The stats reveal trouble in evangelicalism, Bible reading is down, church attendance is down, and the none's are rising. What's going on?

In The Great Dechurching, authors Michael Graham, Jim Davis, and Ryan P. Burge have done the work and come back with the stats. It's both better and worse than we could imagine. 40 million people have stopped going to church in the last 25 years and that's just the tip of the iceberg. However, amid such depressing news, there is hope. Because many of them are willing and ready to come back!

Listen as Travis and Michael Graham discuss the book, the stats, and what we can do to help connect people to Jesus and His church.

Referenced in this episode is Dechurching.com, The Keller Center.

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Takeaways:

• The term 'dechurching' describes individuals who attended church regularly but now do so less than once a year.
• Michael Graham's research reveals a staggering 40 million people have left church over the past 25 years.
• Many who left did so for pragmatic reasons, not due to theological disagreements or scandals.
• Over half of those who left evangelical churches are open to returning if invited.
• The study identifies distinct profiles of de churched individuals, each with unique reasons and circumstances.
• There is hope as many de churched individuals still maintain a positive view of evangelicalism.

We define somebody as being de churched is that they consistently went to church on a monthly or greater basis. Consistently. And then now go to church less than once per year.

So there are a bunch of people who just go to church on Christmas or Christmas Eve or just go on Easter or maybe Christmas and Easter. Those people, for the purpose of our definition, we did not count as dechurch. So the problem's even larger than just the 40 million number.

It's watering time, everybody.

It's time for Apollos Watered, a podcast to saturate your faith with the things of God so that you might saturate your world with the good news of Jesus Christ. My name is Travis Michael Fleming and I am your host. And today on our show, we're having another one of our deep conversations.

If you've been listening to our podcast for any period of time, or if you've ever gone to our website, or if you have been paying attention to any pundits writing about faith in the west, then you know that there is a crisis in the pew. Church attendance is down across the board.

Now, that may not seem like a big deal to you, but when you consider the sheer numbers of people that we're talking about and how fast it's all occurred, then it is mind blowing and will surely have dramatic repercussions for so many different ministries, nonprofits, and organizations across the. It's almost become a cliche to talk about it. Sometimes it feels like we're running around saying the sky is falling, the sky is falling.

But no one is looking any deeper to find out who is leaving the church and why. That may have been true, but not anymore. Today's guest, Michael Graham, along with his co author Jim Davis, did the research.

And today we have Michael on Apollos water to talk about it. Michael is the program director for the Keller Center.

He is the executive producer and writer of as in Heaven and co author of the Great To Churching. He is a member at Orlando Grace Church. He's married to Sarah and they have two kids.

Join me as we take a look at just how big the problem is and who the people are that have left so that we can start to do something about it. Happy listening.

Mike Graham. Welcome to Apollo's Watered.

It's so good to be here. Thanks for having me, Travis.

All right, are you ready for the fast five?

I'm ready. Let's go.

Okay, so I know, you're like me. You're from the Midwest, but you're living in Orlando. I don't know if you're a foodie, but I want to know what's the best food in Orlando?

Oh, you're asking the wrong person. My wife has celiac disease and we never eat out.

Okay, well, you know, that works. You don't even have to give an answer. That's the best answer. Okay, here's the second one, then. All right, the second one.

You have your hand in a lot of different ministries. You work with the as in Heaven podcast, and you've worked with a lot of different guests.

Who is your favorite guest that you've ever seen on the show or heard on the show, and why?

Man, I really got to think about this.

Christina Edmondson has some really helpful things to say.

In the second season of our podcast, she connected a couple dots for me that I just had never connected on racism before.

In particular, she helped me understand that racism wasn't just bad for the person who was the recipient of it, that racism also harms the person who is themselves racist. It's destroying both parties.

There are a number of very sharp.

People, but that moment right there was like one of those aha moments for me. Super basic, but don't know why I.

Hadn'T dawned on me before, but it was really helpful.

Okay, well, how about this next one?

Because you work with the Heller center for Cultural Apologetics, what's the best thing about working with the Keller center for Cultural Apologetics?

Yeah, I mean, it's a really simple one to answer. So we have two dozen fellows. They're all in different disciplines, and they're kind of all around the world.

I think we got seven different time zones, I think four different countries, and some pastors, some scholars, some apologists, and some evangelists, and just a really fun group of people. And I have just learned so much from each one of them.

And it's really fun to gather together and hear the kind of cross pollinating of ideas and not just across disciplines, but across traditions as well. So I would say that that's the best part is being able to be inside those conversations and eavesdrop, for lack of a better word.

Question 4. If you could live anywhere around the world, where would it be and why?

Oh, gosh.

There's two places that have a supreme draw for me. The first is Salerno, Italy. I used to live there.

I was on staff with Campus Crusade for Christ 20 years ago There in that city just south of the Amalfi Coast. Beautiful, beautiful place, beautiful people. The other place would be London, England. There's just tremendous history.

