The statistics are staggering:
• 80% of money given to congregations comes from people 55 years of age and older.
• 26% of Americans attend church.
• 52% of those born before 1946 attend church.
• 36% of gen Xers attend church.
• From 1990-2001 the number of Americans with no religious preference has doubled to 14%.
• The unchurched population in America has grown from 24 to 34% in just 10 years.
• 90% of kids active in high school youth groups don’t go to church by the time they are sophomores in college. 1/3 will never return.

Why is this happening? Reggie McNeal in his insightful book, “The Present Future” argues that the world has changed and the institutional church hasn’t changed. He writes, “We are entering a new epoch of human history called the post-modern age.” (p.5) When we say the church hasn’t changed we are not saying that the church should change and accept the non-biblical post-modern view and accept its ringing endorsements of new definitions of the family including living together without marriage or a homosexual life style or of the individual customized gods and religions that people fabricate for themselves. But the church needs to realize also that its way of speaking to modern age people falls flat in the present reality of post-modern age thinking.

Modern age thinking is what me and many of you have grown to know. Us and the people of our older generation hold reason to be supreme. Modern age people assaulted God by pushing Him and spirituality more and more out of the way in favor of empirical, scientific reasoning. To modern age thinkers materialism and secularism reigned supreme in their world. The Church fought against such idol worship and sought to make public the deficiencies of deifying science. But the post-modern world into which today’s younger generations are born is governed by quantum physics and an emphasis on relationships. Post-modern world people are very, very spiritual unlike the modern world people that preceded them. Post-modern people are looking for god perhaps even more than the moderns who were relegating him to a corner. The question is, “where will the post-modern find their spiritual fulfillment?”

Don’t even think that they are looking in the church. If we think that post-modern world people are looking for spirituality in the institutional church and therefore we design our programs and church fare hoping they will come then we are planning for failure. The truth is that today’s generation that is outside the church think that the church is for church people, not them. The aren’t drawn or hunger to grow the institutional church. No, if we want to grow Christ’s kingdom (Matthew 28:18-20) then in this post-modern world our emphasis must be in getting our church people out with Christ into the communities in which they live. Our emphasis must be our church people carrying Jesus into the workplace, the family reunions, the sporting events and even our own homes. Our church leaders’ responsibility is to organize, train and deploy us.

As we mull over the statistics at the beginning of this letter to the church we may be saddened. The statistics don’t look good. But don’t despair. Don’t confuse these downward statistics on church participation with a loss of spirituality in Americans. The truth is that although interest in institutional religion is down, interest in spirituality is up. A 2003 Gallup poll indicates that a vast majority of Americans say that religion has an impact in every area of their life.

By the Holy Spirit’s prompting let’s show Jesus to a spiritually hungry America!

Serving Him with gladness,
Pastor Chris D. Ongstad