The American Church In Crisis

Groundbreaking research based on a national database of over 200,000 churches shows that the overall United States population is growing faster than the church. The director of the American Church Research Project, Dave Olson, has worked to analyze church attendance, showing that it is virtually unchanged from fifteen years ago while our population has grown by fifty-two million people.What does this mean for you, your church, and the future of Christianity in North America? The American Church in Crisis offers unprecedented access to data that helps you understand the state of the church today. “We live in a world that is post-Christian, postmodern, and multiethnic, whether we realize it or not,” says the author. This book not only gives a realistic picture that confirms hunches and explodes myths, but it provides insight into how the church must change to reach a new and changed world with the hope of the gospel.Readers will find a richly textured mosaic with optimistic and challenging stories. Charts, diagrams, and worksheets provide church leaders and motivated church members with a stimulating read that will provoke much discussion. Questions for discussion accompany the chapters.

Since 1947, the Supreme Court has promised government neutrality toward religion, but in a nation whose motto is "In God We Trust" and which pledges allegiance to "One Nation under God," the public square is anything but neutral -- a paradox not lost on a rapidly secularizing America and a point of contention among those who identify all expressions of religion by government as threats to a free society. Yeshiva student turned secularist, Bruce Ledewitz seeks common ground for believers and nonbelievers regarding the law of church and state. He argues that allowing government to promote higher law values through the use of religious imagery would resolve the current impasse in the interpretation of the Establishment Clause. It would offer secularism an escape from its current tendency toward relativism in its dismissal of all that religion represents and encourage a deepening of the expression of meaning in the public square without compromising secular conceptions of government.

In A People Adrift, a prominent Catholic thinker states bluntly that the Catholic Church in the United States must transform itself or suffer irreversible decline. Peter Steinfels shows how even before the recent revelations about sexual abuse by priests, the explosive combination of generational change and the thinning ranks of priests and nuns was creating a grave crisis of leadership and identity. This groundbreaking book offers an analysis not just of the church's immediate troubles but of less visible, more powerful forces working below the surface of an institution that provides a spiritual identity for 65 million Americans and spans the nation with its parishes, schools, colleges and universities, hospitals, clinics, and social service agencies. In A People Adrift, Steinfels warns that entrenched liberals and conservatives are trapped in a "theo-logical gridlock" that often ignores what in fact goes on in families, parishes, classrooms, voting booths, and Catholic organizations of all types. Above all, he insists, the altered Catholic landscape demands a new agenda for leadership, from the selection of bishops and the rethinking of the priesthood to the thorough preparation and genuine incorporation of a lay leadership that is already taking over key responsibilities in Catholic institutions. Catholicism exerts an enormous cultural and political presence in American life. No one interested in the nation's moral, intellectual, and political future can be indifferent to the fate of what has been one of the world's most vigorous churches -- a church now severely challenged.

From the Introduction: We need not be surprised, then, that in the Middle Ages also there were rulers who aspired to supreme political and temporal power. The truly exceptional thing is that in medieval times there were always at least two claimants to the role, each commanding a formidable apparatus of government, and that for century after century neither was able to dominate the other completely, so that the duality persisted, was eventually rationalized in works of political theory and ultimately built into the structure of European society. This situation profoundly influenced the development of Western constitutionalism.

We are in trouble. Church attendance has dropped, spiritual life in our services has ebbed and we face a serious lack of people preparing for the ministry. Perhaps most alarming is that we have failed to reach or keep our youth. The Sunday school rooms and youth groups of many churches have no real hope or strategy in place to bring them in. Beyond this, dozens of churches close each week never to reopen, while just a few new ones are started. Without some real changes in these areas we will lose our Christian influence in this nation almost entirely in the very near future.Certianly God has not planned for the failure of His church.

In 2006, few Americans were expecting the economy to collapse. Today the American church is in a similar position, on the precipice of a great spiritual recession. While we focus on a few large churches and dynamic leaders that are successful, the church's overall membership is shrinking. Young Christians are fleeing. Our donations are drying up. Political fervor is dividing us. Even as these crises eat at the church internally, our once friendly host culture is quickly turning hostile and antagonistic. How can we avoid a devastating collapse? In The Great Evangelical Recession, award-winning journalist and pastor John Dickerson identifies six factors that are radically eroding the American church and offers biblical solutions to prepare evangelicals for spiritual success, even in the face of alarming trends. This book is a heartfelt plea and call to the American church combining quality research, genuine hope, and practical application with the purpose of igniting the church toward a better future.

Viewing the Civil War as a major turning point in American religious thought, Mark A. Noll examines writings about slavery and race from Americans both white and black, northern and southern, and includes commentary from Protestants and Catholics in Europe and Canada. Though the Christians on all sides agreed that the Bible was authoritative, their interpretations of slavery in Scripture led to a full-blown theological crisis.