The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast
CNLP 024 - Churchless: Why And How America is Learning to Live Without the Church—An Interview with David Kinnaman
(upbeat music) - Welcome to the Carrie Newhoff Leadership Podcast, a podcast all about leadership, change, and personal growth. The goal? To help you lead like never before in your church or in your business. And now your host, Carrie Newhoff. - Well, hey everybody, and welcome to episode 24 of the podcast. My name's Carrie Newhoff. I'm so glad that you're here and I really hope this time together this week helps you lead like never before. I'm so excited because my guest today for episode 24 is David Kyneman. And David is a brilliant leader. You're gonna figure that out very early into the podcast. He's got his finger on the pulse of not only the church, but culture. Like I think very few other people do. He just sees the future before it happens. And that's one of the reasons I love hanging out with him. And he is president of the Barna Group, the majority owner of that. They do extensive research on trends and what's happening in the church, what's happening in culture. So he is chock full of insights. But one of the other reasons I really, really love David is he's just a great guy. We became friends four or five years ago. I've actually stayed at his house. He has an amazing family. And cool thing, he lives in an urban setting in California, but he's got chickens in his backyard. Like you gotta be cool if you have chickens in your backyard, right? Anyway, so David's just a fantastic person. If you've ever met him, you know what I'm talking about. And he really cares passionately about the church. So I think it's a great marriage of leadership, insight and heart for the church. And like you, I'm just trying to figure out how to lead a church. That's what I do full time. And one of the subjects that's come up over and over again recently is just the issue of why people are attending church less. Last week, I interviewed Will Mancini on episode 23. And we talked about why committed Christians are attending church less often. So today it's kind of like part two, I guess you could say, episodes 23 and 24 kind of run together. And so David and I are gonna talk about that. And also why increasingly fewer and fewer young adults are attending church, which is just a trend we're seeing everywhere, both the unchurched and those who used to attend church, but aren't attending church. And David's got some great insights into that. And because this subject is so close to my heart and because it's showing up so often in leadership these days, I've even done a little series on the blog, my blog about this, and you can just go over to karaenuhoff.com and access that series. And we are talking about why people are attending church less often and what to do about it. So the posts that kicks off this series, just in case you're not listening to this around the time it's released, you can find it by just searching this. 10 reasons even committed church attenders are attending church less often. That's the springboard into all the posts that I've written about this. And if you're like, okay, I'm not sure I can find that or remember that, just everything can be found for this week's episode at karaenuhoff.com/episode24. 'Cause that's where you're gonna find this interview on the blog, that's C-A-R-E-Y N-I-E-U-H-O-F. Easier to say than it is to spell/episode24. So I'm not gonna spend a lot more time on this 'cause I'm just so excited to jump into the interview, but I think this is gonna help us figure out what to do as church leaders. And no, it's not an era where there's really super easy answers, but that's okay. I find in an era like that it's just really important to have the right voices around the table. And David definitely is one of those voices. So here is my interview with David Kineman. I'm so excited to have David Kineman here. I had always hoped from the time I started this podcast that you would be able to come on, and it took a little while to get the schedule all worked out, but David so thrilled this moment's come. Welcome. It's my pleasure, Kerry. Thanks for having me. - Yeah, so I tried to avoid you as long as possible. That's the truth. - You did a pretty good job. - No, Dave, you're so persistent. - You're so persistent. David's been a friend for a few years. And also, I think if anybody's got his finger on the pulse of the church, it's probably you, David. I mean, research is kind of what you do. Tell us a little bit about what you do and how you got into it. - Well, President Abarna Group, and as many of you know, it's a research and sort of information and knowledge company. I actually started, I figured I'd be a pastor, a local pastor, my dad's a lifelong pastor of a church in Phoenix and read one of George Barna's books back in college at Biola University, and thought this would be a really cool sort of thing. Just sort of as a side, actually, I didn't expect to stick around now for two decades. I've been here for 20 years in about two weeks is my 20th anniversary of Barna. - Thank you. Thanks, yeah. - I'm doing 20 years in this area with these people in April, so that's cool. - That is really cool. Yeah, I'm older than you, so there you go. - February 14 is my two year anniversary year, so a 20 year anniversary. So, what we do is we're spending a lot of time doing research on various religious trends. We work, you know, a big portion of our work is actually is very proprietary to the organizations that we're working for, so we're working for lots of different nonprofit organizations, a lot of, you know, national ministries. We do some research for local churches. We've done some work for, you know, some of the entertainment studios here in Los Angeles area looking at faith as a consumer, sort of like, how do we get people of faith to come see films? We've done work for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation looking at attitudes towards public education. So, we're always learning new things. I feel like it's quite a privilege to be able to look at the data and learn new things about how the world works, how people are thinking these days. - Well, that's one of the reasons I always enjoy our conversations is because I love the future. I love talking about what's going to happen, not just what has happened. And I always think you've got incredible insights. And if you haven't read David's books, they are absolutely worth reading. You wrote "UnChristian" with Gabe Lyons a few years ago and then more recently you lost me. And today I want to focus in on something that you and George Barna worked together on and released a few months ago called "Churchless." Great title, by the way. - Oh, thanks, yeah. It's my friend Bill Denzel came up with that one. - Well, he did a good job. That's really, really good. So, you are plotting in that book. It's a lot of research. It's basically data with meaning about some major, major shifts in US culture. And I said to you before we started taping. For the first time, I really feel like there's a book written in the United States that sounds like my country, Canada. And I know we've got European and Australian listeners and New Zealand listeners. And they can probably relate to the fact that we're probably a little bit ahead of the post-Christian curve. As can people in New England or Seattle, the West Coast, that sort of thing. But yeah, things are really shifting in America. Things are really shifting in the West. And you talk about the rise of a churchless culture. Tell us