Nearly half of Americans Change their Belief, says Associated Press

I have served in churches where there were few young people. Many of the grandparents and parents ask me; "What can we do to get our children back, or any young people? The answer is really simple: Give them the church, don't simply hand it to them as a memorial to you and to generations past. Allow them to make it their church. Let them take out the carpet, pews, pulpit etc.. Let them put in a sound system and or lighting, let them make it their own and they will stay. Too often this is a bridge too far for church members and they continue to lose the young people. Young people do not want to be handed a memorial to keep in a perpetual state of the 1950s or older.. They want their own church, and that is why many of them move on...

This is a good article I found on FoxNews.com take a look:

The U.S. religious marketplace is extremely volatile, with nearly half of American adults leaving the faith tradition of their upbringing to either switch allegiances or abandon religious affiliation altogether, a new survey finds.

The study released Monday by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life is unusual for its sheer scope, relying on interviews with more than 35,000 adults to document a diverse and dynamic U.S. religious population.

While much of the study confirms earlier findings — mainline Protestant churches are in decline, non-denominational churches are gaining and the ranks of the unaffiliated are growing — it also provides a deeper look behind those trends, and of smaller religious groups.

"The American religious economy is like a marketplace — very dynamic, very competitive," said Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum. "Everyone is losing, everyone is gaining. There are net winners and losers, but no one can stand still. Those groups that are losing significant numbers have to recoup them to stay vibrant."

The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey estimates the United States is 78 percent Christian and about to lose its status as a majority Protestant nation, at 51 percent and slipping.

More than one-quarter of American adults have left the faith of their childhood for another religion or no religion at all, the survey found. Factoring in moves from one stream or denomination of Protestantism to another, the number rises to 44 percent.

One in four adults ages 18 to 29 claim no affiliation with a religious institution.

"In the past, certain religions had a real holding power, where people from one generation to the next would stay," said Penn State University sociologist Roger Finke, who consulted in the survey planning. "Right now, there is a dropping confidence in organized religion, especially in the traditional religious forms."

Lugo said the 44 percent figure is "a very conservative estimate," and more research is planned to determine the causes.

"It does seem in keeping with the high tolerance among Americans for change," Lugo said. "People move a lot, people change jobs a lot. It's a very fluid society."

The religious demographic benefiting the most from this religious churn is those who claim no religious affiliation. People moving into that category outnumber those moving out of it by a three-to-one margin.

The majority of the unaffiliated — 12 percent of the overall population — describe their religion as "nothing in particular," and about half of those say faith is at least somewhat important to them. Atheists or agnostics account for 4 percent of the total population.

The Roman Catholic Church has lost more members than any faith tradition because of affiliation swapping, the survey found. While nearly one in three Americans were raised Catholic, fewer than one in four say they're Catholic today. That means roughly 10 percent of all Americans are ex-Catholics.

The share of the population that identifies as Catholic, however, has remained fairly stable in recent decades thanks to an influx of immigrant Catholics, mostly from Latin America. Nearly half of all Catholics under 30 are Hispanic, the survey found.

On the Protestant side, changes in affiliation are swelling the ranks of nondenominational churches, while Baptist and Methodist traditions are showing net losses.

Many Americans have vague denominational ties at best. People who call themselves "just a Protestant," in fact, account for nearly 10 percent of all Protestants.

Although evangelical churches strive to win new Christian believers from the "unchurched," the survey found most converts to evangelical churches were raised Protestant.

Hindus claimed the highest retention of childhood members, at 84 percent. The group with the worst retention is one of the fastest growing — Jehovah's Witnesses. Only 37 percent of those raised in the sect known for door-to-door proselytizing said they remain members.

Among other findings involving smaller religious groups, more than half of American Buddhists surveyed were white, and most Buddhists were converts.

More people in the survey pool identified themselves as Buddhist than Muslim, although both populations were small — less than 1 percent of the total population. By contrast, Jews accounted for 1.7 percent of the overall population.

The self-identified Buddhists — 0.7 percent of those surveyed — illustrate a core challenge to estimating religious affiliation: What does affiliation mean?

It's unclear whether people who called themselves Buddhists did so because they practice yoga or meditation, for instance, or claim affiliation with a Buddhist institution.

The report does not project membership figures for religious groups, in part because the survey is not as authoritative as a census and didn't count children, Lugo said. The U.S. Census does not ask questions on religion.

wazzup! I guess I am in a gang!

I guess i am in a gang...
I never knew!

ALBANY, Ore. — A pair of Albany teenagers suspended for "gang-related behavior" because they were wearing crucifixes say they were only wearing gifts from their mothers.

Jaime Salazar, 14, his friend Marco Castro, 16, were suspended from South Albany High School recently after they refused to put away the crucifixes they were wearing around their necks.

Salazar said Principal Chris Equinoa saw his necklace and told him to put it away. "I was like, why?" Salazar said. "He says it's related to gangs."

Salazar said he argued and was sent to the office. Instead, he went home. Later, he received a note saying he had been suspended for five days for "defiance and gang-related behavior."