Even though I'm Scottish, I still am a little bit of an Anglophile, even though the British have not been so kind to my ancestors. No, there's just history. There's art, there's culture. There's just all sorts of things that are really interesting there.

I've always been drawn to kind of British evangelicalism as well. I just think that there's a lot there to offer. And you can speak English, so that's a plus. So those would be the top places I would identify.

All right, so being in Salerno, Italy, that's going to lead my next question. Were you married at the time when you were there?

I was not, but I ended up meeting my wife during that time when I was on staff with crew. We met in Spain, and our first dates were in the Amalfi coast and in Salerno.

So, wow.

I guess it's all downhill.

I mean, when you guys would go on dates because she had celiac disease, could you not eat pasta or anything like that?

She was not yet diagnosed.

And celiac is a tricky disease.

You can have it genetically, but the.

Genes aren't necessarily expressed. So the genes were not yet expressed for that. It wasn't until about five years later that she actually got celiac disease.

After a series of challenging things that we saw in ministry.

That then leads me to my final question. What was your favorite food when you were in Italy?

It's not Italian. I would probably actually say the donor kebabs and shawarmas.

In Italy?

Yeah, in Italy, because you got to remember that Salerno is on the Mediterranean.

And so Salerno is also a port city.

So after the allied forces took Sicily, Salerno was the landing spot because that's where they could unload all of the tanks and all those different kinds of things in Operation Christmas. And so Salerno is a port city. So a lot comes into Salerno from the Mediterranean region.

Everything from North Africa to Greece to even parts of the Middle East. And so there's a lot that happens culturally as a result of it being a port city.

So there was a lot of very, very good Mediterranean food in the city that you wouldn't find in the rest of the country. So, look, I struggled to get enough.

Protein when I was there. And so you got to go a little bit outside of the Italian diet.

To get the kind of Midwestern red me, you know, that you need to maintain your mass.

So my. My wife is Italian in heritage. Her Family came over from Sicily and she makes this amazing sauce and her.

I got to have her grandmother's before her grandmother passed away. And when they were poor, they would put hard boiled eggs in the sauce and I loved it. She. She does it to this day.

But that's when they didn't have very much protein. However, when I met them, they were putting everything in that sauce with all protein.

They had a full chicken, Italian sausage, meatballs, and the eggs. I never, I mean, I grew up with Chef Boyardee. You know, it was like, what in the world is this? And now it's. I'm like, this is just fabulous.

Anyway, but enough about food. Let's get to your book. You've co authored a book called the Great Dechurching, along with yourself, Jim Davis and Ryan P.

Burge, which you have used his statistics. This is a book that's causing a little bit of. Getting a little bit of hoopla, get a little bit of controversy.

I know, I've talked to several different people about it. And let's talk a little bit about this book. Why did you write the Great Dechurching?

Well, we never intended to write a book.

And we tried to get a little.

Bit more understanding about some more granularity about all that.

And we were going to do an.

Entire podcast season on a podcast that Jim and I and Scholar Flowers and Mike Acheson did called as in Heaven. We're going to do our third season on the subject of dechurching.

Skyler and I were doing a lot.

Of the writing for that. And so we were trying to do as much research as we could on all literature and any quantitative studies that had been done on dechurching.

And there wasn't much out there. There were some things that could be found, but a lot of it was over a decade old.

And it wasn't of a sample size that was large enough to have pastorally.

Actionable insights to it, let alone congregationally actionable insights.

And so just realized, okay, well, we're not people that are going to do a podcast season, lick our finger, put it up in the air and say, we think this is what's going on. It's like, no, I mean, we need hard information.

And so that's when Skylar and I contacted Brian Burge and asked him what kind of sample size, how much money would we need to raise what kind.

Of questions should we ask? And yeah, so we did our three phase study, 7,000 people, 600 plus data points per person on that third phase.

So we did this primarily just for the as in Heaven podcast, but in.

The process of doing the writing and.

The production for that, a couple people.

Who were in publishing got wind of.

Our research and said basically convinced us you would be irresponsible if you just did this in audio. You need to do this in a book format as well.

So Jim and I backed our way into a book. We're not writers. I don't know if we'll ever do this again. Yeah.

So we wanted to put something out there that would be helpful for everybody from clergy to just regular people who are churchgoers that are sad about their loved ones, family members, neighbors, co workers who don't go to church anymore and see if we couldn't make some sense out of what was going on and give some low hanging fruit insights as to how we might be able to help. So we were pretty surprised by some of the things that we saw.

We weren't expecting to have much hope coming out of the research, but there was a lot more there than what we thought.

Well, some of the data that you came up with was a bit of a surprise. I mean when I saw, first of all, I'd never heard of the term de churching. It made so much sense though, deconstructing.

We've got d everything else out here going on right now. So d Churching seemed to fit in and that seemed to once again give language to what I think many people were feeling. They haven't left the faith.

That's all the stats that I kept saying is they were frustrated with the church. They were frustrated with the church. It wasn't the things of God.