about that. Some of the big findings in the book. And what are some of the key factors that are making a whole generation, new generation of people, churchless? - Yeah, well, I'll admit that the whole notion of a title is, and the way we try to position research is to have an editorial point of view. And so while we're talking about a churchless America, and we'll talk a lot about those trends, I think it's really important to remember that America really is a very churched country and continues to have tens of millions of people who are churched. And we actually see this in some of our research around the world. We did some work in Scotland recently, work we've done in Canada, in the not so distant past, where there still is a great deal of sort of Christian heritage in a lot of our countries of the West. But what is so interesting, and I think so remarkable, particularly for those leaders in North America, and especially in the United States, is that there is a new sensibility, a new churchless sensibility. The Pew Research Center, they call it the rise of the nuns, the religiously unaffiliated. We sort of labeled it churchless. But what's so interesting is that, two decades ago, about only one and every eight people had never been to church in America. They'd never had any kind of period of regular church attendance. So we had a very small percentage of people in the United States who had a very sort of absent sort of experience. They had just had no muscle memory for that. And that's doubled in the last 20 years to the place of one and every four. And so that's the kind of thing that really signals a big shift, right? So you've got now a huge chunk of people, one and every four Americans who have absolutely no muscle memory of what it means to be a regular churchgo or being a part of a Christian community. And that's a huge opportunity. That's not just like, you know, ring the bell. It's a bad news, Barna. But it's a huge opportunity for us to be able to, you know, speak truth and represent the gospel into this new context. - Right. And so I think that's really important to see that as an opportunity. But that obviously creates some challenges. I mean, being a North Point strategic partner, our church, Kinexis, is like, we wanna be a church that unchurched people love to attend. But when you actually run into unchurched people who really don't have, I love your phrase, have any muscle memory about Christianity. It's a very different thing than reacquainting people with a faith they once had walked away from and lost, isn't it? - It totally is. I mean, we were doing a focus group of various church facilities. And so we had a lot of young Christians. We were doing it with millennials or young adults. And one of the non-Christian sort of, you know, churchless people that we had in one of those focus groups, you know, was going through one of these facilities. We're looking really at architecture and some other things. And, you know, they asked our facilitator. They said, would I have to pay to attend here? You know, is this like a move? Is there like a theater charge? You know, is there a ticket? You know, entrance fee kind of thing, a cover charge, right? It was like, you know, that's the muscle memory we're talking about, right? Like they don't even have the first clue. Now we want you to come where this is, you know, a free thing for you. And so, and this is a very interesting and sort of, I thought, kind of telling comment because so much of what we have created is a little bit of this sort of movie theater, sort of experience, you know, or a live theater, kind of experience where, you know, like, you do wonder if there's sort of some exchange of value that, you know, you're supposed to make when you come in. - Yeah, it's interesting. One of a guy who's become one of my best friends, totally unchurched over a decade ago. When he first heard there were two testaments, he's like, what, like, there's two testaments, old and new. Was the old one not good enough? Like what happened? Like you just didn't know, he'd never read the Bible, a brand new paradigm, but it's a lot more complex than that. So get it, drilling into the numbers, David. You identify 38% of the American population as post-Christian and mosaics or millennials, I should say, check in at about 48% post-Christian. So that's almost half the population under what, 30? - That's right, yeah. - Is post-Christian. - Yeah. - What does that mean? - Well, what I like about the post-Christian metric, what we did was we, rather than simply do you attend church. So when we talk about the church lists, we talk really about a single metric or kind of a handful of questions. And I think there's a really fun thing to talk about in a context like this, you know, how do we derive the data that we come to? - Sure. - And so when we talk about church lists, we're really talking about people who haven't been to church in the last six months, not including weddings or funerals. So there's special events, obviously, that might get you into a church, but really aren't church-oriented worship services. You're there for your friends or you're there for to honor the dead or honor in a newlyweds, but you're not there for anything else. So being a church list is simply not having been to church. And there is this increasing number of people who are church lists. And then when we ask them other questions about, have you ever been church, there is an increasing number of people who've never been church? Well, the post-Christian metric is a combination of 15 different questions that we ask across a lot of our national polling, including did you pray? Did you attend church? You attend Sunday school? Do you believe that the Bible is accurate and has meaning for your life? You know, have you ever made a commitment to Jesus Christ that's still important in your life? So it's a whole host of metrics that we use. It's sort of the best of Barna, you know, 15 different things that would measure whether someone has any kind of connectedness to Christianity or Christian orthodoxy, whether Christian practice or Christian belief. And so the post-Christian metric, you know, for the millennials to be at roughly half our post-Christian, it tells us that on those sort of, if you think of it like a Geiger counter, right? And there's sort of like, there's like safe zone and like, you know, unsafe zone. And, you know, over here, like, you know, super Christians, you've got a lot of people with the millennial generation who are just, you know, it's now the defining experience of this generation where they really just don't have the same sort of experience with Christianity. And that's our most sophisticated metric because it really does take into account a variety of things that would count. - So post-Christian really means they honestly don't have an orientation around the Christian faith period around anything we can seem to measure, right? So it's like, you know, 'cause you could say a person, and this is one of the super interesting pieces of it that, you know, a person could be very religiously active, but not be very orthodox in their beliefs. A person could be very orthodox in their beliefs, but not very active in practice. And so when we talk about being post-Christian, there really isn't many fibers of Christian practice or belief that are present in the lives of these young people. - Which makes it really challenging. I mean, again, you know, you're celebrating two decades in leadership, me too. And even if you're a decade in leadership, it was a different ballgame when you started