# US church attendance decline, the sifting.



## NaphtaliPress (Mar 12, 2020)

Good observation by Andrew J. Webb (was PCA, now ARP) regarding an article on the decline in church attendance in the US.
https://www.facebook.com/andrewjwebb/posts/10163322057045038
"The Sifting: Before we start panicking and concluding the gospel no longer works and people aren't getting saved anymore, let's analyze what's actually going on.

The survey rightly defined a "practicing Christian" as someone who regularly attends church, but what we are seeing is that several groups are no longer attending church largely because there is no longer what Social scientists have described as a cultural imperative for attending church, neither does one gain social credit by doing so. In fact, attending church usually involves a net loss of social credit especially in socially liberal areas of the country. Several groups in particular just don't see any reason to attend church any longer:

1) The children of liberal/mainline Christians
2) Political liberals
3) Unsaved conservatives
3) Unbelieving children of evangelicals
4) Non-believers generally

What is actually happening is that church attendance is rapidly being reduced to the people who really believe and therefore aren't concerned about issues like inconvenience, unpopularity, or loss of social credit. In other words, we are seeing a massive sifting of the church in which the chaff is being blown away leaving only the wheat.

What we must not do, therefore, is to panic and attempt to change the church in an ultimately pointless attempt to KEEP the chaff in the church. This has been done many times in the past, but it has never borne good fruit. It's as silly as trying to change the coffee hour for the sake of attracting people who hate coffee."

Reactions: Like 9 | Informative 1 | Amen 3


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