Record breaking day!

We hit a new high yesterday with over 1400 individual visits to the Groundwire website.  This has been building for a while, so we’ve also seen an increase in chats and email requests.  We are over 7.6 million hits and 76,000 visits for the year.  That’s a lot of unchurched and prodigals getting reached with the gospel!  God is blowing our goals out of the water! 

Vatican announces Muslims outnumber Catholics worldwide

Interesting article:

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Islam has overtaken Roman Catholicism as the biggest single religious denomination in the world, the Vatican said on Sunday. 

read the rest of the article here…

Overwhelming Negative Perceptions of Christians among youth

Barna’s stats on perceptions of Christians among the next generation are downright troubling….  Among 16-39 year olds, just 16% indicated they have a good impression of Christianity.  When the same question was asked about evangelicals, only 3% had a good impression.  That’s down 8x over the Boomer generations perception of evangelicals (25%). 

My thoughts on these stats–we (the Church) are losing the youth….. 

The church I attend (New Life–http://www.newlifechurch.org/) has a very strong and committed youth ministry.  It’s tempting to look at my own church and draw the opposite conclusion.  But my church only represents hundreds of young people–there are thousands left unreached in Colorado Springs, millions around the US, and billions around the world.

Some of the specifics aren’t all that shocking:  87% of youth said that Christianity is judgemental, 85% said hypocritical, 78% said old fashioned, and 75% said they felt the church was too involved in politics.  The top two most frequent unprompted comments about Christianity:  “Christianity is changed from what it used to be” and “Christianity in today’s society no longer looks like Jesus”.  The top favorable perception of Christianity with a score of 82% is that it teaches the same basic ideas as other religions. 

Reading stats like these reinforces the notion that the old ways of reaching youth aren’t working as well any more.  It’s time to move beyond the church’s walls and reach out into the world. 

Secular radio waves and the internet have proven effective for Groundwire because those are two of the primary media sources for youth.  We’re able to reach out to kids in the midst of their everyday lives.  That’s the challenge–how do we enter their world and present the gospel so that they have a chance to begin a relationship with Christ….  They can’t make a choice for Christ if they never hear….