Christians are ignorant of Great Commission because churches aren't teaching it enough

Staff writer 

Fri 18 Jan 2019 16:15 GMT

A pastor and missiologist have weighed in on why so many Christians in the US are unaware of the Great Commission.

After Barna research found that 51 per cent of American Christians do not know what the Great Commission means, it called in the experts to find out why.

Allen Yeh, associate professor of intercultural studies and missiology at Biola University, said some of the ignorance could be explained by simple terminology - the fact that 'the Great Commission' is not a specific term that Jesus actually used.

By contrast, Jesus taught his followers the 'greatest commandment' in Matthew 22:37-40 and it's a passage many Christians know by heart.

(Photo: Barna)

But that can't explain all of confusion, Yeh told Barna, and in his view, there's another important reason - churches are failing to teach it from the pulpit.

'I think some of the ignorance of this term can be attributed to churches not teaching this concept enough any more,' he said.

'I certainly heard it a lot growing up, but perhaps it has been lost on this current generation of believers.'

David Daniels, lead pastor of Pantego Bible Church in Fort Worth, Texas, takes a similar view.

Columbia Union Leaders Discuss Young Adult Attrition

Whole Church Solution Needed, Speaker Says

Story by Taashi Rowe
Published 5/17/13

A 2011 book reveals that 59 percent of young adults are leaving the church.


A. Allan Martin, PhD, didn’t mince words. A former professor at the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary at Andrews University (Mich.) and a current young adult pastor at a thriving church in Texas, Martin hit the members of the Columbia Union Conference Executive Committee with stark numbers: some 60 to 70 percent of young people leave the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Yesterday Martin gave a nearly two-hour long presentation to committee members meeting at the Columbia Union headquarters in Columbia, Md. Using the David Kinnaman book You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church ... and Rethinking Faith as his primary reference, Martin brought the gathering up to speed on the whys and wherefores of persistent young adult attrition from churches across North America. For his book, Kinnaman, president of the Christian research firm the Barna Group, looked at the Christian community as a whole.

However, Kinnman’s findings may not have been exactly news to the committee members. “We’ve heard the sirens in regard to young adult attrition for years,” Martin said. He then referenced Roger Dudley’s 2000 book Why Our Teenagers Leave the Church: Personal Stories From a Ten-Year Study, which had similar findings as Kinnaman. Dudley who led the Institute of Church Ministry at Andrews University, tracked hundreds of young North American Adventists from the late 1980s through the late 1990s, and, found that between 40 and 50 percent of teens end up leaving the church.

Martin noted that repeating the information he shared today was important because, “most of this stuff is not intuitive. The Seventh-day Adventist church is about 25 years behind culture and about 15 years behind mainstream Protestantism so the older generation is still trying to figure it out.”

With young adults continuing to drop out, the union's executive committee members have made engaging and partnering with young adults to further the mission of the church one of their six priorities for 2011-2016. Bringing in Martin to address the leadership on this critical issue was one small step in the direction of stanching the exodus of young adults from the church. While Martin gave some familiar reasons why young adults leave the church, which include them finding it repressive, overprotective, shallow, exclusive, anti-science and having no room for doubt, the presentation also left room for discussion and some solutions.

Beverly Miles said in the urban areas he noticed that those who are leaving the church “feel no need for Jesus in their life and find that answers come from another source.”

Martin was not surprised. He responded that he knew a young lady who became a Muslim because she felt that a greater sense of community and involvement in that religion.



An Intergenerational Solution

Martin also discussed how generational differences impact today’s church including that flattened hierarchical structures have made it easier for young adults to have immediate access to formally distant “authority figures.”

Rubén Ramos, assistant to the Columbia Union president for Multilingual Ministries, wondered if a child’s early education and relationship with their parents impacted their future relationship to their church.

Martin said while he could not fully answer that question, he did know that a child’s relationship with his parents does impact what kind of adult he will become. He also said more youth pastors alone was not the answer. “Kids are smart enough to know that the youth pastor gets paid to be their friend,” he said. “Not having a significant relationship with another adult makes young adults two times as likely to drop out of church.”

He continued, “Older adults are missing from young people’s lives. They are going to their friends [for moral centering] not their parents who have dismissed themselves from young people’s lives.”

Dennis Austin, a Pennsylvania Conference pastor, admitted, “There are some churches that want nothing to do with young people. Sometimes we demonize young adults by telling them we don’t have a place for them so we give them their own spaces. But we need each other. We need to find ways to encourage our congregations to become intergenerational.”

