{"id":1694,"date":"2006-10-31T16:34:00","date_gmt":"2006-10-31T22:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/?p=1694"},"modified":"2012-05-15T16:32:48","modified_gmt":"2012-05-15T22:32:48","slug":"reaching-the-unchurched","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/reaching-the-unchurched\/","title":{"rendered":"Reaching the unchurched"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Despite our history of being a &#8220;Christian nation,&#8221; more and more people are leaving the church and joining the unchurched. <span class=\"removed_link\" title=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/churchrelevance\/~3\/41066286\/\">Churchrelevance.com<\/span> reports on a new LifeWay report that investigates why people leave and come back to church.<\/p>\n<p>The Probability<br \/>\n62% of the formerly churched adults said they are open to the idea of attending church regularly again, but not actively looking.<br \/>\n28% said they are unlikely to consider regularly attending church in the foreseeable future.<br \/>\n6% said they would prefer to resume attending regularly in the same church they had attended.<br \/>\n4% said they are actively looking for a different church to attend regularly.<br \/>\nThe average formerly churched adult has not attended regularly for 14 years.<\/p>\n<p>The Catalyst<br \/>\n58% said they simply felt that it was time to return to the church.<br \/>\n41% said a friend or acquaintance invited them.<br \/>\n35% said they would return if they knew there were people there like them.<br \/>\n31% felt that God was calling them to visit the church.<br \/>\n25% said they would resume if their children asked them to go with them to church.<br \/>\n25% said they would go if an adult family member invited them.<\/p>\n<p>The Motivation<br \/>\n(For the large majority who were self-motivated to return to church)<br \/>\n46% said it was to bring them closer to God.<br \/>\n32% want to be around those with similar values.<br \/>\n31% want to make friends.<br \/>\n30% want to make a difference of help others in their community.<\/p>\n<p>How does your church reach out to the unchurched? If not, why not?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Despite our history of being a &#8220;Christian nation,&#8221; more and more people are leaving the church and joining the unchurched. Churchrelevance.com reports on a new LifeWay report that investigates why people leave and come back to church. The Probability 62% of the formerly churched adults said they are open to the idea of attending church &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/reaching-the-unchurched\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Reaching the unchurched<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pEnSo-rk","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1694","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/84"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1694"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1694\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}