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Lifeway survey of young Christians reveals decline in orthodox faith

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Story in USA Today. (H/T Caffeinated Thoughts)

Excerpt:

Most young adults today don’t pray, don’t worship and don’t read the Bible, a major survey by a Christian research firm shows.

If the trends continue, “the Millennial generation will see churches closing as quickly as GM dealerships,” says Thom Rainer, president of LifeWay Christian Resources. In the group’s survey of 1,200 18- to 29-year-olds, 72% say they’re “really more spiritual than religious.”

Among the 65% who call themselves Christian, “many are either mushy Christians or Christians in name only,” Rainer says. “Most are just indifferent. The more precisely you try to measure their Christianity, the fewer you find committed to the faith.”

Key findings in the phone survey, conducted in August and released today:

•65% rarely or never pray with others, and 38% almost never pray by themselves either.

•65% rarely or never attend worship services.

•67% don’t read the Bible or sacred texts.

Many are unsure Jesus is the only path to heaven: Half say yes, half no.

[…]The 2007 LifeWay study found seven in 10 Protestants ages 18 to 30, both evangelical and mainline, who went to church regularly in high school said they quit attending by age 23. And 34% of those had not returned, even sporadically, by age 30.

Michael Snyder writing at Caffeinated Thoughts adds:

According to a recent survey by America’s Research Group, 95 percent of 20 to 29 year old evangelical Christians attended church regularly during their elementary school and middle school years. However, only 55 percent of those young evangelical Christians still attended church regularly during high school, and only 11 percent of them were still regularly attending church when they went to college.

Only 11 percent.

And that was among self-identified evangelical Christians.

But the most recent American Religious Identification Survey conducted by the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society & Culture at Trinity College was perhaps even more shocking.

According to that survey, 15% of Americans now say they have “no religion” – which is up from 8% in 1990. However, what was much more disturbing was that 46% of Americans between the ages of 18 to 34 indicated that they had no religion in the survey.

Those are the facts.

Here’s what we need to do in Christian churches and seminaries. We need to present Christian theology like people present chemistry. We need to consider alternative hypotheses. We need to survey opposing views. We need to host debates on core doctrines featuring non-Christians. We need to get away from the idea that Christianity is a Santa Claus myth. We need to replace praise hymns with speeches given by distinguished scholars. Apologetics should taught in Sunday school as mandatory for all age groups. Apologetics courses should be made mandatory in all evangelical seminaries.

The culture as a whole has turned more towards hedonism. There are a lot of fun things to do in life other than Christianity. Unless Christianity can provide a reason for people to avoid seeking pleasure, then Christianity’s influence will be diminished down to virtually nothing, as we see today in secular welfare-state countries in Europe. At the end of the day, leaders in the church who are more concerned about fundamentalist fideism and emotional satisfaction will be held accountable for their effectiveness, not their sincerity and good intentions. If the results are bad, then the method needs to change.

Mentoring

Apologetics advocacy

Mentoring

MUST-READ: Brian Auten reviews new apologetics essay collection

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The post is here. The book is called “Contending with Christianity’s Critics”. It is a collection of essays edited by Paul Copan and William Lane Craig. He has a chapter-by-chapter breakdown. Do you ever wonder where I learned to argue on all these topics? Well, take a look at Brian’s post.

Just look at some of these chapter summaries, and think of how you could serve the Lord just by effectively telling the truth about him!

Chapter 2:

“At Home in the Multiverse” by James Daniel Sinclair looks at the issues in current cosmology regarding the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life. Sinclair differentiates between the strong and weak anthropic principle and shows some of the problems with positing “many worlds” to explain the fine-tuning: “The Many Worlds advocate is engaged in a problem called the Gambler’s Fallacy.”(3) Sinclair explains that if we have prior knowledge of many worlds, then this fallacy is not taking place. But, “if I am simply inventing Many Worlds, then I am engaged in the fallacy.”(4) Sinclair then addresses six problems facing the multiverse hypothesis.

Chapter 7:

Part two, The Jesus of History, begins with Robert H. Stein’s essay: “Criteria for the Gospels’ Authenticity.” Here Stein lays out a clear presentation of the positive and negative criteria for historical authenticity. The positive criteria: multiple attestation, embarrassment, dissimilarity, Aramaic linguistic and Palestinian environmental phenomena, tradition contrary to editorial tendency, frequency, and coherence. The negative criteria: contradiction of authentic sayings, environmental contradiction, and tendencies of the developing tradition. Stein’s exploration of each is helpful and enlightening, allowing him to conclude that “The burden of proof now clearly shifts from the need to prove a passage’s authenticity to the need to prove its inauthenticity.”(16)

Chapter 8:

