“It’s relational wisdom from the interpersonal standpoint, and it’s building churches and institutions that promote a gospel that’s true, good and beautiful all at the same time. If we do those things, lots of people are going to return—like millions and millions of them. So that’s where there’s just tremendous hope.”
“Of the 40 million people who have stopped going to houses of worship in the United States, about 15 million of them roughly are leaving evangelical contexts. And then within that, we have four different profiles.”
“We didn’t let the machine learning algorithm see ethnicity, but you know, there’s a long shadow in the data and there’s a group that’s 100% non-white and that’s the BIPOC church group, a fascinating group. It has the highest income, highest education of any of the groups, and this group de-churched a long time ago. It’s very male as well.”
“When people are communicating to us why they’re willing to return, they’re just looking for a good community and they’re looking for a healthy local church.”
Jim Davis
“We are currently in the largest and fastest religious shift in the history of our country, and we proved it.”
“Obviously, God is in control of it all. We believe he’s doing the work. You know, nobody’s going to worship him without a regenerative act on his part in our hearts. He is going to keep his sheep. But at the same time, he told us there would be weeds among the wheat, that we should not be surprised when there are people who look like they are in the kingdom and they are not.”
“Before the fall of the Soviet Union, to be American was to be Christian…when the Soviet Union fell, there was now freedom to be both American and not Christian. So that was a really important thing that contributed to the dechurching.”
“There’s more freedom in our society now to say you’re not Christian or to say I’m a Christian, but my spirituality is private.”
“What’s not causing people to leave the church is higher secular education…the more educated a Christian is, the more likely you are to continue in the faith.”
“When you focus in on dechurched evangelicals, their orthodoxy scores, depending on the particular primary doctrine—whether it’s the divinity of Jesus, inspiration of Scripture, the core doctrines that we have—dechurched evangelicals scored higher than those who still go to church…all signs point to them still being Christians. So we believe there’s just a great discipleship opportunity.”
