis and Michael Graham, with Ryan P. Burge.
Become a Partner to support the work of White Horse Inn as we apply the riches of the Reformation to the modern church.
Subscribe to Modern Reformation magazine. Our March/April issue is “The Head & the Heart,” where we feature essays, poems, and articles about how the Bible does not separate the “rational” mind and the “emotive” heart; rather, “In the Bible, the intellect, will, and emotions are all capacities that belong to the whole, integrated person.”

For more information, visit us at whitehorseinn.org or email us at [email protected]

Featuring: Michael Horton, Bob Hiller, Walter Strickland, and Justin Holcomb

Transcript

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0:00.0	Evangelicals craved the attention of pop culture the way mainline Protestants
0:10.9	crave the attention of high culture.
0:13.5	This leads to, and if this goes too far afield, I'm sorry, but if you're going to try and
0:18.1	engage the pop culture, what's going to end up happening and what does end up happening is a
0:21.9	juvenileization of what's going on in the church and so the church becomes less mature because to be juvenile is to be less mature and so you bring people in for youth group and then you try and get them into the adult part
0:35.2	they got but I thought church was supposed to be fun which is not a biblical category as it turns out
0:40.1	and I like fun I'm all for fun. If it happens great. Yeah, but that's not the point.
0:46.0	The point here is to be disabled and to follow Christ. And so this ends up happening so that once you start trying to raise people up in a church like that, you haven't
0:54.6	disciples them properly, and it's much easier to walk out towards something that is a little bit more fun. applying the riches of the Reformation to the modern church, this is Whitehorse Sin, a weekly
1:17.8	roundtable discussion about theology and culture. Growing up in the southern Baptist Convention, I often heard pleas to reach
1:36.0	baptism goals and to invite family and friends and neighbors to come to church.
1:40.2	I'm convinced that my home church set realistic goals to encourage us to share our
1:45.1	faith and to welcome others to the gathered church body and by God's grace our church
1:49.9	grew. As I ventured into our broader denominational environment, I started to hear a lot about
1:55.4	dwindling baptism numbers and church attendance declining, but I was numb to it because of my own
2:00.7	church experience growing up. As time passed, this kid of
2:04.3	the 90s began to recognize that declining baptisms and church attendance was not
2:08.6	just a blip on the radar. As I began to take note of friends who used to come to church regularly, they began to forsake the
2:15.5	gathering of the Saints in their 20s and 30s.
2:18.4	Christian political science, Ryan Burge, identified what I saw anecdotally with empirical research when he said,
2:24.3	quote, the early 1990s was an inflection point for American religion.
2:28.9	Between the early 1970s and 1990s, the share of Americans who had no religious affiliation had only risen
	...

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