Already Gone (Ken Ham) - (Pt 1)

I am in the beginning stages of reading a book that I believe will turn out to be very interesting, and hopefully enlightening. I carry the book through my bookstore, and from all I have heard, and from my wife's review (yes, she finished it before me...again), it is well worth you looking into. This is especially true if you are a church leader, a parent, or anyone involved with education of children. The book is entitled "Already Gone: Why your kids will quit church and what you can do to stop it" and is written by Ken Ham and Britt Beemer. Britt Beemer works for America's Research Group and specializes in statistics, which help to determine human nature trends. For this book, they questioned and studied 1000 American people, between the ages of 20-30, who were brought up regularly attending a conservative, evangelical church, but were now no longer active in attendance, prayer or personal Bible reading.

The trend in America is seen as matching what has already taken place in churches throughout the UK. The UK used to have a flourishing church life, and looking throughout history at the abundance of spiritual knowledge that has spawned from this area, and that obviously later led to America, we have great ties there that are worth examining. America has always been deemed a nation blessed by God, and has shown tremendous spiritual life in it's fairly short lived existence, but the trend shows a great decline, similar to what has already happened in the UK.

The basic surface level results to the inquiry, show a breakdown of the top reasons these young adults have discontinued attending, and include reasons like: boring services, legalism, hypocrisy in leaders, too political, self-righteous people, Bible not relevant, among other less common reasons. But, in digging deeper, with more probing questions, seeking reasons behind the confusion and frustrations, the book found startling results that will probably shock the readers as much as it did the researchers.

I only just got to the beginning of the first major issue they found, and until I finish exploring all they say about it, I won't divulge anything on it here yet. I hope to blog additional findings as I continue through this book, and hope it is found useful, and helpful to stop this bleeding of our churches.

Pick up the book, read along, and post your comments as I explore the book here.

Proceed to PART 2