Thought provoking

Future of the Church: Session 1 Notes

Session 1: Where We are Today

I.                    Pew Research Report—Spring 2015

a.     Persons who identify as Christians are down 8% since 2007

b.     Those who identify having no religion: 23% (up 36 %)

c.      Organized Church Across the Board seeing decline

                                                              i.      Mainline is down (especially PCUSA has shrunk)

                                                            ii.      Also conservative churches are down

1.     SBC has 9^th consecutive year of losses

2.     Declining as fast as UMC

a.     (Pastor note: UMC Dakotas is growing)

                                                          iii.      Decline manifests itself in

1.     Attendance

2.     Membership

3.     Baptism

II.                 Research on people who have left church

a.     31% of Americans consider themselves “dechurched”

                                                              i.      65 million adults

                                                            ii.      Were active but no longer active

1.     No plans to come back

b.     Not done with faith or wanting to pursue faith, just done with “structured” church

III.               Supreme Court ruling on Same Sex Marriage

a.     People want “pelvic autonomy”

b.     Churches are all dealing with this issue and how to speak to it

From December 3 Devotion in "Unwrapping the Greatest Gift" by Ann Voskamp

When we've fallen and when we're lost, God comes with one question. Not the question, "Why did you do that?" Not the question, "What did you do wrong?" The very first God-question of the Old Testament, of the whole Bible, is a love question howling out of God's heart: "Where are you?"

A line from a poem from Madeline L'engle entitled After Annunciation

This is the irrational season

when love blooms bright and wild.
Had Mary been filled with reason
there’d have been no room for the child.

From A Cry Like a Bell:Poems (p. 58)

Hearing God in Proverbs 22

Proverbs 22: 1-2, 8-9 and 22-23

Hearing God in Psalm 125

Psalm 125

Prayer of the Day 9-1-15

O God, at whose bidding man goes forth to his work and his labor until the evening: grant us to cherish the lessons we have learned out of your holy Word. Support us when we are tested in duty, that in all our doings we may remember that you have chosen us that we should go and bear fruit and that our fruit should abide. from the Gelasian Sacrementary