because now if you want to reach people under 30, like basically what we're saying is half of them really don't have any orientation toward what you want to introduce them to. - Yeah. And I think what makes it a particularly dangerous carry is that, you know, there's still a really good chunk of very, very committed, faithful Christians who aren't post-Christian, who are very committed. In fact, a lot of our research here in North America is showing that young millennials who are staying committed to evangelical Christianity are even more committed to biblical orthodoxy. Now, there are fewer of them than there are among boom or evangelicals, but among those who are staying committed, they're very, very committed to, you know, thinking theologically and orthodoxy. And, you know, there's sort of a, their light is shining brighter in the midst of a generation of their generation who's even less, less committed to Christianity. So what I think is tough is that a lot of us as leaders, we see young people in our church communities who seem to embody, you know, the very best. And, you know, I constantly remind church leaders just because, you know, we have a tribe of very loyal, you know, faithful followers of Christ doesn't mean that that defines the generation. In fact, all the best metrics that we can see are suggesting that that group of post-Christian young adults is growing. - So in a sense, your anecdotal evidence then, hey, I know eight 25-year-olds who love Jesus and think theologically and pray every day and invite their friends, that's not actually reflective, the cultural trends as a whole. - That's right, right, exactly. And then you have to do the hard work, I think, of discerning what are the things that are consistent across a generation. Of course, each individual is different. So sometimes even talking about generational patterns feels anathema. It's right, you know, the gospel is for each soul and each individual has to make a unique response as opposed to, you know, generationally, what are we seeing? But I do believe that, you know, one of the consistent threads, for instance, is that young people are interested in things that last and things that are a deeper answer to the questions that they're asking. They're not looking for Pat simple. And in some cases, the apologetics that we've used, where it's sort of formulaic, they're not looking for that, they're looking for, you know, phrase we sometimes use is that they're more willing to be challenged than we are willing to challenge them. And this is true among young Christians and among young non-Christians. There is a sense in which they're waiting for us to make a hard ask, but sometimes we're not necessarily willing to do that because they might not stick around. They might be willing to trade our relationship for something else. - Kay, let me just pick up on that a little bit. - So, you know, you compared Mosaic or millennial Christianity and the faith that they have in that generation to boomer Christianity, which might be a little less serious. I don't want to say, I don't want to say, all boomers are not serious about their faith. But what you're discovering is that those who have stuck are perhaps more orthodox, more evangelical, more serious about their faith than what you would statistically find in older generations. But you also said something really interesting, which is they want to be challenged, but also so do the post-Christian people, that if you're going to invite them into the Christian faith, you're probably not going to do it by watering down the gospel? Is that what I heard you say? - Yeah, that's exactly it. And that they're actually looking in sort of a sea of uncertainty or something to believe in and for something that makes sense and for people that are willing to use a biblical phrase to count the cost. Now, it's interesting 'cause I think it cuts both ways in that one of the interesting things we've been studying is sort of the role of humor with the generation and how is it that we now minister in an age of sort of Jimmy Kimmel and sort of the-- - Jimmy Fallon. - Jimmy Fallon, the sort of funny and also snarky side of humor. And so how do you have an earnest conversation, for instance, about life and the hereafter and sexuality and all the rest when a generation has been conditioned to laugh at all of this? And again, I think that in a great church, you can use humor in a great faithful context. We ought to be people that laugh at ourselves and don't take ourselves seriously. I mean, what better example of that is the prayer, Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me a sinner, right? Like, we are so desperate need to laugh at ourselves and to plead for God's forgiveness and daily mercies in our lives. And so that's an example, I think, of trying to use, how do we think about the notion of what a generation finds funny when so often that humor is used at a point when there might be something poignant or something important for us to discover about ourselves. And in the culture, we use humor sort of just a gloss over, like, okay, well, that was just funny, we just, let's just make fun of it. Whereas in the church, sometimes we get so serious about it or we're so like, well, let's just really dig into that. And we don't laugh at ourselves often enough. And so consequently in generations, like, well, I'm out of here, this is just way too heavy. Oh, yeah, so humor can be an effective tool then or device. And I mean, we always know, I learned this years ago, like if you're gonna deal with a difficult issue, if you're gonna talk about money, if you're gonna talk about sex, it really, really helps to get people laughing first because if they're laughing, their defenses are down, they're open and it just tends to go better than people being uptight when they hear the message. But that's true generationally too. - It is, and that's part of what we're seeing is that the kind of humor that millennials will respond to is different than a boomer or elder audience. - And so what are the differences? Like, tell us about that, I'm just curious about that. - Well, I think they're more accustomed to this sort of reality television sort of show experience. They're more snarky, willing to laugh at others in some fashions. And listen, I'm a huge advocate for millennials. I think a lot of church leaders really misunderstand them. And at the same time, I feel like a lot of times they can be, they're just as frustrating as any other group of people. And they think of themselves as we've been some fashion, I think in the church made millennials a bit of an idol. So we sort of think about, how can we serve you the next generation? And in fact, that is not a biblical response to making an idol out of any particular age segment. In fact, that's what the world does is to try to appeal to younger consumers unless you're marketing hearing aids. Most brands are interested in younger consumers and we in the church sometimes do the same kind of thing where it's like, well, all right, we're gonna try to find a way to appeal to you by using the kind of humor that appeals to you. And so for me as a researcher, I'm very motivated around not just finding these sort of marketing hooks or ways of being clever but saying, all right, well, what if there is a different sensibility? I think it is harder, you know, an example of this was, it's just a funny little personal story, but you know, someone sent me a photo, something I had done and whatever, and it came into mail and my oldest daughter opened it. And she and my wife just started laughing