Top 10 Reasons Our Kids Leave Church

I had a church member pass along a link to this post on The Top 10 Reasons Our Kids Leave Church, which I think is very legitimate and sadly accurate.  The top ten reasons, which are further explained in the post, are as follows:

1. The church is "relevant"
2. They never attend church to begin with
3. They get smart
4. You send them out unarmed
5. You gave them hand-me-downs
6. Community
7. They found better feelings
8. They got tired of pretending
9. They know the truth
10. They don't need it

To see the explanations and read the entire post, click here. 

Pastoral Reminders Amidst Political Unrest

I recently provided our congregation with an article that I hope will provide a balanced and biblical perspective on the upcoming presidential election.   If you would like to read the article, titled Keeping Perspective: Pastoral Reminders amidst Political Unrest, you can click here to view it on our church blog.  Or if you want to download the print version as a PDF, click on that same page and scroll down to the very bottom.

I hope this article proves helpful, and I hope it reminds us of those things that are so easy to lose sight of during this election season.    

Timothy George on Lessons from the Mainline Decline

Timothy George offers helpful and insightful analysis in his recent article, 3 Lessons from Crisis and Decline in the Mainline.  His three main lessons are:

1. There is an intrinsic connection between spiritual vitality and theological integrity.
2. The continuing saga and approaching collapse of mainline denominations should prompt us to pray.
3. Evangelicals have no room to boast or gloat over the "sickness unto death" in the mainlines.

Here is an excerpt:

The debate over homosexual practices within the mainline denominations is not the root cause but only the presenting issue....At the heart of this issue is a broken doctrine of biblical authority, a loss of confidence in the primary documents of the Christian faith....The church and the Bible are coinherent realities in the economy of grace. One will not long survive intact without the other.

Read the entire article here.

A Historical Glance at Colonial Baptists

"Persecution from the establishment - which ran from fines in New England and physical assault in the South, especially Virginia - was a steady fact of Baptist life into the 1770s. But for the opening geography of the colonies as well as for a society with opening ideology, the self-starting, lay-oriented, Bible-centered and thoroughly active work of the evangelical Baptists made them the mainland's most dynamic religious movement between the revivals of the 1740s and the Revolution of the 1770s. They were the primary beneficiaries of the Great Awakening. In the colonies of North America there were less than one hundred Baptist churches in 1740, but almost five hundred by the outbreak of the war with Britain in 1776."

--Mark Noll, The Rise of Evangelicalism

Evangelicals Living Off of Borrowed Capital

"Too often American evangelicals have settled for a Christology that can be reduced to a bumper sticker....Today's American evangelicals may be quick to speak of their love for Jesus, even wear their devotion on their sleeve, literally....But they may not be so quick to articulate an orthodox view of the object of their devotion. Their devotion is commendable, but the lack of a rigorous theology behind it means that a generation of contemporary evangelicals is living off of borrowed capital."

--Stephen Nichols, Jesus Made in America