Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

Well I hope you guys are having a good week so far.

I’ll tell you what, it is so good to be back in Kansas.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the south, way to humid for me, but I am also glad to be back with my family and back with you guys here at the church.

Already I can tell that I am in a better place mentally and have way more energy then I did before I left.

I has been really fun getting to spend time with the group that meets on Wednesdays and get to know people better.

We met this last Wednesday and did our first study/discussion and we had some good talks and good thoughts.

One thing that I really love is getting together and just discussing scripture and how it applies to our lives.

We had some interesting conversations and I hope that as we continue to meet we will continue to dig deeper and deeper into scripture.

You know, as I was thinking about what to talk about this week I was really struggling to come up with a topic.

You see, when I was down in Mississippi I had the privilege to getting to be with a very unique and diverse class.

Now my class was really cool and they were a bunch of good guys, but I was the only Christian in the room out of 8.

So eight people in my class and I was the only one who claimed to be a Christian.

What a culture shock coming from Kansas right?

I went from spending the majority of my time with fellow believers to spending all of my time with a mix of atheist, agnostic, and Christians who had left the church.

But you know what was awesome?

I got to have a ton of discussions about the Bible with them.

And not only were they open to hearing about it, but they would often come to me with questions and we would get to discuss them.

Now I am not going to sit here and tell you that I converted 8 people.

But I will say that I at least opened their eyes to what Christianity should look like, and not what they saw from the unfortunate examples we have in today’s society.

Their perceptions and opinions of what Christians believed and how they acted was so sad to hear, but I was able to give them a look into what it actually meant to be a Christian, you see not all of us are as bigoted and judgmental as people think we are.

Now unfortunately there are some bad apples out there and those bad apples are the ones that give us a bad name, but it is our job to show the world that we aren’t defined by those bad apples and that true love comes from Christ.

Like I said, I had a ton of conversations with these guys, mainly two of them.

One of the guys was a Jewish Atheist.

Meaning he was born Jewish and was familiar with Jewish customs and practices, but he called himself a ‘cultural’ Jew, and the other guy was someone who had grown up Christian and had what he thought was this amazing passionate relationship with God and ended up walking away from it once he joined the military.

Now this second guy, who walked away from the Church, this is story that is becoming all to familiar.

You see we have a major problem going on in our church right now.

And guys let me tell you, this is bad.

One of the worst problems the American church has had since the founding of America.

We have people leaving the church in massive numbers that we have never seen before.

Statistics

I want to share some statistics with you guys.

Unfortunately where we live is like a bubble that hasn’t quite been affected as much as the other parts of the united states and so we get to happily live in ignorance.

But the problem is that even in Kansas, our ship is sinking.

we have water flowing into our boat and we are ignoring it, or even worse, we acknowledge that we are sinking, but aren’t willing to get a bucket and start tossing some water out.

even in Kansas we are starting to see what is called a Post-Christian society or post christian culture.

Did you know that Gen Z is the first generation to be born into an actual post christian culture.

My generation, the ever despised millennial, was at least born into a culture that was primarily Christian.

Or at least the majority of Americans identified as Christian.

But Gen Z, they are the first generation to be born into a culture that is not primarily Christian.

So this shouldn’t come as a surprise but according to a study done in 2018 the percentage of Gen Z that identifies as atheist is double that of the entire US adult population.

Double, there are more Gen Z atheist than there are adult ones.

That is scary, imagine how bad it will be in 20 years when that generation are adults and having kids.

And it isn’t just Gen Z that is running away from Church, my generation is doing it as well.

According to a study done in 2019 64% of young adults in their 20’s have dropped out of the church.

That’s me, that’s my age group right there, and you know what, i know several of my friends and people who I went to school with who have dropped out of Church and don’t believe in God.

This problem is only getting worse and we are starting to see the consequences of it in our schools, in our politics, and especially in the church.

Now let me hear from you guys, whose fault do you think this is that our younger generations are leaving the church in massive numbers?

It is our fault, this is a consequence of how we have been “doing” church the last 200 years.

You see for the last 200 years the church in America has had this “come to us” strategy.

Where since most Americans were Christians or it was the predominate faith in America, we could expect people who were broken and needed help to turn to the church when they had issues.