And honestly what I noticed is a lot of this was, I mean these were many of these as you, you even give different categories, the dme, the church, mainstream evangelicals, which would put me that, that's my people, my tribe. These are people that I would say were theologically orthodox. They were, they were fighting for what we would say would be the right things.

And yet they were so frustrated with the churches themselves as they went through this. And when you gave a number and then you categorize that number by giving it a little bit of a description of what that adds up to.

That was when I was in shock. 40 million people is what we're talking about in the last 25 years. Is that right?

That's right. It's actually probably more than that because there wasn't a technical definition for this. So we tried to basically define it.

So we defined somebody as being de churched is that they consistently went to church on a monthly or greater basis. Consistently. And then now go to church less than once per year.

So there are a bunch of people who just go to church on Christmas or Christmas Eve or just go on Easter or maybe Christmas and Easter. Those people, for the purpose of our definition, we did not count as d church.

And so there's many, many million more Christmas and Easter, only people that aren't in that 40 million. So the problem's even larger than just.

The 40 million number, even when you categorize it. You said this is more than the first great Awakening, the second great Awakening, and all the Billy Graham crusades combined.

That really put things into perspective for me. And then I started realizing, wait a minute, this. And this has all happened in the last 25 years. What's really at stake here?

Let's lay it out really quick here. What's at stake. And you mentioned this early on in the book. What's at stake with this great deterging.

Yeah. So let's start with what's at stake. Even if you don't care, let's say you're an atheist. Why would I care about this phenomenon?

Well, there aren't many phenomenons that hit one in six adults in our country. And so it should be sociologically curious. And you're talking about the reordering of how people spend their time and their habits and their rhythms.

That should be interesting.

Also, the social safety net in our country, in terms of one study, puts the social safety net as being as much as 40% comprised of religious nonprofits.

And so when you're talking about 1 in 6 adult Americans who've left the houses of worship, you're talking about a significant amount of the social safety net kind of likely eroding, because I'm guessing that most of those people are not giving to those kinds of causes anymore.

The biggest thing, and again, this is if you're somebody who is a person of faith, and especially if Christian, you want to care about these things, because go back to Covid, okay, we had the. You had these Covid spikes. You know, you had this variant, and then you had that variant. Why does a spike end up collapsing?

Well, it ends up collapsing because there aren't enough people anymore for the coronavirus to infect with that particular strain. And so that's what we're experiencing right now, is we're in a spike in dechurching. But that spike is temporary and it will end.

And it'll end because at some point the rate of de churching will have to decrease again because there aren't enough people who used to go to church on a monthly basis. And the next spike that happens after the dechurching spike is an unchurched spike.

And here's the difference between those two words in terms of definitions, de church is somebody who used to go to church regularly on a monthly basis, now less than once per year. Unchurched is somebody who's never had the habit of regularly going to church. And so if you have 2D churched parents, what do they raise?

Well, they're going to raise more than likely an unchurched kid. And so the dechurching phenomenon will lead to an unchurching phenomenon.

And I'm not going to necessarily say that one of those is harder than the other. I think it might be, but it's definitely a new and different set of challenges.

And I think while church is still somewhat on our cultural memory, we have a unique opportunity to capitalize on that, especially since most of the reasons why people stopped going to church were very pragmatic and many of them didn't leave with tremendous pain. So I think that there's a lot of opportunity here, and that's a very short window of time that we have to do something about this.

So hopefully we can make a little bit of a difference and something of a dent in that in the short run.

The parents that have de churched have, because they've been raised in church, they still have a Judeo Christian worldview of some sort. Their children will have less than that, and then it will go even further. Like nature abhors a vacuum.

That's why I always laugh when I watch British TV shows, because now that's like this whole rise of the occult coming back. You know, you take God out, you've got to. You got to have something that you put in there. And I think what you're going to see.

And again, we've taken this for granted. We have this Judeo Christian worldview that is at the center of our society in the understanding of rights, equality, freedom, education.

To take away the center of what has actually granted us that, then it becomes very chaotic. Who is leaving? Who are these people leaving and why?

Yeah, so the first thing you have to understand about the d church is they're not monolithic. So, you know, in the book, we. We unpack six different profiles of people who've left houses of worship.

In those profiles, there's a mainline profile, a Roman Catholic profile, and then four different evangelical profiles.

And so the orthodoxy level, the reasons why, the age, what rough time frame, the willingness to return, and the reasons why somebody would be willing to return vary widely.

So of those four evangelical profiles, just for context, when we're talking about evangelical dechurching, you're talking about 15 million of the 40 million people left evangelical churches. And so of those, we outlined four profiles in the book. The first is the cultural Christians. Only 1% of this group say that Jesus is the son of God.

They don't look like they really understand the very basics of kind of Nicene creed level Christianity. And they're the largest of the groups at 8 million. About half of them are willing to return to an evangelical church.

And they left a little over a decade ago.

The second group that you already mentioned, the dechurch mainstream evangelicals, that group and then the next two after it, they're all about 2 to 2.5 million people each. They left more recently around the time of the early part of COVID They're middle aged, about 40, 41 on average.