as me holding like some award or whatever, you know. And I was like, well, what are you guys laughing at? And it was like, and they both looked at each other and I was like, we don't know. You know, it just seemed like the thing to do, right? So, you know, I think finding ways to make light of ourselves and then also to be, you know, to say, like not everything is funny all the time. - Well, I think that's a good point. And do you find self-deprecating humor is really helpful? And that sort of, we hear this a lot, like authenticity. Like people are just looking for you to be real and not put yourself up on some pedestal or have it all figured out. - Oh, absolutely. But even the notion of self-deprecating humor, right? Like can often be, and this is what's so interesting about millennials, they're very, very intuitive around people and how they act. And, you know, they've been marketed to to death. And even in our industry, they've been surveyed research to death. And so they're just, they're very jaded. They're very skeptical. You know, as we were doing interviews with young people about their experiences related to church. And when we asked them about youth pastors, you know, we're starting to see in our research more often where people will say youth pastors are paid to be our friends. So, you know, that's just their job description. Sure, I like them, but that's just, what do you expect of a guy who likes his job is to be friends with students. And so that's, I think, an example of the kind of thing that, you know, is coming up very frequently, you know, where they're just sort of skeptical. They just, they know the game and they can sort of see, like, if the self-deprecating humor is your tool, they see it as your tool. They start to get really clear that, well, he's still pretty prideful, but he just has learned to get a good laugh out of, out of a, you know, a little joke about himself. Or that's a good authenticity thing you're trying there, Kerry, way to go. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, go ahead, David. I was just going to say, you know, like, and by a lot of the measures, you know, millennials think they want authenticity, but they themselves aren't always that authentic, you know? And so it's a very interesting world in which, you know, despite some of the really positive things we could say about millennials, they bring their own sets of brokenness to the table, for sure. That's a great point. Let's talk a little bit more about the post-Christian demographics. So at the same time, 38% of the American population, just a quick check. That's a national figure, right? That's not just California. Okay. Yeah. So those are the 10 people I interviewed on my street. Right. Okay, good. I do that kind of research, David, so if you ever need to recruit me. Yeah. So that's a national sampling, which is pretty dramatic. I'm sure there's going to be regional variations, but 38% of the whole population, 48% of mosaic or millennial Christians are, or people are identified as post-Christian. But you also say that one in four unchurched adults are skeptics or atheists. So basically, that kind of means three quarters are not. So they're churchless, but they're spiritual? Is that what's going on? Yeah, there's a whole range of people who are churchless. And this gets to some of the things we've been talking about, that it sort of depends on where you focus the microscope. And so if you talk about a person's presence in church among the churchless people who aren't in church in a typical six-month period, one in four of those individuals say they're skeptical, they're skeptics or agnostics, so they're atheists. The other three quarters of all churchless people believe there is a God. They believe that they may consider themselves to be Christian. And in fact, a good chunk of these individuals, I forget the percentage offhand, but they're born again Christians. They say they're committed to Christ, they believe if you had to put a test in front of them and ask them to describe things about their faith, they would mark almost all the orthodox questions. So what's super interesting is you can't tell a lot, I mean, the famous phrase, you know, you can't judge a book by its cover, you can't judge a person by their presence or lack of presence in a local church in terms of kind of the clarity of their belief and what it is that they stand for in the world. - So the churchless includes then the de-church, people who used to attend church and drop out. - That's right. - And maybe they have an authentic Christian faith, but there's probably also a growing number of people who are spiritual or maybe even Christ followers who just like, I don't need the church. That's what you're discovering. - Exactly. And the primary group of people who are churchless, people that are spiritual nomads, people that grew up in some fashion as a Christian and are no longer, you know, very active in their faith. - Yeah, and you talk about them and you lost me, right? - That's right. - Nomads, how do you begin to develop an approach or a strategy to reach people who don't go to church, but who believe? - Well, I think part of the reason we do this work is to, you know, we're the notion of a taxonomy or to think about categories, to think about different experiences. I mean, Jesus does this in so much of his teaching. He talks about the parable of the sower, right? And he provides a taxonomy of the soil. There are different kinds of soil, different kinds of experiences in which seed might grow or not flourish. And so I think that your question is a really good one. I don't have a real good answer to it, but I think that it represents the kind of taxonomy and segmentation oriented questions or technical terms, but they really reflect this notion that, you know, God has called us not to reach everyone at all times in any context, the church, yes, but not individually. - My church, yeah. - Yeah, and certainly not us as leaders. So, you know, the more local you get in your ministry, you're talking about one individual, I'm not called to reach every person in North America, of course. My local church reality is not called to reach everyone in North America, much less even everyone in Ventura. And yet the church broadly is, of course, called to reach everyone in North America and beyond. And so I feel like this taxonomy, the segmentation, to begin to think about who it is we're communicating with. And at the same time, and there's all these tensions that we have to balance in ministry, at the same time, we're not, I think we ought to be very clear about who God has called us to reach and communicate with. And at the same time, we ought to be very careful not to simply have a target market, where we sort of say, all right, well, I'm called to this group and I don't deal with these. I think that sometimes in the church leaders that we interview, we find that, you know, they tend to target demographics that are convenient for their churches to reach. You know, married families are much easier to reach than our single urban young adults who are unmarried. And so being able to sort of find the right rhythm in our calling is a very important thing for us to do. - Right, in some of the post-Christian findings, the churchless findings, are you discovering that part of the disconnect between a person's faith? So let's say they would consider themselves spiritual or maybe even by objective standards, Christian, but not church. Why is that? Is that like an anti-institutional thing, a suspicion about institutions, about authority? Or is