We realized that most of the people that we interacted with who don't go to church

used to go to church. This was amplified by a Barna study we saw of the Orlando metropolitan area that made the claim that 42% of our metropolitan area used to go to church and now no longer does.

And actually said that we had the same percentage of evangelicals

as New York City and Seattle.

But we began to think like, well, why does Orlando feel so different

than New York City and Seattle and the reason is

because a lot of our people used to go to churches so carry with them a lot of that

foundation and so that's when we started thinking about de-churching when my wife

was in your class and your

apologetics class she wanted to do her final paper on de-churching and your

response was there is no research on there's nothing to research and so that stuck with us and we

began to look for research and we couldn't find it. So the hunch we had, this isn't

just an Orlando phenomenon and we began to theorize that we might be in the largest and fastest religious

shift in the history of the Reformation to the modern church. This is Whitehorse Sin, a weekly roundtable discussion about theology

and culture. Hello and I'm Justin Holcomb, one of the four co-hosts.

Usually an episode is the four of us having a conversation,

but this is a special episode in which I will be talking with Jim Davis and Michael Graham about their new book, The Great D. Churching.

And this conversation is vital for two reasons.

First, it's important that we learn why 40 million people have left the church in the last 30 years.

And also why 20 million are willing to come back. They aren't just numbers. These are people we love and

care about. They're friends, family members, neighbors,

co-workers. And because we care, we're here to listen to them and hear why they left.

...