John 4:23 But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him.
Important Takeaways:
- The importance of religion in the lives of Americans is shrinking
- Just 16% of Americans surveyed said religion is the most important thing in their lives, according to the PRRI study, down from 20% a decade ago.
- However, for people who do still attend religious services, they say they’re optimistic about the future of their house of worship.
- Even though the U.S. as a whole is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse, the vast majority of Christian churchgoers report that their congregations are “mostly monoracial.”
- The research also found that religious Americans are on the move.
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Revelation 3:14 ““To the angel of the church in Laodicea write: These are the words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the ruler of God’s creation. 15 I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! 16 So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth. 17 You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. 18 I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see. 19 Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest and repent. 20 Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.
Important Takeaways:
- Ignorance Of The Bible Isn’t Just A Problem In Our Culture—It’s A Problem In The Church
- Multiple surveys reveal the problem in stark terms. Most Christians in the United States believe the Bible teaches, “God helps those who help themselves” (and some even believe this quote is a Bible verse). A series of Barna surveys shows that only 19% of “born again Christians” hold to the simplest elements of a basic biblical worldview.
- A Barna poll once indicated that at least 12 percent of adults believe that Joan of Arc might be Noah’s wife.
- Another survey of graduating high school seniors revealed that over 50 percent thought that Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife
- A considerable number of respondents to one poll indicated that Billy Graham preached the Sermon on the Mount.
- The larger scandal is biblical ignorance among Christians. Choose whichever statistic or survey you like, the general pattern is the same among professing Christians. America’s Christians know less and less about the Bible. It shows.
- Bible teaching now often accounts for only a diminishing fraction of the local congregation’s time and attention.
- Youth ministries are asked to fix problems, provide entertainment, and keep kids busy. But how many local church youth programs actually substantially increase their Bible knowledge during the critical junior high and high school years?
- Recovery starts at home. Parents are to be the first and most important educators of their own children, diligently teaching them the Word of God (see Deuteronomy 6:4–9). Parents cannot pass their responsibility off to the congregation, no matter how faithful and biblical it may be.
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Romans 1:28 “And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.” 2 Timothy 4:3-4 For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; 4 And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.
Important Takeaways:
- ‘Hell Is Systemically Coming After Our Children’: Anti-Sex Trafficking Expert’s Warning About Dangers of Pornography
- With the growing pervasiveness of pornography comes a greater comfortability with nudity at increasingly younger ages — a concerning issue for parents trying to protect their children.
- In just one year’s time, from 2019 to 2020, the number of children ages 9-12 years old who perceive it as normal to share nude pictures and videos with each other jumped from 13% to 21%.
- Even higher percentage of 9- to 12-year-old boys (26%) see the illegal trend as commonplace.
- Elizabeth Fisher Good, an expert advocate against sex trafficking and founder of The Foundation United said root causes of this escalating issue is pornography. “Our children are being taught by the world, and it is not pretty,”
- “Hell is systemically coming after our children, systemically dismantling the ability for intimacy, for family. If we don’t do something, in one decade, everything will be different — and we have the power as the church to speak to it.”
- As a survivor of sexual abuse — first by a same-sex peer as a child and later by a worship leader — Good, a former pastor and author of “Groomed: Overcoming the Messages That Shaped Our Past and Limit Our Future,” struggled for years to open up about the ways she had been exploited. Those secrets, she said, fed a pattern of abuse that lasted for years.
- We have to enter this conversation, lead it, speak to it intelligently and not as if it’s taboo because, you know what, your kids are on the school bus every day and whoever’s educating them is not pretending that it’s taboo.”
- Christians, she added, “need to get in the ring and take this on.”
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2 Timothy 4:3 “For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.
Important Takeaways:
- The Church In The West Stands On The Brink Of Destruction
- (Queensland, Australia) — “An open and professed disregard for religion has become the distinguishing character of the present age. Christianity is ridiculed and railed at with little reserve, and the teachers of it without any at all. There is no such thing as religion in England. If anyone speaks about religion, everybody begins to laugh. It has come to be taken for granted that Christianity is no longer a subject of inquiry, but that it is now at length discovered to be fictitious. Accordingly, it is treated as if, in the present age, this were an agreed point among all persons of discernment, and nothing remained but to set it up as a principal subject for mirth and ridicule.”
