Spiritual Urban Legend #3: You Don’t Have To Go To Church To Be A Christian.
Note that this myth is not so much about a personal faith in Jesus Christ as it is about the growing perception in America that the church is irrelevant. Reasons given for not attending church is include that the church is boring, filled with hypocrites, and is judgmental.
In a recent poll by the Barna Research Group, information was gained that speaks question of just how large this group is. The Barna data indicate that 28% of the adult population has not attended any church activities, including services, in the past six months. That translates to nearly 65 million adults. When their children under the age of 18 who live with them are added to the picture, the number swells to more than 100 million people
One of the biggest surprises to some people, however, is that a large majority of the nation’s unchurched population is drawn from the sector comprised of people who consider themselves to be Christian. In the United States, 83% of all adults label themselves “Christian.” The percentage is lower among the unchurched, but such self-identified Christians still outnumber those who do not embrace Christianity by a three-to-two margin (61% vs. 39%).
Demographically, the self-identified Christians among the unchurched stray from common assumptions. Within this group, women outnumber men; Boomers and their elders outnumber the young; downscale adults double the number of upscale unchurched; conservatives are more common than liberals; and whites outnumber minorities by nearly a three-to-one margin.
Read the entire Barna article here.
So we have a huge group of people who have faith in Christ, but do not consider church participation to be important. Do we need the church in order to follow Jesus Christ? Can we fulfill his commandments by ourselves? Is being a Christian a matter of our personal relationship with Jesus Christ and nothing else? Good questions that we will consider this Sunday.
