Church Dropouts

“Misconception #1: People leave primarily because of negative experiences with the church….Misconception #2: Young people are leaving the church after attending secular universities.” - TGC

“Counterintuitively, part of the trend of decline may be churches that ask too little of those who darken their doors.” - Breakpoint

“When I talk about the majority of dechurching stories being a story of slowly rolling down a slope…. I’m also thinking about specific choices that churchgoers will make that announce to everyone in their family and friendship groups that church is actually not that important.” - Mere Orthodoxy

A look at themes related to the book: The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? by Jim Davis and Michael Graham - C.Leaders

“Already, 30 percent of Southern Baptists ‘seldom’ or ‘never’ attend church….The southern Bible Belt is quickly becoming a region of unchurched or lapsed Protestants who may still hang onto their evangelical identity to some extent but who don’t think going to church is necessary.” - CToday

“…what should you do when you begin feeling discontent at your church? What should you do when you feel that yearning to pick up and move on?” - Challies

“It’s not that our students ‘got smarter’ when they left home; rather, someone actually treated them as intelligent. Rather than dumbing down the message, the agnostics and atheists treat our youth as intelligent and challenge their intellect with “deep thoughts” of question and doubt.” - C.Leaders

“Disaffected young evangelicals and those who left the church describe an out-of-touch institution not in line with their political beliefs, a scholar found” - RNS

“After their sweet sixteenth birthday 73% of eventual church dropouts attend regularly, compared to 79% of those who stayed in church. By 17, the divide grows (64% of dropouts are attending versus 78% on non-dropouts). At 18, less than half of those who drop out are regularly attending (48%)” - Lifeway

“I started to wonder whether religion itself—or at least the kind of Christianity that showed up in the slogans all around me—might really be about something else: southern culture or politics. If so, I thought, that would mean that Jesus is not the Way, the Truth, and the Life, but a means to an end.