Some of my favorite quotes:
"There's no longer evidence for a need of God, even less of Christ. The so-called traditional churches look like they are dying." Pope Benedict
When you count the people in the pews on Sunday rather than having a pollster ask whether or not they attend church, fewer than 18% attend church regularly. From 1980 to 2005 in the Southern Baptist Church, baptisms of people between eighteen and thirty four – in other words, their next generation of leaders – fell 40 percent, from 100,000 in 1980 to 60,000 in 2005.
But the U.S. population grew by 27% during those 25 years, so the Baptists would have had to baptize 127,000 in 2005 just to stay even; they really fell by 52%. In 2006, the Southern Baptists – who claim almost six times more members than any other white evangelical church – made a concerted effort to baptize one million people. Not only did they fall over two-thirds short, they actually baptized even fewer than they had the year before.
You might think that some faith group must have grown during the last thirty years, and you'd be right: atheists and nonbelievers more than doubled in the eleven years between 1990 and 2001, from 14 million to 29 million: from 8% of the country to 14%. There are more than twice as many atheists and nonbelievers as there are evangelical Christians.[6] And since it's hard to believe that all atheists/nonbelievers would be willing to confess that to pollsters, the number is probably much higher. From 2000 to 2005, church attendance fell in all fifty states.
Then, to add insult to injury, when a sampling of non-Christians were asked to rate eleven groups in terms of respect, they rated evangelicals tenth. Only prostitutes ranked lower.
http://inewp.com/?p=4679 (http://inewp.com/?p=4679)
Quote from: tekla on August 17, 2010, 12:18:11 AM
Some of my favorite quotes:
"There's no longer evidence for a need of God, even less of Christ. The so-called traditional churches look like they are dying." Pope Benedict
I wonder who's fault that might be , Benedict, hmmm?
The real atheists they are worried about turn out to be the ones at home, their children.