In case you didn't already know, this is why we do what we do..

Do the Math

My brother was forced by his brother-in-law to listen to this sermon, "Home is the Key," by Voddie Bachum, pastor of Grace Family Church in Spring, Texas, available on Family Life Radio. He then forced the sermon on me. Now I’m forcing it on you. It is definitely worth listening to in its entirety or reading the transcript. Here’s the gist. The pastor says:

We're losing somewhere between 75 and 88 percent of our young people by the end of their freshman year in college – somewhere between 75 and 88 percent. For that low number, you can look at Glenn Schultz's work on Kingdom Education; for that high number, the 2002 Southern Baptist Council on the Family. So these are not things just made up or just grabbed out of the air. That's what's been happening over the last few decades. We're losing somewhere between 75 and 88 percent of our young people by the end of their freshman year in college. [My note: This is a sermon from a Southern Baptist pastor to a Southern Baptist audience so I can only assume that the “we” is the denomination. I don’t have time to check these numbers or how they arrived at them, so take this with that word of warning.]

Next, the pastor quotes the statistics that we often talk about here at BreakPoint, that the birth rate here in the U.S. is a whopping 2.1 percent. He refers to a standard attitude that we have in our churches today, that looks down on women who have more than, say, 2 or 3 children. Then he starts with a little number crunching:

Now let me put these two statistics together. We lose 75 – let's take the most optimistic number – we're losing 75 percent by the end of their freshman year in college. We average two children per family – that means it currently takes two Christian families in this generation to get one Christian into the next.

Let me make it even more plain – there's 16 million Southern Baptists on paper.

By these numbers, next generation, 4 million; third generation, 1 million; fourth generation, 250,000 – more than numbers now, aren't they? Oh, but that's okay, we'll just replenish those numbers through evangelism. Interesting – in order to replenish those numbers through evangelism alone, what we would have to do is reach three lost people for every one Christian. Currently, we only reach one lost person for every 43 Southern Baptists.

Now let me make it plain and bring it home – Christianity in America is dying one generation at a time, one home at a time.

This is a sobering reality. This pastor calls for Christians to seriously re-examine their attitudes toward children and family, saying, “God has a plan for multi-generational faithfulness. That plan is the family.” He calls into question our attitude toward children and an abdication of responsiblity in teaching a biblical worldview to youth ministry professionals. His words definitely left me re-thinking many of the cultural norms we take for granted today. He may not be right on every point, but the sermon is definitely thought-provoking in a counter-cultural way.