it just, no, I don't need that anymore? - Oh, I think there's a million reasons. Among the main reasons people just say they're so busy. And I think that what has happened is that the life of being a part of a local church has become, you know, it's ironic we talked about the story earlier in our interview about the person who says, well, do you have to pay to come? You know, it feels like a theater kind of experience where, you know, you plop down your 10 bucks and you sit in the seat for an hour and a half and, you know, the entertainment happens and you go and you kind of have your experience for the week. And so people are very busy. They come to believe that church is just one extra thing that can be sort of, you know, sort of, they can sleep in a little longer on a weekend and they can, you know, is it how important is it to really go to church? And by the way, this is a really interesting thing that we were noticing in our research on the churchless project was that a lot of very committed Christian families and others are less church than they typically were, let's say two decades ago because they're so busy with children's sports and hiking and other kinds of activities. And so in the past, our culture defined regular church attendance as people who attended two or more times a week. Right. And so you're a regular church attender, for sure, if you went every Sunday and probably, you know, once midweek, but now a regular church attender is someone they think of themselves as a regular church attender if they go at least once every six weeks. And so that's another factor, you know, that's taking people who are very committed to Christianity and to Christ. But they just, they don't end up showing up every week. They've got house projects and they want to sleep in or sporting events or, you know, their kids have a basketball or hockey game or whatever, right? And it's like, well, it's a Sunday. It must be, you know, just any other day of the week for us to take care of those activities. So the notion of Sabbath has really changed in our cultural experience and that has an impact on the way people think about church going. - Yeah, it's funny. Will Mancini and I did an interview and that's episode 23 of the podcast where we talked about the fact that at the end of the day, people just don't attend churches often as they used to. And so it's not necessarily a hostility to church. It's not traversal. It can be an indifference or what we're finding increasingly is people who actually like the church, they just don't go a lot. - Yeah. Well, and I think this has a huge set of challenges for communicators among many other things, but among those of us who are trying to disciple through teaching, because part of what you're doing, again, growing up in a pastor's home, my dad is a great, great communicator, had a large church in the Phoenix area and would do these wonderful series, often teaching through sections of scripture or books of the Bible or sometimes topically. And so, you know, what happens when people hear, you know, one of or two of eight different topics, you know, you're trying to build and weave this sort of narrative and provide a biblical worldview on which people can make decisions and they only get, you know, a small portion of it. And that's as if, you know, even if they sat in the audience all eight weeks that they would have a biblical worldview, you know, like it's not just automatic because they're there, but you certainly have a harder time now if they're not there as often. So some of the things that we've seen some effective churches trying in that context are a few things. I mean, just to give it real practical feet here. One thing we've seen is churches doing a kind of an infographic sort of map. So they'll basically almost like a puzzle top. They sort of say, here are the things that we're gonna talk through. If it's an eight part series, let's say, you know, we're gonna, this week we're covering, you know, the nature of God, this week we're covering the nature of the Trinity, this week we're covering this and it's literally a picture of a map of those topics. And then they provide people with the tools to be able to come in and watch not just the full length podcast of that or, you know, like all 40 minutes of all eight topics, but they'll actually give little three and five minute video examples of what that was. We're beginning to, you know, show people, all right, we know you're not gonna catch the whole thing. We hope you do, but if you can't, we want you at least to be able to try to catch up and see you at the sort of the journey that we've been asking you to take on this series. - Hmm, that's a really practical idea. It assumes you have the resources to be able to do that, but that is, I mean, and that's part of the debate, right? Do you cooperate with what's happening or do you compete with it? And if you compete with it, I think to some extent you're bound to lose, but if you cooperate with it and you try to figure out, okay, you're not gonna be here all eight weeks of the series, but how can we make this a great experience for you and how can you grow in the midst of it? I think that's a really good thing. Now, one of the other findings you had, David, is that there isn't a whole lot of a lifestyle difference between people who attend church and people who don't, who are churchless. Now, that could mean a couple of things. It could mean that the church has been completely secularized or that the culture has become Christianized, even without regular church attendance. So like, what's up with that? Like, is that an indictment of the church as culture really become filled with decent people? Like, what's going on? Well, the image that comes to mind is sort of this, an estuary of some sort of river and sort of the brackish water, right? Between the ocean and the fresh water, you know, coming off the continent. And I think it's some of both, right? I think the culture has become increasingly secularized, increasingly the culture has largely been Christianized. And then the church has largely become secularized. And we could talk about issues of morality and whether, you know, people abstain from sex within the church more than within the culture. And there are areas where there are actual differences. And again, depending on how, and this is a classic debate among sociologists, but depending on how narrowly you define the church-going population, see? So if you say, well, anybody who is active, like if you go every week twice a week and you believe all these things, then we start to see some differences in people's behavior for sure. But to me, that's always been, well, we're sort of like just saying, all right, we're just gonna make the screen so tight for Christian belief and behavior that somehow we're removing anybody who might not fit our definition. See, a person who's married might struggle less with certain things than a person who's not married. And so if we've got a lot of people who tend to be married in the church, that's gonna be just a different, it's gonna be a different demographic segment. So the faith may or may not have been, you know, the transformational agent in that equation. Just 'cause we have more married people. So, you know, but be that as it may, this is one of those classic areas. There's a few areas in which the church is really, really struggling to represent that it is a transformational community of people. It is to put it really succinctly, the church is struggling to make a witness to the world. And among those reasons, homosexuality is