Castro, a junior, was suspended for three days after refusing to take off a string of milky rosary beads, with a crucifix and a tiny picture of the Virgin Mary, that he was wearing around his neck. His mother gave it to him, he said.

Equinoa said religious items are not banned. But, as principal, he reserves the right to ask a student to remove, or cover up, any item he feels could indicate gang affiliation even a crucifix

The school district backs him up.

Are the Kids alright??

OK please excuse the hint at the Who song (if you don't know that's alright, you just might be too young)

A good research article from Churchrelevance.com

Over the past several years, UCLA researchers have been studying the spirituality of college students. What is intriguing is undergraduates tend to become more spiritual but less religious between their freshman and junior year. The Pew Forum recently shared the following findings from the study:

Religious Attendance

• 43.7% of freshmen frequently attend religious services.
  25.4% of juniors frequently attend religious services.
• 20.2% of freshmen never attend religious services.
  37.5% of juniors never attend religious services.

Measures of Spirituality

• 48.7% of freshmen say “attaining inner harmony” is “very important” or “essential.”
  62.7% of juniors say “attaining inner harmony” is “very important” or “essential.”
• 41.8% of freshmen say “integrating spirituality in my life” is “very important” or “essential.”
  50.4% of juniors say “integrating spirituality in my life” is “very important” or “essential.”
• 62.8% of freshmen agree with the statement “most people can grow spiritually without being religious.”
  74.8% of juniors agree with the statement “most people can grow spiritually without being religious.”

Why the rise of spirituality but fall of religiosity?

Researchers believe two factors affecting this trend are:

1. Many of these students are away from home for the first time, and we suspect that, for some students, religious observance before college is influenced by the presence of the family
2. A greater deal of time is invested in studies during college than before college.

So what is the best way to reach these college students? Should a college ministry try to reverse the trend and get undergraduates to start attending a service? Or should a college ministry focus on bringing spirituality to the college campus?

For Discussion:
- What do you think?
- What recent college ministry success stories have you heard?

Moral Truths (final article)

What makes us continue to search for the truths in life? Even those who do not have an understanding of who God is, or a belief in His son our Savior Jesus Christ will know deep in their hearts what is right and wrong. We continue to search for that which is right. It is said that we all have a God shaped hole in our hearts. We attempt to fill that hole with many things and yet we are always left longing. It is this same way that we continue to search for the truths in life, it is in this way that we keep coming back to what is right. It is in this way that we as nations of this world can’t avoid the basic tenants of the Ten Commandments when we are drafting the laws of the land, it is because God has placed them in our hearts, we were hard-wired with them from before birth and they are inescapable. Romans 1:19-20 tells us, “Since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities- His eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that we are without excuse.” God has made it clear to us what His intentions are; man in turning away from what God has made clear will be destroyed.

The things that seem to be most prevalent in our societal discussion in the “progressive church” these days, the things that we try to pass off as acceptable based on a false sense of inclusiveness are in fact unacceptable in God’s eyes. This term “progressive” is not only disturbing it is laughable. What is more progressive than God? Is there a way that God’s word can be improved upon? The truth of the matter is, the less we have to rely on God for our laws and moral standards the more we can invent our own, and this makes us accountable to each other and not to God. As writer Jonathan Glover tells us, “we can re-create morality to suit ourselves”. The very term, re-creation leads us to believe that we are tinkering with something God has already put in place, for God is the only one who can create ex nihilo (from nothing). The fallacy of this principle, of course, is that we never escape the judgment of God and it is to His moral standards that we will be held accountable.

The bottom line is that certain moral truths are common to all people. We are bound by these truths, which were created by God simply because we are also His creation. When we go awry of these truths we wander down a path of destruction. God has made known to everyone what His truths are and has provided to us the Holy Spirit in order to reveal them to us. We are judged by the standard that was given to us by our creator, to ignore that fact will certainly lead to doom.

Moral Truth & Absolutes (pt 2)...

There are those who would say that our moral absolutes come to us from instinct. Somehow the things that served our parents generation and previous generations so well in the past, will serve us as well, and therefore are ingrained in us as instinct. They would say it is this herd mentality that keeps us on the track of morality. However, the same moral truths that are given to us from God are evident in all societies; there are certain things, as the author J. Budziszewski would say, “we can’t not know”. There is a standard, and that standard is God. God created our standards and put them in place deep within our hearts, and it is this God given absolute standard that guides us in our daily lives. Unfortunately we live in a world that doesn’t always recognize the standards of God, and we live in rebellion. This rebellion pits us against nature itself since nature follows the laws created for it by God. There are too many examples of how our lifestyles that are in opposition to God’s standards have caused great upheavals in the natural world. Our poor stewardship of our resources has caused great pollution. Our inability to adhere to the covenants established by God for relationships between men and women have created a society where sexually transmitted diseases are running rampant, and where AIDS has become a pandemic across the continent of Africa and is growing all over the world. Famine is in places where there used to be plenty, often times because of poor stewardship of the water sources and of the earth itself. There is always a price to pay when we go against the standards and absolutes set in place by God and in today’s day in age we are reaping what we have sown.