- Many might assume that the above comments were recently written in a left-leaning newspaper. Wrong. They were made in 1730’s England. Various Christian heresies were fashionable among the upper classes at the time.
- However, a 2022 survey by Ligonier Ministries and LifeWay Research found that many American evangelical Christians now hold a concerning set of beliefs. For example, 38% considered that religious belief was a matter of personal opinion and not about objective truth.
- Among the evangelical pastors surveyed 39% considered that there is no absolute moral truth and that each individual must determine his/her own truth
- 37% said that having faith in general is more important than the question of in what or in whom that faith is placed
- 30% did not agree that their salvation was based only on having accepted, by faith, Jesus Christ as their Savior!
- From these surveys it is clear that the Church in the West stands once again on the brink of destruction – not from without, but from within. We have now reached the stage where Christianity in the UK and much of the West is once again a laughing stock, as it was in 1730s England.
- If God were to abandon the West how could we complain, given that we have contemptuously pushed Him away so often, so publicly and so shamelessly?
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2 Timothy 4:3 “For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.
Important Takeaways:
- Churches are closing at rapid numbers in the US, researchers say, as congregations dwindle across the country and a younger generation of Americans abandon Christianity altogether – even as faith continues to dominate American politics.
- About 4,500 Protestant churches closed in 2019, the last year data is available, with about 3,000 new churches opening, according to Lifeway Research.
- It was the first time the number of churches in the US hadn’t grown since the evangelical firm started studying the topic. With the pandemic speeding up a broader trend of Americans turning away from Christianity, researchers say the closures will only have accelerated.
- The Survey Center on American Life and the University of Chicago found that in spring 2022 67% of Americans reported attending church at least once a year, compared with 75% before the pandemic.
- “Since the 1990s, large numbers of Americans have left Christianity to join the growing ranks of US adults who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or ‘nothing in particular’,” Pew wrote.
- by 2070 that number will drop to below 50% – and the number of “religiously unaffiliated” Americans – or ‘nones’ will probably outnumber those adhering to Christianity.
- “A church will go through a life cycle. At some point, maybe the congregation ages out, maybe they stop reaching young families.
- “If the church ages and doesn’t reach young people, or the demographics change and they don’t figure out how to reach the new demographic, that church ends up closing.
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- Barna: Thousands Of Pastors Have Become Leaders Of A Movement Away From God, Toward Narcissism
- Parishioners in the United Kingdom were shocked and appalled in November to hear a University of Cambridge student pontificate during his chapel message that Jesus Christ is transgender.
- …what’s more alarming is an increasing unfaithfulness to the Scriptures by pastors of Christian congregations across the United States.
- A 2022 survey of 1,000 Christian pastors across seven major groupings of denominations revealed that only 37% of clergy have a Biblical worldview.
- Among evangelical pastors surveyed, 30% said they don’t believe that their salvation is based exclusively on confessing their sins through repentance and accepting Jesus Christ as their Savior.
- 39% of evangelical pastors reject that there is absolute moral truth and instead contend that each individual must determine their own truth.
- 37% said that having a faith matters more than which faith you have.
- [In Conclusion]…the prevailing worldview for 88% of Americans, Barna said, is syncretism, defined as a personalized or customized worldview dictated by an individual’s preferences, desires and subjective truth claims. “Worldview is important because you do what you believe,”
- “Because pastors teach what they believe, many churches are becoming centers of syncretism and secular thought,” Barna continued. “Perhaps without even realizing it, thousands of pastors have become leaders of a movement away from God, toward narcissism.”
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2 Timothy 3:6,7 “They are the kind who worm their way into households and captivate vulnerable women who are weighed down with sins and led astray by various passions, 7who are always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.
Important Takeaways:
- Churchgoing and belief in God stand at historic lows, despite a megachurch surge
- Church membership, church attendance and belief in God all declined during the pandemic years, survey data suggest, accelerating decades-long trends away from organized worship.
- In-person church attendance plummeted by 45 percent in the pandemic, according to an ABC News analysis.
- At least one-fifth of Americans today embrace no religion at all.