“Jesus the Seer” by Ben Witherington III focuses on the two key phrases used by Jesus: “Son of Man” and “kingdom of God.” Witherington’s goal here is to find where these two concepts occur together in the Old Testament. Witherington’s chapter contends that “there is no nonmessianic Jesus to be found at the bottom of the well of historical inquiry. Jesus made some remarkable claims for Himself and His ministry; the historian’s job is not to explain the claims away but rather to explain them.”(17) When the historian is faced with certain facts about Jesus and his claims, they cannot be ignored: “A historian has to explain how the high Christology of the church could have arisen after the unexpected and precipitous demise of Jesus through crucifixion. This conundrum becomes more puzzling, not less, for those who don’t believe in Jesus’ rising from the dead than for those who do.”(18)

Chapter 9:

“The Resurrection of Jesus Time Line” by Gary Habermas establishes the time line starting from the late first century and works back to the death of Jesus about 30 AD. According to Habermas, “current critical scholarship even agrees to the exceptionally early date of this proclamation [of the resurrection] as well as the eyewitness nature of those who made the claims.”(19) Habermas provides an overview of the time line: AD 60-100 The composition of the Gospels; AD 50-62 Dating the “authentic” Pauline epistles; AD 34-36 Paul’s first trip to Jerusalem; AD 45-50 Paul’s later trip to Jerusalem; AD 30-35 Back to the date of the actual events. Habermas shows that this time line is not a point of controversy, but accepted by the majority: “Virtually all critical scholars think this message began with the real experiences of Jesus’ earliest disciples, who thought that they had seen appearances of their risen Lord. It did not arise at some later date. Nor was it borrowed or invented.”(20) Habermas sees this as “the chief value of this argument. It successfully secures the two most crucial historiographical factors: (1) the reports of the original eyewitnesses, which are (2) taken from the earliest period. This is the argument that has rocked a generation of critical scholars.”(21)

Chapter 13:

“The Coherence of Theism” by Charles Taliaferro and Elsa J. Marty. Here the authors seek to defend the coherence of the concept of God. They address six attributes: “necessary existence, incorporeality, essential goodness, omnipotence, omniscience, and eternity.”(26) They point out: “The attributes of God are therefore not a patchwork of arbitrary characteristics. Each one is, rather, interconnected, and together they form a coherent whole. Appreciating this helps one avoid the more crude depiction of God one finds in Dawkins’s work.”(27)

Chapter 15:

“Did God Become a Jew? A Defense of the Incarnation” by Paul Copan aims “to show that the incarnation, though a mystery, is a coherent one.” Copan’s task: “(1) briefly review the scriptural affirmations of Jesus’ humanity and divinity, (2) highlight three important distinctions to help us understand the incarnation, and (3) examine the question of Jesus’ temptation in light of His divinity.”(29)

The other chapters are ALL good, addressing real questions that you will hear if you ask people in your office or in your family why they are not willing to investigate whether Christianity is true. This is incredibly practical. It’s all muscle, and no fat. It’s an arsenal – tailor-made for people who are concerned about God’s reputation, and who want to love him by defending his existence and character in the most effective ways.

Further study

If you like podcasts, Bill Craig explained the different chapters in a recent podcast. But Brian’s text review is superior.

I highly recommend this book and “Passionate Conviction: Contemporary Discourses on Christian Apologetics”, along with Lee Strobel’s “Case for…” books, as the basic building blocks of an amateur apologists’s arsenal.I especially recommend Lee Strobel’s “The Case for a Creator”.

You may also be interested in a new book offering a detailed response to the New Atheists, called “God Is Great, God Is Good: Why Believing in God Is Reasonable & Responsible”.

Humor

This evil satire of Calvinism is not funny at all!!!

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I don’t even think you should read it. It’s so evil!

Excerpt:

In this post I would like to look at the extent of the atonement. By using proper exegesis of scripture it can be proven with certainty that Jesus died to effectually secure salvation for Paul of Tarsus. And for Paul alone.

First, let’s take a look at Galatians 2:20. This is the most important verse in the Bible, because it explicitly states the extent of the atonement (bold mine):

“I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

This verse is key. It indisputably proves that Jesus loved and gave himself only for Paul.

And:

In Matthew 18:12 we learn that the shepherd only wanted to save one sheep. In fact he abandoned 99 sheep to save the one (bold mine):

“What do you think? If a man owns a hundred sheep, and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off?”

This passage is so clear. It proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that the shepherd found and saved only one sheep (Paul). The shepherd left the 99 other sheep on the hills. By doing this the shepherd maximized his glory. Moreover, he increased the appreciation and adoration of Paul, whom was effectually retrieved. If other sheep could have been retrieved, it would have diluted the value of the shepherd’s act.

This is so awful, that I have no words to describe how awful! Awful!

Here’s another thing that you shouldn’t read!

All kidding aside, I do believe in definite atonement. Sufficient for all, efficient for some, based on God’s foreknowledge of who would respond to his taking the initiative to draw a specific group of people toward him, who did not want him at all, but who he knew would freely responding to his loving them FIRST.

I apologize to all of my Calvinist readers for posting this. Please forgive me. You have to allow me my fun once in a while. Isn’t that what friendship is all about?