Nearly three million Americans are now aligning themselves with other religious movements, such as New Age and Wicca. And the number of self-declared Muslims has doubled over the last two decades from .3 to .6 percent.
Bishop Michael Curry of North Carolina’s Episcopal Diocese says America is going through a cultural change.
“I would argue that people are more profoundly religious and expressing it, but it’s coming out in new ways,” he said. “You hear it in language about ‘spirituality.’ You may not hear it as consistently in terms of institutional religion, but the spiritual quest (is there), the hunger.”
To feed that hunger, the Episcopal Diocese has launched a new ad campaign to help attract worshippers, particularly younger ones.
I’d like to see the ad campaign. If it’s related, the graphic on the diocese’s website says God’s people are diverse, and invites them to come be “Hopeful & joyful brave generous loving kind involved.” Nothing about Jesus. Sounds like a very nice club. I don’t object to the invitation: “All are welcome, come celebrate God’s love with us,” but I wish Jesus were mentioned.
Curry will have a hard time attracting real Christians. They will see through him in a second. Curry is probably inventing a new religion to compete with those mentioned. Real Christians are Long Gone from his diocese.
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” Pastor Benji Kelley, who dresses in casual clothes when preaching, makes no apologies for it.
“They’re voting with their feet,” he says. “They’re leaving the church because they show up and the church doesn’t sound like the music they listen to, the message is not relevant, and it just has no place in (their) life. And what we’ve done is, try to say, no-no-no, Christianity is always relevant.”
My generation is not leaving the Church because the music in churches doesn’t sound like the music on my IPod; in fact, I’d leave the church if the music sounded like what I listen to on my IPod.
The reason people my age find the Church irrelevant is because ‘the message’ the Church wishes to communicate has become completely relativized by its continued divisions. If Christ’s message can be divided into thousands proclamations of Churches/denominations who each claim to speak the truth, then why should we need to belong to any one of them? I can go to bedside baptist, listen to a sermon online now and then, read the Bible, be a good person according to some ‘list of essentials’ and my version of Christianity is just as legit as the rest. That is exactly the response I get from most everyone my age who doesn’t attend Church.
Want a next generation? Stop dividing. Otherwise you can proclaim the biblical truth until the cows come home – no one is going to be listening. Even young evangelicals who are getting the Bible preached to them in ‘conservative ways’ are getting tired of their churches constantly dividing and they’re looking for something with more catholicity. If they leave their ‘evangelical roots,’ they’re not looking for more division so if the AC splits – most will just continue on to the RC or EO Church.