Why People Are Losing Their Religion (and How the Church Can Respond)
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There is a growing group of people, known as the religious dones, that would have formerly considered themselves religious but no longer identify as believers. Recently a study was published in Psychology of Religion and Spirituality sharing information that was gathered from this emerging group of people.
Many of us grew up in a very rigid Christian culture, where questions felt like an affront to Jesus himself. Yet, each of us will enter seasons of doubt, struggle, and questioning. There is no way to live this life where evil abounds and not have a why God moment! Our churches need to make space for questions.
The generations coming up have been programmed to question everything. They question why teachers can give them a certain grade, why parents have a say in their lives, why God has assigned them a certain gender, and the list goes on. If we want to reach a generation that is filled with questions and sometimes, consequently, a lot of confusion, we have to start engaging them with some tough, well-thought-out answers.
Many are walking away from faith because they “grow out of it” due to a desperate lack of discipleship in the American church. Most of us don’t know what the Bible actually says because we aren’t taking the time to study it ourselves. Lifeway research tells us only about 11% of Americans have actually read through the Bible at least one time. It's a pretty easy tactic on the part of the enemy to draw people away from the church by being told that your worldview is incomplete if you don’t actually understand what God actually tells us in his Word.
The church needs to focus on Biblical teaching, discipleship, and helping people to experience God’s presence in their lives. Knowing God and knowing of God are two very different things. We need to raise a generation who knows God intimately, understands his Word and nature, and is ready to cling to that truth when life gets tough, and your view becomes unpopular.
Following Jesus is tough, the Bible teaches that we follow the narrow way, and falling away from God’s truth is easy. We are not to judge harshly those that have stepped away from the church; there are real reasons why hurt leads us away from a community that is supposed to be designed to love and nurture our souls. It’s time to open our ears, humble our hearts, and lean into truth so the generations to come can find Jesus for their lives. A Jesus that is bigger than the failings of organizations and whose truth is timeless.
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