Martin agreed, “It is our responsibility to interface with the next generation of the church. I’m all about church planting but if it’s done to segregate, then the church will become anemic especially if it is done to accommodate a preference for a certain worship style.”

Martin then detailed the ABCs and D of building young adult relationship, which included authenticity, belonging, compassion and discipleship. He especially stressed longitudinal relationships or what he calls reverse mentoring. “We used to look toward the ‘sage on the stage,’ but this generation is more interested in the ‘guide on the side,’” he said. Finally, he asked committee members to write down the names of 10 young adults who have varying connections to the church, pray for them and reach out to them.

Following the presentation Dave Weigley, Columbia Union president, promised to procure copies of Kinnaman’s book for committee members. “I hope this presentation was beneficial to all of us,” he said. “If we are serious about engaging young adults, we must realize that this was just one step in the process of intentionally reaching them.”

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More Americans tailoring religion to fit their needs

By Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA TODAY
Updated 3d 16h ago


If World War II-era warbler Kate Smith sang today, her anthem could be Gods Bless America.
By Eric Gay, AP
People take part in a National Day of Prayer gathering in San Antonio in May. Polls show that in 1991, 24% of U.S. adults hadn't been to church in the past six months; today, it's 37%.


That's one of the key findings in newly released research that reveals America's drift from clearly defined religious denominations to faiths cut to fit personal preferences.

The folks who make up God as they go are side-by-side with self-proclaimed believers who claim the Christian label but shed their ties to traditional beliefs and practices. Religion statistics expert George Barna says, with a wry hint of exaggeration, America is headed for "310 million people with 310 million religions."

"We are a designer society. We want everything customized to our personal needs — our clothing, our food, our education," he says. Now it's our religion.

Barna's new book on U.S. Christians, Futurecast, tracks changes from 1991 to 2011, in annual national surveys of 1,000 to 1,600 U.S. adults. All the major trend lines of religious belief and behavior he measured ran downward — except two.

More people claim they have accepted Jesus as their savior and expect to go to heaven.

And more say they haven't been to church in the past six months except for special occasions such as weddings or funerals. In 1991, 24% were "unchurched." Today, it's 37% .

Barna blames pastors for those oddly contradictory findings. Everyone hears, "Jesus is the answer. Embrace him. Say this little Sinners Prayer and keep coming back. It doesn't work. People end up bored, burned out and empty," he says. "They look at church and wonder, 'Jesus died for this?'"

The consequence, Barna says, is that, for every subgroup of religion, race, gender, age and region of the country, the important markers of religious connection are fracturing.

When he measures people by their belief in seven essential doctrines, defined by the National Association of Evangelicals' Statement of Faith, only 7% of those surveyed qualified.

Barna laments, "People say, 'I believe in God. I believe the Bible is a good book. And then I believe whatever I want.'"

LifeWay Research reinforces those findings: A new survey of 900 U.S. Protestant pastors finds 62% predict the importance of being identified with a denomination will diminish over the next 10 years.

Exactly, says Carol Christoffel of Zion, Ill. She drifted through a few mainline Protestant denominations in her youth, found a home in the peace and unity message of the Baha'i tradition for several years, and then was drawn deeply into Native American traditional healing practices.

Yet, she also still calls herself Christian.

"I'm a kind of bridge person between cultures. I agree with the teachings of Jesus and … I know many Christians like me who keep the Bible's social teachings and who care for the earth and for each other," Christoffel says. "I support people who do good wherever they are."

And it's not only Christians sampling hopscotch spirituality. The Jewish magazine Moment has an "Ask the Rabbis" feature that consults 14 variations of Judaism, "and there are many," says editor and publisher Nadine Epstein.

"The September edition of Moment asks 'Can their be Judaism without God?' And most say yes. It's incredibly exciting. We live in an era where you pick and choose the part of the religion that makes sense to you. And you can connect through culture and history in a meaningful way without necessarily religiously practicing," Epstein says.

Sociologist Robert Bellah first saw this phenomenon emerging in the 1980s. In a book he co-authored, Habits of the Heart, he introduces Sheila, a woman who represents this.

Sheila says: "I can't remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It's Sheilaism. Just my own little voice. … It's just try to love yourself and be gentle with yourself. You know, I guess, take care of each other. I think God would want us to take care of each other."

Bellah, now professor emeritus at University of California-Berkeley, says, "Sheila was a jolt to some at the time. But to a lot of people, it wasn't a jolt at all, they had been living that way for a while. Don't romanticize the past. Fervent religiosity was always in the minority. Just because people showed up in church didn't always mean a deep personal conviction or commitment."

