Thursday, March 31, 2005
A Churchless Faith
This is from a guy named
Alan Jamieson should feed the fire a bit. This is a real issue read more at:
What makes people stop attending church and what happens to their faith after they have left?
As I approached the front door of the first of over a hundred church leavers I would interview, I thought I knew what happened to the Christian faith of those who no longer went to church.
I could easily understand why people choose to leave the church, I'd watched others leaving; and had contemplated shifting out myself on more than one occasion. Part of what held me in was the belief that leaving the church was inevitably the first step to a dwindling faith - the ultimate Christian disgrace - 'backsliding'.
http://www.reality.org.nz/articles/33/33-jamieson.html
Two and a half hours later I left by the same front door somewhat bewildered. The couple I had just met didn't fit my expectations. They had left their eldership role in a growing Pentecostal church nearly five years previously, yet their faith had obviously continued to develop, their understanding of God at work in their lives was undoubtedly continuing, and they were involved in their community as an outworking of their faith.
I was intrigued and somewhat mystified. My plans to conduct a quick study of half a dozen or so church leavers, which would confirm my prejudices, were in disarray. In fact the study grew into a four year project involving 162 interviews with both church leavers and leaders in Evangelical Pentecostal and Charismatic churches ( a group which I refer to as EPC churches).
The people I tracked were predominately in their 30s and 40s. They had made Christian commitments (as well as commitments to their respective churches) as adults (over the age of 18 years) and had been actively involved in their churches for an average of 15.8 years.
To try and sum up the faith journies of 108 people spread from Dunedin to Auckland (with a few Australians thrown in) isn't easy. Each person's journey was in fact quite distinctive with its own twists and turns, but what I did find was that those church leavers I interviewed fell into five clear groups.
Alan Jamieson should feed the fire a bit. This is a real issue read more at:
What makes people stop attending church and what happens to their faith after they have left?
As I approached the front door of the first of over a hundred church leavers I would interview, I thought I knew what happened to the Christian faith of those who no longer went to church.
I could easily understand why people choose to leave the church, I'd watched others leaving; and had contemplated shifting out myself on more than one occasion. Part of what held me in was the belief that leaving the church was inevitably the first step to a dwindling faith - the ultimate Christian disgrace - 'backsliding'.
http://www.reality.org.nz/articles/33/33-jamieson.html
Two and a half hours later I left by the same front door somewhat bewildered. The couple I had just met didn't fit my expectations. They had left their eldership role in a growing Pentecostal church nearly five years previously, yet their faith had obviously continued to develop, their understanding of God at work in their lives was undoubtedly continuing, and they were involved in their community as an outworking of their faith.
I was intrigued and somewhat mystified. My plans to conduct a quick study of half a dozen or so church leavers, which would confirm my prejudices, were in disarray. In fact the study grew into a four year project involving 162 interviews with both church leavers and leaders in Evangelical Pentecostal and Charismatic churches ( a group which I refer to as EPC churches).
The people I tracked were predominately in their 30s and 40s. They had made Christian commitments (as well as commitments to their respective churches) as adults (over the age of 18 years) and had been actively involved in their churches for an average of 15.8 years.
To try and sum up the faith journies of 108 people spread from Dunedin to Auckland (with a few Australians thrown in) isn't easy. Each person's journey was in fact quite distinctive with its own twists and turns, but what I did find was that those church leavers I interviewed fell into five clear groups.
hd 8:52 PM