certainly one of those questions about how do we handle same-sex attraction? Are we just being bigoted in our perspectives? Another is the fact that the church doesn't seem to have much difference in the way we live our lives or we think about our resources or the way we use our technology and whether we take digital sabbaths, sabbaths or whether we do anything differently. And so there are, I think, some very profound reasons that the culture looks at the church and says, you don't matter, you aren't in fact doing the kind of good in the world that you claim you want to do. - Right. And when there's not a big contrast, right, that what are you calling people into other than a more committed relationship to Jesus? Like where does the transformation come from? And a lot of churches, and I'm listening, I'm all for practical teaching, but at the end of the day, do you really need God to balance your books? Like you can do that without God. You can be celibate with or without faith. And no, I think the Holy Spirit enables you to do things that you couldn't do on your own, but so where does that go? Like do you need, what are some of our distinctives then? Or how do you even do evangelism in a culture where the culture says, look, we're basically decent moral people and you're decent moral people. And we just disagree about the whole question of God or I agree with you on God. I just don't need to hang out with you guys to agree with you. - Yeah, that's right. And I mean, this is such a fascinating moment. And I think in the history of the North American church and the church in the West, where so many of the innovations of Christian community, if we're being really honest about it and it's not a thing to brag about, but public education was imagined through a Christian sort of worldview, healthcare in some fashion, as we know. - Yeah, the hospitals were all religious. - Exactly. - 100 years ago, it was Presbyterian Hospital, Methodist Hospital. All those Christian innovations transformed the culture. - So to me, part of the way we think about both the challenges there is, unless you just like singing songs and listening to good orator speak about the Bible, the question becomes what is the reason for us to be a part of a Christian community? And we've been talking about all these things and there's lots of other, lots of smarter people than me who've been doing this. But one of the interesting things for me and one of the places of distinctive, there's a lot of different dimensions. But one of the things that I'm very passionate about is this notion of vocational discipleship, of connecting people's faith and helping them understand that to balance the books, the example you used a few minutes ago, is actually a question of our creative mandate for order, that if you're an accountant or you're a business person, that God gives human beings three big mandates, one for beauty, and that's the job of a creative, one for order, which is the job of a science-minded, sort of more kind of left brain kind of person, and then the last is abundance. That's the job of a marketer and entrepreneur. And so for me, if we could begin to say, listen, part of it is I think we're so busy in a lot of our churches, telling and retelling sort of the same story, and this is in no way a criticism of pastors, but I think there's a sense in which we're so busy trying to be kind of remedial, to try to help people who are kind of at the middle of the curve, and we so often sort of think about, well, I gotta make sure everybody can get this, but what we're seeing, especially in youth ministry, is that if you forget about not just the more gifted and talented, but it turns out that everyone has a particular gifting and talent, and that part of what our job is, is to identify and nurture and cultivate, and so what we're beginning to say with some of our work with millennials, with student ministry, youth ministry, and young adult ministry is if the church could say, you have a calling to be someone who creates abundance in the world. You can create profit, and that is a God-given talent, because communities need abundance. You have a God-given talent for creativity, for beauty in the world, and so we wanna cultivate that, not because you can just be, make a lot of money, and then come here once a week, and just donate money into our offering plate, but because that's a God-given, you need a God-oriented, Jesus-focused community to cultivate the right spirit of being a creative in the world. And then finally, somebody who's a science-minded, or your medical doctor, or you're an accountant, or you're someone who brings order to the world, that is a God-given thing. And so as we begin to sort of expand the message of what it means to be Christian, and how that gets lived out, that then means that in whatever calling you have, abundance, order, or beauty, you can find what it means to be a Christ follower within our church, and to do that in a community where we pray together, Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on us as sinner. And so the heart of what it means to be people called into these different sort of areas becomes an example of how the church actually does benefit people's own calling and their lives. - Well, I think that's a fascinating concept, David, and really what it does, if I hear you correctly, is it's like synthesizing faith in life in a way that I think is a little bit unique. And I think a lot of people instinctively think of your vocation, your day job, your work as a theological. It's like, well, be a Christian in the midst of it, but that actually is a legitimate ministry, a legitimately, a legitimate mission, and it is our job to equip, to pray, to send, to prepare, and to work with you. Have you written more on that, or that's sort of a new concept for me, or is it in writing anywhere that you've seen? - Well, we've been building the case through things like You Lost Me, where one of the reasons that young people leave the church is that they don't have any idea that the Bible applies to their career field of interest. - Oh, that's right, that is there. - We did do a new project called Making Space for Millennials. And so we talk about the five themes that we think are helping to, it's a new little report that our team has developed. And we talk about the five themes that we think are helping to generate a more lasting connection between millennials and local churches. And among those things is vocational discipleship. So it is something we've been thematically building a case for based on what we think the research is showing us, and yet we also hope to do some more stuff in the future on it. - Okay, we'll put the links to those two resources. You lost me into that study in the show notes so that we'll have that. Now, is church attendance a dying concept? 