Out. Thank you. Welcome to the Cathedral Church of saint. My name is justin holcomb. Im the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of, Central Florida. And this is our we have lots of people from around Metro Orlando in the room and we are thrilled that you are here some of you are churched some of your church, some of you are unchurched for some us, its complicated regardless of your attendance, we are thrilled that youre here for the church event named after this book, which youll hear more about in just a little bit. But this is vital for to first 40 Million People in the past 30 years have left the church and half of them are willing to come back. And we need to find out why they left and why are they willing to back. And and so that theyre not just numbers, though thats the thing that youre here because you want to hear about this but these are people it could be you these are friends, family, neighbors and, coworkers. Youre going to hear a lot numbers tonight. And those numbers important, but the numbers are also and people who are made in the image of god in hearing their voice is really important to honor them and listen to him. So were here to listen to the ample, amplified voice of the church and jim and are helping amplify their voice. The second is because the goal is not just to get people back into a building so they can give money or vote a certain way. The reason this is so important to welcome people back who have left is because god as many people as possible to hear his great news which is that in christ he was reconciling the world to himself. Jesus christ said, that that god so loved the world and that he sent his only son so that anyone who believes in him not perish to have everlasting life. And the sun was not set into the world to condemn the world, but that through the sun, the world might be saved. Thats why its so vital. And ive known our speakers for years. Were actually our families, our friends, our children go to the same school weve been serving orlando for four years as ministers. We started podcast together and theyve been guest lectures in my apologetics class on numerous occasions. So im inviting friends to come up, but my friends are now experts from whom i will learn, which is an absolute blast. So let me give you the the technical about them. So jim davis is the pastor, the teaching pastor at orlando grace church. He his modules at reform Theological Seminary. Hes a host of as in heaven podcast and hes the coauthor of the great the churchy. Hes also married angela, who was a counselor here in orlando, and they have forged Michael Graham is the Program Director for the keller of cultural apologetics. He also received his mba from reformed Theological Seminary. Hes the executive producer of the podcast, as in heaven and he is the other co author and. Just so you know, the title, you cant read the thing is the great ditch searching, whos leaving . Why are they going and what will it take to bring them back . Hes married to sarah and they have two children and they live in orlando. Please me in welcoming jim davis and Michael Graham. Thats. A funny photo. Thank you, justin, for that really warm and gracious introduction and thank you church, Cathedral Church of saint luke for hosting this event in this amazing building, this beautiful place. And thank you. Just being a faithful witness in downtown for a very long time. I think that especially pertinent to this group is to understand that this research was birthed out of the story of Central Florida. So i grew up in Central Florida, in orlando Third Generation might, grew up in orlando. And if you were here in orlando in the nineties and early 2000, it had feeling like it was becoming a christian mecca of sorts. So it didnt matter what your denomination denominational space you could be if youre in the mainline space, the second largest mainline church in the United States was here in downtown. If you were in the evangelical baptist realm, First Baptist church was booming and. Their pastor was president of the southern baptist. If youre in the nondenominational space, joel hunter is pastoring northland church, 20,000 people on the cutting edge of church technology. In many ways, if you were well and then his son planted a church in downtown orlando that was arguably the coolest church in town, baptizing magic players like dwight howard. And if you were in the charismatic space, we may forget benny hinn was here paula white was here, an institution these major christian organized nations began to relocate to orlando, florida. So in the nineties reformed Theological Seminary came here campus crusade for christ. The Largest ChurchMissions Organization in world, relocated to orlando and then a litany of other ministries like ligonier pioneers, wickliffe and others began to relocate their headquarters here. Well. Well, fast forward to a bahner report in 2017 and we learn that the orlando metropolitan area a seven county area has the same percentage of evangelical ills as new york city and seattle. And so mike and i were really affected by that report and began to think through orlando and began to think through why is it that we feel so much different than new york city and seattle . And it wasnt to see that the majority of people who we interacted with who did not go to church used to so in new york city and seattle is very different. People have grown up their whole life, maybe never even been inside a church, but a lot of the people in had been had grown up in a church been invested in the church and for whatever reason no longer went. So we wanted to understa and more