Bellah sees two sides to the one-person-one-religion trend. On the positive: It's harder to hold on to prejudices against groups — by religion or race or gender or sexuality — if everyone wants to be seen individually.

"The bad news is you lose the capacity to make connections. Everyone is pretty much on their own," he says. And all this rampant individualism also fosters "hostility toward organized groups — government, industry, even organized religion."

Today, even the godless disagree on how not to believe, says Rusty Steil of Denver.

He grew up Lutheran and retained his parents' "strong moral code," but, he says, he couldn't stick with "ancient myths of people trying to make sense of the world."

"I don't find much comfort in imagining there's an all-powerful God who would allow people starving and all the natural and man-made disasters," Steil says.

Steil calls himself a "live-and-let-live atheist," as apart from the virulently anti-religious variety such as Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins, or "those who actively promote disbelief."

Paul Morris, an Army medic at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and veteran of six tours in the Middle East, says he has seen Christianity, Judaism and Islam in action, for better and for worse, and, frankly, he'll pass.

Morris grew up "old-style Italian Catholic," but says he never felt like his spiritual questions were answered. So, he says, "I just wiped the slate clean. I studied every major religion on the face of the planet. Every one had parts that made sense, but there was no one specific dogma or tenet I could really follow," Morris says.

"So now, I call myself an agnostic — one who just doesn't know. What I believe is that if you can just do the right thing, it works everywhere."

Source
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New Barna Report Examines Diversity of Faith in Various U.S. Cities

There is little debate that most Americans are faith-oriented people. Yet how does spirituality and religion differ from one city to the next? A Barna Group study of regional and city-level expressions of faith both confirms and rejects many popular stereotypes about Americans’ faith. Read the Barna Update >

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'Forget the pizza parties,' Teens tell churches

Updated
8/11/2010 1:04 PM
2d 1h ago

By Cathy Lynn Grossman and Stephanie Steinberg, USA TODAY

"Bye-bye church. We're busy." That's the message teens are giving churches today.
Only about one in four teens now participate in church youth groups, considered the hallmark of involvement; numbers have been flat since 1999. Other measures of religiosity — prayer, Bible reading and going to church — lag as well, according to Barna Group, a Ventura, Calif., evangelical research company. This all has churches canceling their summer teen camps and youth pastors looking worriedly toward the fall, when school-year youth groups kick in.

"Talking to God may be losing out to Facebook," says Barna president David Kinnaman.

"Sweet 16 is not a sweet spot for churches. It's the age teens typically drop out," says Thom Rainer, president of LifeWay Christian Resources in Nashville, which found the turning point in a study of church dropouts. "A decade ago teens were coming to church youth group to play, coming for the entertainment, coming for the pizza. They're not even coming for the pizza anymore. They say, 'We don't see the church as relevant, as meeting our needs or where we need to be today.' "

"I blame the parents,"who didn't grow up in a church culture, says Jeremy Johnston, executive pastor at First Family Church in Overland Park, Kan.

His megachurch would routinely take 600 teens to summer church camp, he says, "and many would be forever changed by that experience. But this summer we don't even have a camp.

"Remember, 80% of kids don't have cars. Their parents could be lazy or the opposite — overstressed and overcommitted. If parents don't go to church, kids don't, either."

Don't forget the overcommitted teens themselves, the recession and growing competition from summer mission trips, says Rick Gage of Go-Tell Youth Camps, based in Duluth, Ga.

Registration fell 22% in 2009 but stabilized this summer with 2,000 middle- and high-school teens at five camps in four states. Attendance peaked in the late 1990s at 5,000 teens, Gage says.

Chris Palmer, youth pastor at Ironbridge Baptist Church in Chester, Va., says its youth group enrollment slid from 125 teens in 2008 to 35 last winter.

He pulled participation back up to 70 this year by letting teens know "real church, centered on Jesus Christ, is hard work," Palmer says. "This involves the Marine Corps of Christianity. Once we communicate that, we see kids say, 'Hey, I want to be involved in something that's a little radical and exciting.' "

Rainer agrees. He says teens today want Scripture, they "don't want superficiality. We need to tell them that if you are part of church life, you are part of something bigger. The church needs you, too."

But first, they have to find the kids.

Sam Atkeson of Falls Church, Va., left his Episcopal church youth group not long after leaving middle school.

"I started to question if it was something I always wanted to do or if I just went because my friends did," says Atkeson, now 18. "It just wasn't really something I wanted to continue to do. My beliefs changed. I wouldn't consider myself a Christian anymore."

Source: http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2010-08-11-teenchurch10_ST_N.htm?csp=34news

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