Friday, October 06, 2006
The Four Percent Solution
In today's New York Times, Laurie Goodstein writes that more than 6,000 evangelical preachers will meet in 44 cities this fall to hear some of the biggest names in the conservative evangelical movement tell them that "only 4 percent of teenagers will be 'Bible-believing' by the time they reach adulthood.
Unfortunately, like so much else they're wrong about, they may be wrong about this, too.
“I’m looking at the data,” Ron Luce, the founder of Teen Mania, a 20-year-old youth ministry, tells Goodstein, “and we’ve become post-Christian America, like post-Christian Europe. We’ve been working as hard as we know how to work — everyone in youth ministry is working hard — but we’re losing.”
The board of the National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella group representing 60 denominations and dozens of ministries, passed a resolution this year deploring “the epidemic of young people leaving the evangelical church.”
Unfortunately, like so much else they're wrong about, they may be wrong about this, too.