about this we wanted more data. We wanted to the scope of it, which we soon found it was not just an orlando phenomenon what was going on in was paradigmatic for the entire United States. The problem is that there was no Real Research church that we could bank we were doing on anecdotally. You heard that Bishop Holcomb over here. He teaches apologetics at reform Theological Seminary. My wife took his class. She was getting her counseling degree there and she wanted to do her Research Paper teaching. And justin said, thats great, but theres no research. You cant do a Research Paper if theres no research. So this got our wheels turning and we decided to commission the most comprehensive nationwide academically Peer Reviewed quantitative study. Thats a mouthful ever done on churches in the United States. We commissioned social scientists dr. Ryan birge and dr. Paul joop to do this study. We raised about 100,000 to do this study, and we learned a lot from the study there were over 7000 participants in the study over 600 data points. There were three different phases to the study and the first study, the was to prove or disprove this thesis we are currently in the largest and fastest religious shift in the history of our country and we proved it. So we proved it as said by learning that over million adult over the past largely 25 years have stopped going to church. Now its important to know the way we define a churched person is that somebody who used to go to church least monthly and now to less than one time per year. So to put this in perspective, if were going to go at it by a percentage previously the largest religious shift in the history of our country was were the 25 years postcivil. There was at least a 12 uptick in that 25 year period in the number in the percentage of churchgoers in the United States our current religious shift the past 25 years is 1. 25 times greater than. That one just going the opposite direction in terms of numbers. It larger than the first great awakening, the second great awakening. And every billy graham crusade combined. So that thats the part that initially we want to land the United States is in middle of the largest and fastest religious shift in the history of our country. Then we wanted to know who is determining, who are these people and . If you if you just Pay Attention to what you see in the news and on social media, you would think, well, the Church Person had a really bad experience. Church, this person has converted completely probably is wrestling through gender identity and sexuality, sexual ethics that may be different than the church. And while that that those types of church certainly exist. Do you want to know the number one reason for searching in america . I moved. I moved we actually found that of the 40 million adult americans who have left church, 30 million of them did so without any pain point. So at the highest level then began to understand okay. Some people left with a pain point, about 10 million americans. But 30 million didnt. So we began to distinguish between these two groups and we called one the deep church casualties and they have the pain point and the other 30 million americans as we called the casual church they moved they had Life Transitions. They got divorced they had children. Their children grew up. And they were consumed in travel, sports. The children had their activities, church became inconvenient for whatever reason. And of course, then there was covid people stopped going to church depending on what state you lived in, anywhere from 3 to 18 months, people, new rhythms, new habits. Many people during that time which combined find are just more and more reasons for this casually deep church group to increasingly grow now in the church casual tea. Some are christians, some are not. Were to show you more about that in the casual church realm, some are christians are not. As best we can tell. But what we really to see is that the Church Person is not a monolithic profile. And so we wanted to, in our third phase of our study, dial in even deeply. And so we use something called Machine Learning. Its good know this this isnt just two pastors putting their finger up in the air or polling you know our 200 best friends are doing a facebook poll we had a Machine Learning algorithm mind these massive amounts of data that we had to compare common answers and help to understand who is the searching in more granular detail and all that might take it from there. So yeah machine, learning is just a fancy word to say. This is how we efficiently and without bias introduce dos people who had very clusters of answers, choices of why they did church, what kind of demographics they are, how much willingness that they have return to the church and what reasons why they might return to the church. And so were going to talk five different profiles here. Were going to go through these things relatively. Were going to first cover four different types of Church Evangelii and then were going to cover the and Roman Catholic church together. Now whats interesting to note about the mainline Roman Catholic and why were going to cover the cover, those together is by and large the mainline and Roman Catholic people who did churched look very similar in just about every category. Now, the main difference between the mainline and Roman Catholic church would be the Catholic Church were a little bit more sensitive to scant clergy scandal in the world. And you know, if youre familiar all with the history and, you know, films spotlight and these kinds of things can understand why and then the mainline church were a little bit