They trend a little bit more female than male. They left for very pragmatic reasons, just.

Like the cultural Christians did. And 100% of them are willing to return to an evangelical church. 98% would say that Jesus is the son of God.

Their orthodoxy scores were higher than people that still went to church to an evangelical church at that. The exvangelicals were an interesting group. They had a very high view of Jesus. 97% of them said that Jesus is the son of God.

Even though 0% of them said that they'd be willing to return to an evangelical church. Their orthodoxy scores were pretty high as well. Most of them still held to kind of a Nicene Creed level Christianity.

I think that there's a subset of that group that's kind of hyper online, younger and trends more educated.

But on the whole, that group is predominantly mid-50s women who are not online and most of whom are not in kind of nuclear family situations and who are very much struggling in just American culture and society. Groups very allergic to racism, they're very allergic to misogyny, clergy scandal, clergy abuse and political syncretism.

58% of them self identify as being independent. That's five times the rate of people self identifying as independent as any of the other groups.

So that group's very much struggling just in America in general with respect to her institutions.

You mentioned in the book the success Track, the church actually caters to people in the success track. So briefly explain what the success track is, and then I have some questions on that. But would you explain that for us?

Yeah.

So the American Enterprise Institute, I believe, is the ones who kind of coined this term the success sequence, which is basically graduate from high school, work full time and get married and have children in wedlock, basically in that order. And 97% of the millennial generation that has done those three things in that order live above the poverty line in America.

And so basically the thesis there is that it does seem that people who are staying on that kind of success sequence are more likely to be churched. And the people who get off of that success sequence, it's become more challenging for them.

Now, this is different than, I think what we've seen in Europe basic secularization thesis is that the higher the GDP of the country, the less religious that country becomes. America, according to sociologists, is stubbornly religious.

And when you look at the GDP versus religiosity graph, it's like America is this weird outlier, just this point sitting out and floating in the air, and the rest of Europe's way below us on that map.

But we think what's going on there is that if most of the reasons why people stopped going to church were very pragmatic reasons, and I'll unpack that in a minute, of what I mean by very pragmatic reasons, and they were surrounding things that were, that pertained to when people had disruptions in life. So the top three reasons why people dechurched were, number one, I moved.

Number two, attendance was inconvenient, and number three, some kind of family change, marriage, divorce, remarriage, the birth of a child.

So if those were the top three reasons why people de charged, then it stands to reason that if you are not a member of the middle or upper middle class, then those life situations would hit you harder if you had less financial margin or if you were a single parent. Look, it's no big secret. Birds of a feather flock together.

Especially in the digital age, we have algorithms that help us flock together more than not.

And so it only makes sense that those who would have more cultural distance to a local church are going to have a harder time being able to, to stick in.

And that's something that if you're listening to this and you're clergy or you work at ministry, we've got to be cognizant of people who are around us who have more cultural distance than the center of mass of our congregations. And we have to live in a way that helps everybody in our communities have a missional encounter with this gospel that we're trying to.

Trying to both proclaim and demonstrate in our communities.

What is happening in evangelicalism? Let's focus on that for a moment. What do you see that's happening in evangelicalism?

Or better yet, what did the data reveal of what's happening in evangelicalism in North America?

Yeah, so kind of going into this study, there were two stories that were being told, and those stories kind of depended on what your media diet kind of looked like.

If your media diet leaned a little bit to the left, the first story that was being told was, well, you had all these people who've left churches and houses of worship because those churches and houses of worship have made mistakes.

Things like racism, misogyny, clergy scandal, clergy abuse, political syncretism.

And then if your media diet leaned a little bit to the right, the story that was being told there was that people had left primarily because of secularization, the progressive left, the sexual revolution, these different kinds of things. And when you're talking about 40 million people, you can find a few million people that fit both of those stories.

It's not that either of those stories is untrue. I think both of those stories are true.

And all of the things that both of those stories bring up very serious problems, problems that we should take very seriously. However, the biggest story was a really boring story.

And that's basically the story that most people left for reasons of habits and rhythms of the inertia of American life. And again, super boring things like they moved or going to church was inconvenient and, you know, some.

Some kind of life, you know, kind of thing happened. So we talk in the book about how there's two very different types of people who de churched casually and then people who were dechurched casualties.

And so it looks like about 30 of the 40 million people left casually, and then about 10 million people left as casualties. And so it's important to. I don't want to Minimize or overlook.

10 million people is a lot of people who left intentionally and with some form of significant pain.

So definitely want to be caring and loving and shepherding and pastoral towards people who have either been hurt interpersonally or hurt institutionally.

But we were very surprised to see that 30 million people left without honestly what looked to us to be a very good reason to leave and who left with a low degree of intentionality. And you have groups like the fourth group that the BIPOC group that was 100%, you know, minority culture.

So there's just a lot of low hanging fruit in terms of, with each of the different profiles, there's tremendous opportunity that's there.