69% of Americans have interestingly enough, according to your research, a favorable opinion of the church, but nearly half see no value in attending. Yeah, that's fascinating, same word. - Well, it is certainly going out of favor, but I think it's one of these things that we need to fight for. One of the projects that we did with a church planter in New York City called Sacred Roots was one of our frame series of sort of mini books. And the notion of encouraging people to plant sacred roots is I think a very important concept. And again, I think to use a phrase that I think came from Lincoln, the better angels of our church leader nature, when people see that we are simply fighting for church attendance because we want you to be a part of our church. There is a certain, we have to admit that there is a certain degree to which we as church leaders receive salary status and staff based on the number of people who respond to our teaching. And that's, there's a good side of that, and there's a shadow side of this. And so it just, there's these tensions in ministry, that's just one of them. And so when we as church leaders are allowing our communication gifts to be hijacked in some fashion to where we think, and I've been in churches that do this, where it's like we really are so compelled to get you here and so the church attendance really becomes choose us. Choose, pick me, pick me, pick me. - It's an idol to it. - Yeah, it is. And I think millennials see that because they see that we're competing against, we're trying to have a, we're trying to be better than first Baptist or first Methodist or whatever. And so to that extent, I think millennials and people in our culture are saying, we're not interested in just sort of voting with our feet and playing the same sort of games that church leaders are playing around, just come to church to hear, 'cause then you'll be subjected to these wonderful sermons and your life will be changed. They just don't see it. And at the same time, I think there's this sort of deeper reality, which is that to be a part of a community, to understand your vocation as the thing we've been talking about through the lens of Christian community, to understand prayer, to understand seeing one of your dear friends lose their daughter to cancer and going through that together, to experience some of the highs that come with being in Christian community, to give together and serve in a shared way, to be led in that through a gifted communicator. And it's this whole different sort of way of thinking. And again, I know a lot of church leaders get into it for this reason. And I mean, I struggled with this as a researcher. You know, am I doing the research just to sell books for to try to be a conference speaker? You know, one of my deepest fears is that we do this research and the more I do the research and the more I go out and speak on a subject that I think is right. But you know, it's like, at what point, if the research starts to diverge from my own opinion about that, would I be willing to say, wait, I've been wrong, I need to get over here with what the research is showing because this is what God has called me to do is to be truthful, even if it doesn't match your opinion as a listener, or my opinion as the teller. And we see this in scripture so often, right? Where God speaks to his prophets and to his spokespeople and says, no, no, no, no, that's not the message. You know, like you gotta get back on script here. And so I feel like there's a lot of instances when we talk about church attendance. Of course, it is more important than ever. People are lonely here. They're more in need of relational connection. They're more in need of deeper perspective about life. Some of this can only be found through being a part of a local church. But if we make it, like just be here on Sunday 'cause you don't wanna miss the great sermon, then they just see through that charade. Now it doesn't mean we shouldn't have great sermons, but we just be very careful not to fall into the trap of marketing for attendance sake because we get what we market for. - Yeah, is it what you want from people or what you want for people, right? Do you just want them to be there? Do you want, you know, they jack up your statistics? Or are you really for them? Do you want them to have a deep commitment to Christ? Do you want them to be growing in their faith? Even if that means they're there, not every Sunday, even if that means you're gonna have to get innovative. And I really appreciate the mode of check. I think that's something every single leader needs to do, David. And I think that's something everybody needs to do. You know, if you're in medicine, you mentioned medicine. Am I there because it's a great career or do I really wanna help patients? Do I really, you know, that is just, I think that's a gut check that every human has to go through. Well, times moving quickly, as it always does when we have these conversations, David, I wanna ask, let's bounce down to this idea. What are some keys that you see to reaching people in a post-Christian age? We've covered a few, but just in summary form, what are some churches gonna have to do? What are all of us gonna have to do to really embrace this reality that's actually emerging very, very quickly? If you do this research again in two years, the numbers will be different, right? Probably not in favor of what we knew a decade ago. They'll be moving in the other direction. Well, I think there's so many things but to hit on a couple of them. One is to recognize that influence is small, that we can't, you know, sort of change everything. So we do have to be very, very committed to the things we can change as leaders. I mean, it kind of goes without saying, but it's one of these things the lower keys bring you back to, which is don't trade your own children for your pipe dreams of influencing other people's children. My kids are 15, 13, and 10, and my wife and I, we don't do this perfectly, but it's like I got two years left before my oldest goes off to university. No kid. And there's no ministry conference, no opportunity that is bigger than me taking our walks, but Emily and I and just being there as her dad. So realizing, and I think there's just so many reasons for us as church leaders to get really fired up and motivated to try to change our culture. There's a lot of things that are really challenging and huge opportunities for the gospel, but if we don't bring the gospel into our own families, it's gonna be in some fashion all for not. You know, Jesus says what profit is it? If a man gains the whole world but loses his own soul. And so I think we have to be very careful. And so to that point we're actually working on a project around spiritual leadership in our age. We're looking at the souls of today's pastors. Do they in fact themselves turn to prayer? And do they themselves turn to spiritual counsel? Do they have a peer accountability group? Do they themselves use the very same spiritual means of change that they recommend to people? And so I say this because at the very time when our culture, so you ask, you know, what do we do? And what I'd say is there's nothing we can really do in some fashion about all the world out here. I do think we need to get smarter. I do think we need to understand sort of the trend beneath the trend or at least the story beneath that. We need to be very comfortable in the language of statistics and research and social trends. There are trends and counter trends. And those are all very, very critical for us to use a spiritual imagination to influence that. And at its core, it's gonna come down to who we are as people and whether the Lord is working in our lives. You know, there's, there's just no formula for it. So if God is faithful through us, then I think we have to be, as the scripture says, sort of a willing vessel for that to happen. And that's just, it's just my own story. I would tell you, it's just harder than we can let on, right? Like it turns out it's just the more success you have, the more cranky and prideful and formula driven you get. I get. - True. - And so we just gotta be so careful about tending our own souls. I think in this era as the world is becoming more and more kind of gospel resistant. - Well, I think that's a really good point, you know, because you can look