And as technology evolved and information became more easily accessible to the population did the church change their strategy from a “come to us” strategy?

Not at all, instead we decided to double down on that strategy and build bigger buildings to attract larger crowds.

We thought that if we had awesome music and huge concert like worship services that it would attract people .

We commercialized church and tried to market church out to the population like it was “an experience”.

Come to our worship “experience” we would see churches say.

And you know what?

That screwed us.

You know why? because we created a generation of Christians that was consumer based.

If you didn’t like the type of music that a church played, or you didn’t like the style of preaching, we simply just went to a church that could satisfy that.

And what happened, we had these mega churches start to pop up that had all this big flashy music and massive worship centers.

And then what happened next was these large churches had two major concerns, bringing money in to support this money vacuum that was their staff and systems and getting people to be baptised, because for some reason if they could report that a certain number of people got baptized each month or year that would somehow show to the church board that they church was being effective and that the pastor had good job performance.

Never mind that once someone got baptized there were little resources for discipleship.

Sure there were small groups and opportunities to “volunteer” in the church by handing out offering plates or being door greeters, but there was no follow up, no teaching or discipleship that occured after.

So people who ‘became christian’ soon felt that fire leave them and slowly started to fade into the background and ultimately out of the church.

Now the point of this isn’t to bag on any one particular church or to say that the church is completely ineffective because there are people who have had their lives changed at these churches and that is awesome.

And there are good communities within those churches.

These churches also give a lot of money back into the community, but unfortunately if you look at their budget and expenses, most of the money coming in is there to pay staff and maintain the building.

And this generalization might be unfair to apply to all mega churches, but I will say I have been in a church where they had a baptism “goal” for the summer.

Or after every sermon they would have an altar call and keep track of how many people “accepted” christ that month.

The point is to say that the overall strategy that we are using is NOT working.

We cannot continue to do the same thing we have been doing for the last 50 years and expect things to magically get better.

If we continue on the path we are on now soon Christians will be a very small minority in America.

I mean come on, in 2011 the drop out rate for young adults in the church as 59% and in just 8 years it increased to 64%.

That is not a good trend at all.

The first question that we have to ask is WHY people are leaving the church.

If we don’t know why they are leaving we will never be able to fix this problem.

So i have a graphic for you that shows Non-Christians Barriers to Faith.

This right here is why people are walking away from the church.

The number one top answer is I have a hard time believing that a good God would allow so much evil or suffering in the world.

Second on the list is that Christians are hypocrites, and unfortunately whether we are or aren’t that is how non-Christians perceive us.

And the third one, I believe science refutes too much of the Bible.

And this fourth one about fairy tales, I like to kind of lump this into the one above it because it seems like alot of the same concerns would be addressed in the lack of science to explain these “fairy tales”.

The bottom three, while valid, are things that we have no control over and we can speak to them, but we can’t undo the past.

So lets focus on the top four, which are the biggest problems anyways.

These top four barriers are things I have explicitly heard non-Christians or Christians who had dropped away from the church say.

If we want to know the true reason people are leaving the church this is the best place to start.

So here is what I want to do this week is going to be a hybrid week where we split into groups and have some discussion.

When was the last time you had a conversation with someone who wasn’t a Christian that expressed a barrier to faith that is up on the screen and did you feel equipped to handle the conversation?

What could we as a church being doing better to address these issues?

Now, lets take a quick look at a poll of teens that are currently going to church.

this is a smaller poll of about 200 hundred teens, but I would imagine the statistics would be around the same number with a larger group sample.

Almost half of churchgoing teens say that the church seems to reject much of what science tells us, 38% said that the church is overprotective, 36% say that the people at church are hypocritical, 27% say the church is not a safe place to express doubts, 24% say the faith and teachings are shallow, and 17% say its too much like an exclusive club.

Now i know this study is centered around teens, but I think the majority of us have heard similar perceptions from people we know.

We even see some similar trends from the last slide into this one.

Here, the church rejecting science is at the top of the list and at number three we have the people in church are hypocritical.

Now the next two are interesting too me.

27% of teens feel like they aren’t safe to express doubt, and 24% find the teachings shallow.

So here is the next question.

Science is a theme between both of these slides.