However, there's a lot that people need to get educated on in terms of the makeup of the different profiles and kind of what each of them needs for us. And again, when you're talking about profiles and stuff like that, nobody's going to be a slam dunk in most instances.

And just one of them, it's just, it's just a helpful heuristic to kind of wrap your mind around different people. Of like, oh, I could see a little bit of this second profile and maybe a little bit of this third one, whatever, all the different permutations and.

Combinations of those things.

How did you come up with those different questions or even possibilities? How many categories did you have when you were looking at why people left? I mean, or did you let them create their own categories?

No, we, we gave people 30 different options to choose from.

Okay.

And so it was kind of like a check all that apply.

And then people then had the opportunity to order all of the ones that they applied to the factors that were more significant to less significant so that.

We had, you know, okay, altitude on that.

Now where did you find these people? I mean, I'm not a data person. Like, I don't do analytics. I'm not doing all that type of thing. But I'm always curious on what your.

You said a sample size of 7,000.

Yeah. So we used all the same research methods that any of your large statistical surveys of either politics or on other sociological trends use.

So there's an entity called Qualtrics. Qualtrics is kind of the gold standard for North American surveys. And so what you do is you put together your list of questions. So we worked with Dr.

Paul Jupe, who's a political scientist, in addition to Dr. Ryan Burge. Ryan did all of our data analytics and we worked with Dr. Jupiter on survey design.

And then you have to go through basically a university review board process because we wanted to do a joint clergy and academic study. A lot of times these studies are either only done by academia or they're only done by, say, an evangelical research entity.

But we wanted to be able to publish something that was credible both in academia and something that was also seen as credible among clergy and ministry practitioners.

And so, yeah, so we had to go through a lot of different steps in order to publish something that was seen as credible in both of those circles because they each kind of have their own standards, very different kinds of gatekeeping for each.

That makes total sense to me. I would figure that each one has their own little shibboleths that they have to be able to work through and understand.

So I was curious what criteria you employ to be able to do that. We did mention a little bit ago about the role of technology.

It seems, as you mentioned, some of these people de churched in the late 90s, other people about 10 years ago. Is what role has technology played in dechurching or can that even be identified?

It can definitely be identified in terms of pinning the tail on the donkey.

It gets a little hairier than just kind of saying, oh, it's this, the role of the Internet, and particularly the growth of high speed Internet in people's homes. It certainly has proliferated the rate at which people are interacting with different ideas.

Okay, I think about, just consider, for example, on say, social media in a given week, I would guess that decades, if not hundreds of years of conversations in church history, when you compare the volume of communication just online versus several hundred years of church history, you have probably similar amounts of just how much communication is actually transacted over per unit of time. That's why it took us 300 years to get to the Council of nicaea and over 400 to the council of Orange.

And so when it takes so long to have those kinds of conversations, when the velocity of conversation speeds up, that definitely has an impact to how quickly different trends pick up. And so I think we live in attention economy. There's more content in media that can be consumed than what people have time to do.

And why is that? Well, it's because there's more media now than what people can consume.

And so people's media diets are far more niche down and they are more individualized and atomized. And so there's just a lot of complexities that come with that.

I can find several people who I listen to some fairly obscure music, but I can find six other clergy members in my own city who listen to the same kind of music.

And I can Find those people in, say, three minutes because of the way that social media can allow us to sort ourselves into these increasingly smaller niches.

Well, on the one hand that's kind of cool, but on the other hand, it's kind of scary because you can now create the illusion that, you know, everyone in your world is just kind of just like you. And so I think that this creates a lot of. It creates a lot of asymmetric challenges for institutions in general.

Because the idea of an institution is you get people together who have. Maybe there's some commonality that's there, but you're going to be drawing from a diversity of different pools. But the Internet cuts against that.

And I think people don't have the ability to handle as much dissonance in their life and difference of thoughts or opinion. And certainly that's the case online. I don't like this. I'm going to mute that or I'm going to unfollow this or these different kinds of things.

And I think that's beginning to spill over in the way that people treat their, in real life interactions, in the institutions that they choose to connect themselves to. Some of that's good in terms of providing accountability, where accountability needs to be brought to bear.

But a lot of that, I think, cuts against things that are good and healthy, namely that emotional, relational and spiritual maturity is bound up in our ability to handle dissonance and to be able to hold different things in tension.

It seems as if there's been almost like a collision of things like that perfect storm idea where you've got technology making its rise. There's also been a generational missing, generational handoff as you've articulated.

On one level, I look at the parents and I go, well, I mean, you're, you're fighting things now that the previous generations didn't in that the Internet. I mean, we came of age during the time when the Internet is just in its infancy and yet emerging into adulthood. I remember my first pastorate.

I mean, we were, we were online, but it only been online for a few years. At that time, social media was still not there yet. Not everybody was a part of it.

And now I see the world that my kids are in and it's, it's very different, but I still have that experience of it, whereas my parents did not have any idea of it.

