What has caused so many people to turn their backs on the church?
Answers in Genesis, the world’s largest apologetics ministry recently conducted intense research to study this very question. The results they found were absolutely staggering. Here are the results of the study:
Research shows that students who regularly attend Sunday school in a conservative, Bible-believing church are actually:
· More likely to defend premarital sex.
· More likely to accept that gay marriage and abortion should be legal.
· More likely NOT to believe that all the accounts/stories in the Bible are true/accurate., etc.
Further info can be found in the new book, Already Gone, from Ken Ham and Britt Beemer.
My question is: Why?
Why are people who have attended Bible-believing churches more inclined than others to believe in things that contradict the Word of God?
Is this a simple case of rebellion against “the faith of our parents,” or is there something deeper at hand?
Tags: Already Gone, Answers in Genesis, Britt Beemer, Ken Ham
July 30th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
This is a tough question with no real “one” answer. In many cases, people have turned their backs on church because the church has let them. Many churches fail to educate, and establish the Bible as absolute truth, because they would rather continue to rely on comfortable cliche’s that no longer hold weight or merit with the most educated generation in history. The world has offered compelling cases for why things like premarital sex, abortion, gay marriage are acceptable, while punching holes in the authority of the word of God, and the church has not done a sufficient job of accepting the challenge or answering those questions intelligently. I don’t think this is a case of rebelling against “the faith of our parents” as much as it is a deeper issue.
July 30th, 2009 at 6:37 pm
I think it’s really an issue of teaching religion over relationship. In Matthew 23 Jesus makes it clear that he gets extremely upset when religion gets in the way of a relationship with God. For many churches, religion (dress, hair, music, building, program, curriculum, politics) is/was more important than relationship (love, honesty, mercy, justice, fellowship, growth, depth, time).
July 31st, 2009 at 9:15 am
Joe, I think that your comments are valid as well. Good comments.
August 3rd, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Maybe a lot of parents that enroll their children in Sunday School don’t spend as much time instilling in those same children the values they want them to embrace, simply because they expect the school to do that for them.