God is by nature good and perfect, and in creating us he stated that we were very good. This must mean that he has in store for us a life that is good as well. God is interested in our rights as His creation, our human rights. He is the very author of those human rights as can easily be seen in scripture. God’s very nature is reflected in His laws and therefore His laws are good, loving and perfect. C. S. Lewis tells us in Mere Christianity that “The law of gravity tells you what stones do if you drop them; but the law of Human Nature tells you what human beings ought to do and do not.” We are, by our sinful nature, rebellious and in turn at odds with our Creator. When we assume to take God out of the picture when it comes to human nature, we find ourselves with a poor substitute, we find ourselves left with us. By claiming that we are the authors of the absolute truths we state that we are able to govern our behavior, we become our own judge. That being said, without God as the author, all is up for grabs when it comes to both the determination of the standard and the punishment for disobeying it. This also leads to a changing of the standard based on popular belief, this makes our standard no standard at all, and we fall into chaos. (Part 3 next week)

True Worship

Moral Truth and Absolutes...

Where does morality come from? This is a question that begs to be asked, especially in this frenetic Post-Mod society. There is an effort these days to rush forward and embrace everything Post-Mod as new, edgy and cool. Even the Church is falling all over itself to market itself to this upcoming generation. One of the things we are doing wrong is attempting to overlay the Post-Mods with what is being called the Emerging Church. This often leads to our watering down the teachings of Jesus in order to make room for a variety of beliefs. If the Church is changing (and I think it is), and if the modern Evangelical Movement is on the way out (and I think it is), what we are left with is what is being called the Emerging Church (for lack of a better name right now). What we often fail to see is that this movement is not ours, but God's. It is the Post-Mod that needs to be immersed into God's emerging Church. When we see it this way, we are working alongside our creator in reaching this incredibly diverse group of spiritual young people who often have a "drifty" sense of absolutes and moral truth, and introducing them to the amazing, mysterious unchanging morality of Jesus...

So I ask again... What does morality come from?

I would say that is it clear; our morality comes to us from our Creator. The very terms right, wrong, good, and evil have to stem from something. There must be a moral compass that tells us why something is right rather than wrong, good rather than evil. As long as we understand that this moral starting point is God we can then see the relevance of the terms, if we believe we are the ones who create this moral beginning, than we are doomed to fail since it is immoral man who is attempting to set a moral code. Those who say that there is no God and therefore no absolute moral truth, have nothing to base morality on; if we do not base our moral principles on God than we are simply basing them on preferences.

Sooner or later we find that everyone has absolute truths, even those who say that there aren’t any. When someone comes to me and says that there are no absolute truths in this world, I simply ask them “are you absolutely sure?” By making the statement they are implying that there are no truths except the ones they seem to hold to on any given day. The final question that can be asked of all those who attempt to apply moral truths and absolutes of their own without the guiding hand of God is; “says who?” Where is the basis for their decision; where is the foundation of their argument. This is the same argument that is used so successfully against the evolutionists, if not God than whom? C.S. Lewis discusses this in his book, The Abolition of Man, when he talks about subjectivism. He asks when talking about the authors of the Green Book; “values in whose eyes? Necessary for what? Progressing towards what? Affecting what?” He tells us that there are many who try to debunk traditional values, and yet inside themselves have values that they feel are untouchable to debunking. These values that they have are of course absolutes to them. (I will continue this discussion in upcoming posts)

Relevant Faith

If our faith is not relevant to our daily life in the world and in the parish, then it is no use; and if we cannot be Christians in our work, in the neighborhood, in our political decisions, then we had better stop being Christians. A piety reserved for Sundays is no message for this age.
... Douglas Rhymes

I have, over the years often asked non-believers why they never embraced Christianity, many of them answered that they did not want to be like the Christians they knew. Some of them said they didn’t know any Christians, even though I knew several Christians that they were acquainted with. I have often wondered, that if we are a people with the hope of eternal life, if we are the recipients of the inheritance of the King why aren’t we a joyful and satisfied people? If Christianity is the best thing going, if the only way to the Father is through the Son, then why aren’t we infectious with our presence and our Spirit? Why aren’t people grabbing us by the shirt sleeves and asking us what it is that we have and how do they get it?

I see many a Christian in the church on Sunday morning. Some (if only a few) of them have their hands raised in praise, some deep in prayer. Most of them are very polite and seem genuinely happy to see each other. Most of them sing with gusto when we raise our voices together. I also see several Christians outside the church, where God especially wants us to be Christians, and I often see another picture. Why is it that we can be so comfortable together and so uncomfortable outside the church? If we are able to worship among friends, and unable to witness among non-believers, who is it that we are really ashamed of?

Then he said to the crowd, "If any of you wants to be my follower, you must put aside your selfish ambition, shoulder your cross daily, and follow me. If you try to keep your life for yourself, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for me, you will find true life. And how do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose or forfeit your own soul in the process? If a person is ashamed of me and my message, I, the Son of Man, will be ashamed of that person when I return in my glory and in the glory of the Father and the holy angels. And I assure you that some of you standing here right now will not die before you see the Kingdom of God." (Luke 9:23-27)