And I remember listening to Nate Bargazi though, and he said, you know, I grew up in the 80s when my parents became Christian and they were the most Christian in the 80s and the 90s it just made me laugh because I'm like, well, wait a minute, you have a lot of these people that were raised in very conservative evangelical homes and yet there's been a big drop off. The baton was dropped. Is it technology or were there other factors involved?

Well, we learned something.

Maybe it was a little surprising.

And it doesn't matter how old, what decade or what birth cohort you were in.

Everybody self identified as being most religious between the age of 0 to 18. And they were the least religious in their life between 18 and 30. Yeah, 18 and 29. Okay.

And then the graph goes back up after that decade, but never reaching that initial point from 0 to 18. So there's a million things that we could say about how to make sense out of that phenomenon.

I mean, some of that is just as you grow older and you have more experience and I think for most people, things become more gray over time and you begin to differentiate the things that you actually know from the things that you thought that you knew. And certainly in middle age, I think that's where a lot of people are at.

And then as you're towards the end of your life, you're certain about the things that you're certain, but everything else I think you tend to be more open handed on. However, there's just so much in flux in that 18 to 29 year old timeframe.

You have the transition from high school into either university or into the workforce, then you have the handoff between for those who go to university and career, and then you have the handoff between early career and marriage and parenting. So at each one of those different handoffs, we saw some pretty big drop offs at each of those things.

And so I think that there's a lot for us to learn on both the parenting side there, and there's a lot for us to learn as missiological best practices in the local church. And keeping in mind especially 13 to 30, there's just so much that's in flux during that time frame.

We've got to remember how much changes in those 17 years.

And we have to have proactive approaches for how we help people at each one of those kind of baton passes so that we don't drop the baton, so to speak.

One of the surprising things that I found, actually there were a couple of surprising things that came from your data that seemed to violate some kind of well established evangelical beliefs and perspectives.

And one of those was actually on the educational level of those who came through simply because you hear you send your kids off to the secular university and it's a lamb going to slaughter. But that's not what the data revealed at all.

It seemed to reveal something entirely different, that those who were evangelicals actually had a higher level of education. Can you elaborate on that?

We were really surprised, Travis, at this. Ryan wasn't because he's been studying these things for a long time.

But yeah, there's definitely, you know, I think that's one of his myths in.

His book 20 Myths. You can read about that from Ryan's book on that.

But only 3% of evangelicals who got a graduate degree ended up dechurching. That's 1/8 the rate of people who.

Only had a high school diploma or only did some college. So you were eight times less likely to de church if you got a graduate degree. That was just jaw dropping for us.

Because how do you square that with people being.

Least religious during that same kind of timeframe?

And I think probably really the only real conclusion that you can make there is that even though a lot of people de churched in that 18 to 29 year old timeframe, it doesn't look like it's necessarily, necessarily that the cause is the education piece. I think that there's a lot more.

There's a lot of other factors, just all the factors of adolescence, post adolescence, all the various shifts and look, I mean, how many people move between 18 and 29? And I think most people have probably moved a few times during that time frame.

And if you don't have institutional handoffs of, oh, I left this local church and now somebody followed up with me and they helped me get connected here.

And then that church went and did.

The same thing with the next.

So there's a million different ways that you can kind of think about those trends and put some story and some narrative as to, okay, the why behind the what with respect to all of those, there's no doubt that whatever we've written to this end is certainly not comprehensive on what's kind of going on during that particular time frame. But we just wanted to bring up.

The issue and we hope that other.

People will do some additional study here on this part themselves as well.

Looking at the groups that you've done your study on, I know that you did bipoc. You did some of that. But how much of what your research uncovered is it revealed in regions?

Because I'm thinking of what we're seeing now in the southeastern part of the United States where we both are located, and there seems to be a greater growth of those d churched evangelicals. In the Southeast. Can you see that in your data or no?

Yeah, there's definitely. There's some pretty significant regional differences. Nobody would be surprised that, you know, the largest region of dechurching is in the Northeast.

And most of that dechurching is out of mainline and Roman Catholic denominations, primarily.

Because that's what the Northeast has historically been. We were most surprised about what we saw in the Midwest. The Midwest had a lot more Detroit than what we had anticipated.

The west coast had less than what we had anticipated. And the Southeast was about average on the whole. I do think that the shape of the dechurching in each of those regions, it does look different.

The Southeast has more cultural Christians in it by percentage relative to the other regions of the country. This is no great surprise.

You have folks like Smith that have talked about moralistic, therapeutic deism in the south, and we certainly saw those things in the Southeast.

Are you talking about Christian Smith?

Yes.

Okay. Okay, go ahead.

And then the Midwest, we were really surprised. That was kind of the one region that really was like kind of flashing red to us. We have some thoughts as to what might be going on there.

Obviously, the Midwest is very different culturally than the rest of the country.

It's so much better.

Yes.

As two Midwestern people here. Yes.

And that's where we lost our viewers in the Northeast, in the Southeast, in the Southwest, and all Midwestern people. Actually, I'm a part of a Facebook group. It's called Midwest versus Everybody. And I love it. It's just so funny some of the stuff that comes up there.

