This is a Salaback Church podcast.

We're in week number three of a message series called Worthy of It All.

And I've loved this series. It's been one of my favorite series for us since Stacy and I've come.

Most importantly, because God's doing something in our church through this series.

He's shaping and shifting our hearts and culture and moving in a powerful way.

And today as we continue this series, I want to begin, I was reading a book recently called

The Great Dechurching.

And what the author was talking about in the book, he's looking at the patterns of the church in North America.

And what he noticed is that over the last few decades, through research, what they see,

is that there was a decline in the American church, the number of people and the percentage of society that attends churches going down.

Now, this is also true in Europe, where the church is on the decline. This is not

true in Asia, South America, or Africa, but it is true in North America, United States, and it's also

true in Europe. And the altar was kind of unpacking, what are the patterns? What are the reasons why?

Now, there's another guy, took that book, wrote an article on it.

It was kind of a Cliff Notes version, and I liked that too.

So I got through the first 80 pages of the book, and then I read the article and I was like,

okay, that's great.

Synthesized it for me.

I have the world's record for numbers of books started, not finished.

But this article was written in the Atlantic this summer, and the writer of

the article, as he was taking that book, was talking about this very important idea. And what he said

is that the reason, based on research, that most people are leaving the church is not because we

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