“We aren’t as Christian as we used to be”

Deep thoughts on Nones, Commitment and community

New Beginnings

The Pew Research Center released a study this week on “America’s Changing Religious Landscape,” and I’ve been surprised by how much press it received.  The findings aren’t surprising to me as a pastor; I have heard for years that the population of Christians in the United States is declining and the percentage of Americans who are religiously unaffiliated is rising.  I’m not particularly bothered by the sentiment that “we [ie the United States] aren’t as Christian as we used to be.”  Perhaps this indicates that folks nominally connected to Christianity because they felt compelled by culture or society have now left church altogether.  To me, that seems like a more honest position.  It means those active in their churches want to be active because they have had an experience of God or have made the conscious choice to follow Jesus (to use Christian lingo…I am a Presbyterian pastor after all…).

However, the…

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Author: katyandtheword

Pastor Katy has enjoyed ministry at New Covenant since 2010, where the church has solidified its community focus. Prior to that she studied both Theology and Christian Formation at Princeton Theological Seminary. She also served as an Assistant Chaplain at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and as the Christian Educational Coordinator at Bethany Presbyterian at Bloomfield, NJ. She is an writer and is published in Enfleshed, Sermonsuite, Presbyterian's today and Outlook. She writes prayers, liturgy, poems and public theology and is pursuing her doctorate in ministry in Creative Write and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. She enjoys working within and connecting to the community, is known to laugh a lot during service, and tells as many stories as possible. Pastor Katy loves reading Science Fiction and Fantasy, theater, arts and crafts, music, playing with children and sunshine, and continues to try to be as (w)holistically Christian as possible. "Publisher after publisher turned down A Wrinkle in Time," L'Engle wrote, "because it deals overtly with the problem of evil, and it was too difficult for children, and was it a children's or an adult's book, anyhow?" The next year it won the prestigious John Newbery Medal. Tolkien states in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings that he disliked allegories and that the story was not one.[66] Instead he preferred what he termed "applicability", the freedom of the reader to interpret the work in the light of his or her own life and times.

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