more sensitive to moving as jim mentioned, the very top choice for why people did church. And so, without further ado, going to start, though, with the four different types of church evangelicals now imagine with me here for a moment, the first profile cultural christians now theres 15 million of the 40 Million People who did churched who out of evangelical churches the Roman Catholics and mainline together are about 20 million. So but cultural christians this is about million of the 15 Million People who left. Imagine with me the cultural christian. Youre about 40 years old. Your male. You were probably never a christian and life seemed to be working well for you didnt necessarily have a big problem with the church and just kind of moved on from church about decade ago and so the cultural christians this is a group of people they didnt necessarily have a big issue with the church by and large theyre in that that cultural that casual Church Category now necessarily a lot there looks catastrophic the average age of the person who was a cultural a cultural christian who did church is 40 years old and they did church about a decade ago. This group interestingly enough, is almost entirely monoliths actually white and one thing to note, as were going through all of the data here, the learning algorithm that jim referred to we did not allow the algorithm to sort based on race or ethnicity. And so these clusters were developed without the, you know, algorithm have the having the benefit of seeing and well circle back. Well play a little bit of back and forth with that. I think Bishop Holcomb will ask him some questions about that. But its important to note this group is monolithically white, 98 married. These are people who are doing well for themselves. They had above average incomes, above average education, lots of full time work in this group. Now, heres where things start to get interesting in terms of the belief system for this group of people. Now, we developed something that we called an orthodoxy score with respect to all of these different profiles. Heres what we mean by that. Largely what we were for were things like what you would find in the nicene creed, the divinity of jesus, the humanity of the sinless ness of jesus jesuss substitution. Every death, his atonement, the resurrection jesus, the reliability of the bible and the trinity. So this group of people, this profile, the cultural christians, the lowest orthodoxy, score on average, they would answer, you know, accurately relative to nicene creed. About 56 of those, you know, kind of seven questions. Now, heres the kicker. This is why, you know, that this group largely probably are not followers. Christ, only 1 of this group said that jesus is the son of god, 1 . So this is probably not a group of people who are probably serious christians and probably in the faith. And again, this is a little bit over half of the people who left evangelical churches. Interestingly enough, this group is lean center politically. However theyre not necessarily super progressive on like racial justice. America does seem be working well for this group people as well. Okay why did the cultural leave the number one reason and youll see a lot of these casual reasons that jim kind of alluded to was attending, was in convenient the from the top reasons was my friends were not attending Worship Service number three they moved theres some other things in the mix things like suffering wanting to express their gender identity scandal in the in the broader church the broader culture and feeling that church was too restrictive their sexual freedom or things like worshiping online. But by and large, these seem to be issues that seem be a bit more casual in nature. And it doesnt seem that these people were really christians in, you know, in the historic of our creeds and confessions. Now, whats interesting is that almost half 48 of this group said theyd be willing to return to church today. Right now. And so here the top where they said that they would be willing to return, number one, new friends. Number two, lonely and want to make new friends. Three, this is this ones a little bit this ones like the one thats not like the others supernatural phenomena. This is the only the only time any group supernatural phenomenon. Its interesting. I would have to levitate begin to miss church a friend invites me a spouse wants to go move and want to make new friends in a Good Community and. Heres what you see among the cultural christians. Theres tremendous opportunity is there particularly relationally almost all of those things have to do with interpersonal, human. So theres a lot of opportunities with people who have, you know, who fit this this category in this profile. So what is this group people need in order to return to church . The top thing i would say is they need sincere community. They also need interestingly enough, we didnt cover this they need Mental Health help. It kind of surprisingly relative their education, their high education, their high income, their Mental Health was not in a good place, particularly as it pertain to anxiety, depression and loneliness and. Theres a lot more that we we cover in the book, but there actually are Significant Health benefits of. People who go to church on a weekly or greater. You can look at harvard professor tyler vander weise this we talk about it in the book. And the third thing that this group needs is they need sound doctrine in a church that will care about spiritual formation. Spiritual formation is where know we are formed in our head or our in our hands and we grow more into the likeness