US Becoming a Lot Less Christian

I expect many of you have seen this headline all over the Internet today. The famous Pew Research firm released the results of 35,000 interviews with Americans and discovered that the number of people in United States identifying themselves as Christians could be said to have dropped nearly 9% between 2007 and 2014. I guess the sky is falling!

Actually don’t throw up your hands just yet. A closer examination of the numbers shows that the vast majority of those moving over to the “unaffiliated” category are leaving denominations that have been known for a long time for having very low standards of membership which is another way of saying very few convictions.

So as I read the data, an awful lot of people who have been Christians, pretty much in name only, are just facing the facts and being honest about what they really are, and maybe now are even giving up their Christmas and Easter rituals.

So if the “US is becoming a lot less Christian” that doesn’t concern me. What would concern me is if a lot of disciples of Jesus were becoming a lot less kingdom- minded. Actually, let me put that another way. What does concern me is that a lot of disciples of Jesus are not constantly growing in becoming more kingdom- minded.

After considerable delay, my good friend and co-author, Steve Brown,  and I began to work in earnest on volume 3 of our trilogy on the Kingdom of God. I did not keep track, but I expect I wrote somewhere between 40 and 60 hours in the last week, and probably slept about five hours a night. The topic of the kingdom just sets me on fire. No wonder Jesus said seek it first. No wonder he talked about a man who searches for it like a merchant searches for a rare pearl and sells everything in order to buy it.

It doesn’t bother me when uncommitted people stop wearing the name of Christ. It bothers me a lot when those who wear the name of “disciple” stop hungering and thirsting for the kingdom and stop praying, “your will be done on earth… in my life… as it is in heaven.”