Americans Pursue Their Faith Outside of Churches

In Pop Goes the Church, I write that the church is losing its' effectiveness and becoming an impotent institution. However, people in the real world continue to pursue their spirituality...they just aren't going to churches or pastors anymore.

This recent article in the Denver Post seems to back up my claim. In the article reporting on a brand new survey, the author writes,

Americans are shopping for religion, and brand loyalty is in decline, according to a landmark survey released Monday.

More than a quarter of adult Americans polled have left the faiths they were raised in to join another religion or to belong to no religion at all, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Pew's latest survey, based on interviews with more than 35,000 adult Americans in May through August, shows a dynamic and diverse religious landscape, researchers said.

The survey confirms trends such as the declining loyalty of people in traditional U.S. denominations, especially among mainline Protestants and Catholics.

Later in the article it talks about the number of people pursuing their faith outside of the church:

The group with the greatest net gain was "the unaffiliated" — the country's fourth-largest segment — with 16 percent of American adults saying they are not part of any organized religion.

As church leaders, we need to get on the ball and offer the attractive Jesus of the Bible, the Jesus that connected with the culture and drew crowds through his entire teaching ministry. Regardless of the name of the church or the denomination it belongs to, if we aren't introducing people to Jesus we aren't doing our job.

Thanks to Luke Humbrecht for finding this article.