This book is for ANYONE who is curious about the shifting experience of faith in the 21st century.
Profound questions are facing us today.
​
What does it mean to live well?
How do we live with beauty, depth, and meaning in our shallow culture?
​
And pressing questions are facing collective Christianity.
​
What does it mean to have faith today?
Does it help us live better?
Or is it just abstract concepts about the supernatural and the afterlife?
​
MILLIONS of people have left the church this century. And more keep leaving every year. There's no sign that this trend will change, and it keeps happening despite all the physical, financial, mental and emotional challenges of the 21st century.
​
On the other hand, our population spends billions of dollars every year on self-improvement products. Vast numbers of people seek treatment and healing through psychotherapy. Mindfulness and meditation are becoming more popular every year, and spirituality among the non-religious appears to be growing. With all this yearning to live better and experience something bigger, how has the church become so irrelevant?
Questions
21st-Century Questions
Why are so many people leaving the church?
If the church really was spreading good news, would more people care about it?
When people leave the church, are they deciding to make their lives worse, or better?
Unbecoming Questions
What was the verse where Jesus told people to center their faith on a book?
Was Christ more concerned about getting people to worship him, or to follow a beautiful, impactful, and profound way of life?
Does it ever feel like the church is stuck in the 2nd grade?
Post-Modern Questions
Should anyone today care what a religious institution says?
Which of the many thousands of versions of the Christian religion is right?
Is the Bible a history book full of facts about God, or something far more interesting?
Do great spiritual teachers tell us what to believe, or help us discover whatever it is that we choose to believe?
Conversations
Modern
Conversations
Millions of people have left the church. What they're ultimately saying is that the product of the church isn't significant.
And the product of the church is the message. It's what people either buy or reject. High-quality music, professional video productions, remodeling of worship spaces, and charismatic speakers are all wonderful, but they're ancillary to the message. Ultimately they're just mediums to convey the message. And people keep leaving the church despite these ancillary improvements.
So maybe it's time that churches to take a critical look at their message.
Honest
Conversations
Religious institutions are as flawed as the people who sit in their pews.
Critical
Conversations
If the church wants to have a positive presence in the world, it must learn to value young adults. And young adults aren't necessarily concerned about worship services and uniform belief systems. We know this because of how few of them go to church.
But they could be extremely interested in activities that promote discussion and connection. They might want to talk about how music, art, and ancient literature mirror their experiences today. They might also want to investigate what it means to live well in this disconnected age: transcending the shallowness of our culture, growing healthy relationships, taking care of the earth, and overcoming all the depression and anxiety that pervades their world.
If these activities are not worth doing in your church, don't be surprised when your church keeps aging and shrinking.
Innovative
Conversations
For a long time Christians have subscribed to the concept of sin, that we humans are born into sin, that it's in our nature, and that God needed to punish us for our sin. But then Christ saved us from our sinful nature by being brutally tortured and killed.
But neuroscience teaches us something very different about our nature.
Today we can see how negative, selfish, and hurtful (sinful) thoughts generate in our brains. We can literally see this on scans.
We also understand through psychology and anthropology that these thoughts were bred into us through years of evolution and the necessity of personal and tribal survival.
And we understand now that we are able to actually change our thoughts into something more positive through therapy, synapse mapping, and new pattern development.
​
Perhaps these discoveries will forever change our outlook on what the church has simply advertised as our sinful nature.
