The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? by Jim Davis and Michael Graham with Ryan P. Burge. Zondervan. 272 pages. 2023
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This important new book, written by Jim Davis (teaching pastor at Orlando Grace Church, Michael Graham (Program Director at The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics) with Ryan Burge (associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University), uses research on some forty million Americans (about 15 percent of American adults living today), who have left the church over the last twenty-five years. They tell us that we are in the largest and fastest religious shift in the history of our country. This would be an excellent book for church leaders to read and discuss and might also be a good topic for an adult Sunday School class.
What began as a desire to equip the primary author’s local church through a podcast called As in Heaven, became a research project that eventually developed into this book. They engaged social scientists Dr. Ryan Burge and Dr. Paul Djupe to do an academic-review-board-approved, nationwide, quantitative study to answer their questions about the dechurching phenomenon. The authors tell us that the size, pace, and scope of dechurching in America is at such historic levels that there is no better phrase to describe this phenomenon than the Great Dechurching.
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