No, I love. We love our brothers around the United States that are in second place. So what did you notice in the Midwest? What did you notice in the Midwest?

Our hunches.

That this is not a growing part of the country. Okay. And it's been hit harder economically. Globalization has not been kind.

The ways in which supply chains have shifted over the last several decades. My family is from both my parents.

Grew up in Detroit.

My grandparents were in the. In the blue collar automotive industry. And so we know these stories well.

So when your kind of anchor economic things have eroded, how can this not also impact some of the other institutions that are there? When the cities and the communities and the towns have emptied, you know, it's only going to impact to some degree or another, the pews.

I think it's more complicated than just. Than that particular story.

But I think some of it just also depends on the kinds of denominations that you find more prevalent in the Midwest, both on the mainline side and on the evangelical side of both of those things. I think that also plays into some of that. But we were most surprised about what we were seeing in the Midwest.

And I remember one older man, he said, you know, he was lamenting the loss of a Sunday night service and a shift that was going on. And that wasn't unique. I mean I saw that happen in Chicago because I pastored in Chicago before that.

And one of the things that he had mentioned, he said it was the Disney movie. It was the Sunday night Disney started doing a movie and families could start staying home.

And you know, whether that was the excuse, whether that was something better, I mean it's hard to imagine that in a data because we can see that this and, and probably map this on a variety of different things going on. But I, I just was curious on that. One of the other surprising things that came from your study which actually I didn't know what to do with it.

On one level I wanted to say this is proving our thesis on me because many people in indicated one of the reasons that they didn't come back with social. Now you mentioned moving. I think we have a harder time the further that we do isolate ourselves online. We have less skill in making friendships.

Relationships are much more disposable.

One of the things though that you said and you said here that with dmes the D church mainstream evangelicals have comparatively better mental health than those who attend church. So these. So let me make sure I, I want everyone in the audience because they're, they're probably wondering what I just said there.

Those who don't go to church that were mainstream evangelicals actually have reported better mental health from not being in church.

What do we do with that is that that church has just become dysfunctional and it's actually become more stressful for people rather than giving them the freedom, the joy that we're supposed to be giving them.

So the, that particular profile is definitely.

An outlier relative to their other D church evangelical peers.

So the cultural, Christian, exvangelical and bipoc mental health was not good, very not good on things like anxiety, depression, loneliness and suicidal Thoughts? The mainstream evangelicals who had de churched that particular profile, which is 2, 2.5 million people, they were kind of outliers on this.

Oddly enough, they had a higher view.

Of evangelicals than people who still went.

To an evangelical church on a weekly basis. So there's a lot of odd things.

About that particular group. They seem to actually really like evangelicals. They like the church. They seem to be doing pretty well for themselves.

They seem to still have a surprisingly vibrant walk with Jesus despite not being in church here these last few years.

I think that most of those people, they definitely seem to be Christians.

I think most of those folks will get back in church. It doesn't take much.

Anytime I've run across somebody who clearly.

Fits this profile, the simplest nudge of.

Hey, would you come to church with me?

We can go grab lunch after or I'm leading this thing, I want you to come and hear me speak at this or do this small group or.

It'S not good for you not to.

Have a church home. Come on, come on, come join.

I love my church. Come join me. That group is clearly the lowest hanging fruit.

So Tyler Vanderweel at Harvard has talked about this. He studied this more extensively than anybody on planet Earth.

And that's the relationship between people who attend a house of worship on a weekly or greater basis than those who do not. And there are objective health gains on both the physical health and on the mental health front for people who. And this cuts.

His research cuts across all religious traditions. Obviously, the sample size in the United States is predominantly from Christian traditions.

So I would say on the whole, the mental and physical health of those who are connected to a house of worship are objectively doing better than those who do not.

It just so happened among the d church mainstream evangelicals that they seem to be doing pretty well for themselves and seem to be living pretty happy lives, even though they've been out of church for a few years.

I mean, that still makes me have a lot of questions as I go through that, as I have a lot of questions from some of the data. But I know that your time is very limited. I do want to thank you for coming on the show today. But one kind of a.

Before we get to the water bottle question, where do you see hope?

I see hope in a lot of different places.

I mean, the number one place of hope is half the people who left. Over half the people who left evangelical churches are willing to return to an evangelical church today.

That's a tremendous amount of people, a tremendous amount of Hope and the reasons why we're very at the highest altitude, we're very simple. It's am I going to find good people, good relationships there, people who exercise relational wisdom and am I going to.

Find a healthy local church? Will I find the gospel there? Will I find a gospel that's true, good and beautiful at the same time?

So these are not huge asks.

I'll tell you what was not hopeful. What was not hopeful were the two stories that used to be told.

What can I as a single person do about misogyny, racism, political syncretism, clergy scandal, clergy abuse, secular progressivism, sexual revolution? I have no agency to change those trends at the largest scale.

I can make a little bit of a difference in my community on some of those things, but there's just not much hope that was in those two stories that were kind of previously told. But when we understand that most of the reasons why three quarters of the.