for tips and tricks and they're out there. You can discover it and, you know, it's probably not just gonna be the next great series. It's probably not gonna be the next location. It's probably not just gonna be, it's gonna be deeper than that. And again, if it's not healthy at the top, it will not be healthy at the bottom. And I think maybe sort of the underbelly of this is the church hasn't always been healthy in the last generation. And that starts with leaders. You know, it starts with me, where I serve. I can't expect my people to love Jesus more than I love him. And I'm sure some do. It's not that I'm the most spiritually mature person on the planet by any stretch. But, you know, to the degree that my devotion to Christ is deep and real and to the extent that my integrity gets deepened every year, I think our church has a better chance of influence. And I think our people, consequently or in some, you know, connected way, become healthier. And when their light shines brighter, it shines further into the darkness. And I think that's a good place to leave it. You know, sometimes it's not just, there are five things you can do. And this will all turn around tomorrow. It's like, go look in the mirror, get on your knees, get into a group. And I'll look forward to more of that research, David. Thank you so much. I appreciate this. I know people are going to want to learn a lot more. We will link to things in the show notes, but what are a couple of really quick links that people can follow up on? - Well, we're super excited about the churchless study. As you said, Kerry, you know, there's a lot of just great statistics and perspective about a secular generation and today's, you know, ministry environment. So there's a lot of stuff at Barna.org/churchless on that project. And then we also mentioned the millennials in space, study millennials in architecture, lots of really practical stuff about the kinds of auto tools. - It's not millennials like going to Mars, it's like millennials in space. - Yeah, you can imagine the space, the space elements on. - That'd be pretty cool. Sounds like a Donald Miller book. - We kept talking about the pigs in space, muppets in space sort of thing when we were working on that one. So it's millennials, it's making space. So Barna.org/makingspace is another place. We're launching some stuff on different regional trends. So cities. Barna.org, but that's all, you can find all that stuff at our website at Barna.org. And I mean, thanks for the chance to talk about those things. You know, it's our heart to try to link up with other leaders through these resources to give you some of that intelligence to give you maybe a little bit deeper, more, you know, socially crafted story, you know, more, more clear as to the zeitgeist of what God's doing in our times and how it is that we can be a part of that. - Well, and that's what I really appreciate about the work you do is I think a lot of us pick up on this stuff anecdotally and instinctively, but often when you just look at the research, it's like, oh, that's what's going on. So we'll link to all of that in the show notes. - David, you're so generous with your time again today. Thank you so much. - Gary, it's my pleasure, man. I love you so much. I appreciate you and it's great to be friends across these many miles. - Absolutely. Thanks so much, David. Appreciate it. - All the best. - Well, some super great stuff from David there, isn't it? And I've got all the links, everything he talked about, including some of the studies available for you. You can just head on over to the show notes. Just go to carrynewhoff.com/episode24. You're gonna find them there. You'll also find some of the articles. I've been writing recently about this whole issue of declining church attendance and what church leaders can do about it, as well as a link back to episode 23 with Willman Cini last week, where we talked in different ways about the same thing. So I hope this has really helped you and your team lead a little bit better. And you might be walking away going, well, there aren't super tangible takeaways. There are some, but I know they're not gonna solve the problem overnight. I get that, I get that. But I find at a time like this, it's just so important to have the right voices around the table to be processing it. And this is a conversation I keep having with church leaders of large churches, small churches, mega churches, mainline churches, evangelical churches, everybody sees it. We're all trying to figure out what to do about it. And that's why I get so excited about conversations like this is I think in some way, they help us all make progress. So I hope that's true of you. I would love to hear more from you. If you go to the show notes and just leave a comment, that would be carrynewhoff.com/episode24. You can leave a comment that way or jump in on some of the other articles that we've linked to that I've written on this. And if you really enjoyed this podcast, make sure you subscribe. You can do it absolutely for free and you get a new episode in your inbox everywhere on your phone or wherever, not your inbox, I guess. But you get it every Tuesday. And so I would love to have you do that. And thanks to everybody who keeps leaving awesome reviews on iTunes, Stitcher and TuneInRadio. Thank you. And I wanna thank the Orange Conference who makes this podcast possible. And do you know if you really love the senior leadership stuff, like I do, that we've got what I think is an incredible track for you put together. The senior leader track at Orange Conference. If you haven't registered yet, please do so. Just go to the orangeconference.com/senorleader because in those three days in Atlanta, April 29th 30th and May the 1st, you're gonna hear from people like Donald Miller, John Acuff, Reggie Joyner, Doug Fields, Judd Wilhite, Perry Noble, Jeff Henderson, Josh Gagnon, Jenny Catrin, who's gonna be up on the podcast very, very soon. And a lot of others. So I mean, it's gonna be an incredible time together. I love getting connected and I'll be able to hang out with you, which would be a lot of fun. You can do it for a fraction of the price of like bringing any of those people into your church. You can just do that by registering at the orangeconference.com/senorleader. So you wanna make sure you do that before it's too late, that's happening at the end of April. And next week on the podcast, you're gonna hear from the aforementioned Jenny Catrin. Jenny is an incredible leader. She served as executive pastor at Crosspoint Church with Pete Wilson in Nashville, as they grew from like a church plant to 5,000 people. She's gonna give us the blow by blow. And then about a year and a bit ago, she went over to California. Now she's an executive pastor with John Ortberg at Menlo Park Presbyterian Church, helping them navigate a lot of change as well. And Jenny is gonna talk to us about a not talked about nearly enough subject of the changes you need to make to help your church grow. And I mean, she's just brilliant at it. I can't wait for you to hear that. That's episode 25. Best way not to miss it is to subscribe for free if you haven't done that yet. And in the meantime, thank you so much for listening. Really, really appreciate you. I hope this has helped you lead like never before. And we'll talk to you next week. (upbeat music) You've been listening to the "Carry Newhof Leadership" podcast. Join us next time for more insights on leadership, change and personal growth to help you lead like never before. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)