- The rise in “nones,”… all come at the expense of a vanishing “moderate middle” of American faith said David Campbell
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2 Timothy 3:6,7 “They are the kind who worm their way into households and captivate vulnerable women who are weighed down with sins and led astray by various passions, 7who are always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.
Important Takeaways:
- As attendance dips, churches change to stay relevant for a new wave of worshippers
- American Christianity is in the midst of an identity crisis. Attendance is in steep decline, especially among millennials and Gen Z who say traditional church doesn’t speak to their realities.
- [Some say] they’re looking for a faith community, but they’re burned out on traditional religion.
- Pastor Chris Battle walked away from more than three decades leading Black Baptist churches and turned his attention to Battlefield Farm & Gardens in Knoxville. They grow vegetables and sell them at a farmer’s market. They also collect unsold produce from around the city and deliver it to people in public housing once a week.
- Methodist pastor Bradley Hyde, sitting at a table sipping java while the milk steamer hisses behind the counter. “I think people were already wanting to leave church, and Covid gave them a great opportunity to say, ‘Good bye.’ I’m not the only pastor who has noticed that, but a lot of people have just not come back.”
- Baptist Pastor Chris Battle says he used to measure the success of a church by what he calls “the BPs.”
- “Butts in pews, bucks in the plate, baptisms in the pool, and building programs. The BPs. That’s how you grow a church, right?” he says, chuckling.
- When he was senior pastor, the question used to be how can the church change the culture? Today, he says, it’s how do we change the culture of the church?
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2 Timothy 3:6,7 “They are the kind who worm their way into households and captivate vulnerable women who are weighed down with sins and led astray by various passions, 7 who are always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.
Important Takeaways:
- What ‘The State of Theology’ Tells Us
- This year’s State of Theology study’s results show that not just Americans but evangelicals in particular are increasingly muddy on core truths such as the nature and character of God, the reality of human sin, the role of the Church in the world, and the exclusivity and divinity of Jesus Christ.
- Nearly half of evangelicals agreed that God “learns and adapts” to different circumstances, in stark contrast to the biblical doctrine of unchanging nature, or immutability;
- 65 percent of evangelicals agreed that everyone is “born innocent in the eyes of God,” denying the doctrine of original sin, and with it, the very reason that people need salvation in the first place
- Some 56 percent of evangelicals agreed with the idea that “God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam,” in contrast to Jesus’ words in Matthew that without Him, “no one knows the Father.”
- When asked whether they agreed that “Jesus was a great teacher …but not God,” 43 percent of American evangelicals answered yes.
- The State of Theology paints a bleak picture.
- It’s worth noting that these failures are not because evangelicals have a low view of Scripture. Some 95 percent, after all, still agree with the statement that “the Bible is 100 percent accurate in all that it teaches.” The implication, then, is that they simply don’t know what it teaches, either because they haven’t been taught or they haven’t cared enough to learn.
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Matthew 24:4, 9-10 ““See to it that no one deceives you. … They will deliver you over to be persecuted and killed, and you will be hated by all nations because of My name. At that time many will fall away and will betray and hate one another, and many false prophets will arise and mislead many”
Important Takeaways:
- Prepare To Stand: Will Church Leaders Compromise To Avoid Persecution?
- How could deception creep into the church, and what could it look like?
- The messaging from our culture is that pleasure and self-fulfillment are the highest values: Follow your heart. Be authentic. Be true to yourself. In practice, this means that I do what makes me feel good. My feelings determine my own truth, and I live according to my truth.
- Many who identify as Christian deny the exclusivity of Jesus. They think there are multiple ways to God, and many don’t think Jesus’ demands for obedience apply to them.
- Many church leaders are now hesitant to teach on the wedge issues because it will cause division.
- Going forward, pastors will face tremendous external pressure to compromise, and those who do will be held up by society as examples of good and acceptable Christianity.
- Some leaders will compromise to avoid persecution. But there’s a more insidious reason because it comes from seemingly good motives—the desire to protect their ministry: If I avoid certain issues, then I’ll be able to continue my ministry, which is producing fruit and serving people. But in the end, those leaders will lose their purity and their witness.
- Jesus warned about this. He said, “Many will fall away and will betray and hate one another” (Matthew 24:10). Deceived believers will attack faithful believers. It is going to become very messy and confusing.
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