A wise friend of mine says, "The plural of anecdote is not data." Robert Wuthnow would agree. He brings the eye of the sociologist to the life of the church and gives us insights that sometimes confirm but often confound our anecdotes. In After the Baby Boomers, he examines data about adults between the ages of 21 and 45 and concludes, "If I were a religious leader, I would be troubled by the facts and figures currently describing the lives of young Americans, their involvement in congregations, and their spiritual practices."

As he conveys large doses of data (along with a few anecdotes), Wuthnow keeps reminding readers not to hastily draw conclusions "from where the action is" but rather to reach their conclusions on the basis of "a full consideration of where the action is not." He goes on to say that "social reality is . . . complicated," and "we need a more sophisticated view of society if we are going to understand why American religion is patterned as it is."

I recently completed 24 rewarding and challenging years of leading what Wuthnow would describe as a youthful congregation. Over the past several years I've also been traveling extensively in North America and around the world, trying to understand the sweeping changes in our culture and world and to articulate what they mean for the church. What I've seen in hundreds of churches in dozens of denominations often causes me to wonder whether congregations as we know them can survive.

Read it all.

Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Religion & Culture

1. NewTrollObserver wrote: McLaren: Again, if evangelicals begin congratulating themselves at this point, they should pay attention to one other way that they excel in Wuthnow’s data: in being unwelcoming toward Asians and Hispanics. The odds of being unwelcoming “are about 1.7 times greater among evangelicals than among nonevangelicals,” Wuthnow reports, and “evangelicals are a more likely source of mobilized resistance against newcomers than any other religious group.” From my experience, both Asian and Hispanic evangelicals/pentecostals tend to establish their own churches, most likely not because of white evangelical inhospitality (though that is known to occur all too often), but mostly because of cultural differences. Korean-Americans, amongst the Asians, and formerly-Catholic-presently pentecostal Hispanics, often have their separate churches, and don’t seem too concerned about it. November 4, 4:38 pm | [comment link]

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