People left were very pragmatic things and.

People are just looking for good relationships and a healthy local church, well, gosh, there's tremendous good news. There's low hanging fruit and three out of four people that we're going to talk to.

And so I think that hopefully we've demystified and taken some of the relational risk out of the equation.

Because when we went into this, we.

Kind of assumed that maybe having this conversation of inviting somebody to church or having spiritual conversation was maybe a relational relationship ending conversation. But it really just doesn't look like that's the case in most instances. And so I think that there's just a lot of hope that's in all of that.

I want to inspire people. If you're listening to this, and I don't care whether you're a pastor or you just somebody who loves Jesus and loves your church.

Jim and I want to inspire people to take relational risk. We want to inspire people to take relational risk with who? Well, with somebody that God is consistently putting in front of you.

So I want you to think about who is somebody God is consistently putting in front of me. And I want you to take some relational risk with that person.

Obviously get educated, read the book, learn how you can get a little bit of altitude in terms of categorizing different things and so you have a sense you can be armed with better information and whatnot. But yeah, we just want to inspire people to take some relational risk with somebody that God's consistently putting right in front of you.

Well, that seems like that's also the water bottle to give to people that relational risk I remember having Tom Mercer on the show and he said, who are those people that God is placing in the front row of your life? That's who you're to reach and build those relationships with. And in our increasingly polarized and isolated world, it's something that we all need.

But I think a lot of people have lost the skills to do so because it's not so obvious. I know you have to run. What's some final thoughts about people can follow and keep up with what you're doing.

Yeah. So the work that Jim's doing, you can see he's a pastor at Orlando Grace Church.

So you can go to their website orlandograce.org I work for the Keller Center. Our URL is thekellercenter.org I'm on Twitter.

I don't say much on there, but sgrights W R I T E S Michael Stephen Graham writes MSG we did build a whole other website. If you're listening to this and you're clergy, we built an entire website.

Dchurching.com dechurching.com is a resource that we built exclusively for clergy and institutional leaders. And on there you can find a 20 point audit for free on what kinds of things can a local church do to help on this dechurching phenomenon?

So we talk about 20 best practices there. On dechurching.com, you can take that 20.

Point audit to your, your elders, your.

Deacons, whatever your leadership board is in your particular polity, structure and tradition. So if you want to make progress on any one of those, you found an area of weakness or whatever, there's.

A paid resource there that has worksheets, basically project management worksheets on how to improve in each of those 20 areas. If you need some rails to run on.

So yeah, dechurching.com on the one hand, it's like in order for us to make a difference on dechurching, we have to do two things at the same time.

We have to make a difference interpersonally on the individual level, but we also have to make a difference at the institutional level, particularly at local churches. We got to do both of those things at the same time. So that's why we built dchurching.com that.

Is an awesome resource. I would encourage everyone to get out there and check that out. Get the book. It is a good book. It's very insightful.

We didn't even get into half of it. I mean, there's so much more that it's in here that I wanted to get into with all your different solutions and spiritual formation.

There were some excellent resources that are in there. And Mike, I just want to thank you for coming on the show.

It's been a delight and we'll have to have you back again to continue to this conversation because I think there's so much more to explore. But God bless you and everyone.

I would encourage to check out, check out the great dechurching as well as the Keller center because we've had so many of the different fellows that have been on the show. But again, I want to thank you for coming on Apollo SWAT.

Thank you so much, Travis.

40 million people in just over 25 years. That's over 12% of our current population.

That's a lot of people.

And there is a real reason for concern. But as Michael said, there is also hope. While there are many who have no interest in going back to church, perhaps 3/4 left, casual life just got in.

The way and in the right circumstances.

Many say they would be willing to come back. That's a way bigger number than probably any of us suspected. I know it's a bigger percentage than I thought.

The fact that so many people left for pragmatic reasons really gets us thinking.

As churches, especially evangelical churches that we have come from and most of our listeners come from, what are we teaching our people about the importance of the church? Are we teaching this at all? I really do wonder. As I mentioned to Michael, I still have questions about this research.

I'm not sure what to do with the mental health question about mainstream D church evangelicals specifically. I think we need to dive deeper there because it's an outlier.

At the same time, when we look at the data in this book, the Great to Churching, it makes me it makes all of us at Apollos watered even more convinced that there's a lot of work work to do among our own people in the church, much less those outside of it, to make sure that we are being formed. Well, Jesus said that he would build his church. Paul would tell us that the idea of a Christian apart from the church is not even possible.

After all, together we are the body of Christ. The stats are sobering and yet hopeful. Christ is still king and the church for all of its flaws, is still his.

And a great many are willing to come back. Do we have what it takes to be relationally risky and make the first move? I hope so. That's it for today's episode.

Please check out this conversation and many others on our YouTube page or follow us on Instagram or Facebook. We would love to hear from you.

So if you have any questions for.

Us, don't hesitate to contact us. I want to thank our Apollos Watered team for helping us to water the world. This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off.

From Apollo is Watered. Stay watered everybody.