Ed Stetzer Agrees with Me: Evangelicals are Growing in “None” Form

Last updated on: June 26, 2015 at 6:00 am by Alicia de los Reyes

Ed Stetzer Agrees with Me: Evangelicals are Growing in “None” Form 2015-06-22T10:30:21-08:00 Alicia de los Reyes

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Last week I stumbled upon this article by Ed Stetzer, director of LifeWay (an evangelical research company) on CNN about the rising number of evangelical nones.

Evangelical rock band at 80/35 in Des Moines, c/o of doryfour

I expected it to be about how evangelical Christians also identify as nones (which is fascinating! I usually think of nones as ex-mainstream Christians with very little religious affiliation or concrete belief system), but the article also focused on how church rolls might obscure growth, which some folks commented on in my post about why Millennials like me are leaving mainstream denominations and continuing to join evangelical ones.

At the very least, many evangelicals have been generous about claiming someone as a member. Moving between denominations makes it probable some were members of more than one church at a time. Getting churches to drop people from membership, until recently, was more difficult than the proverbial act of Congress.

There’s some truth in the old joke: There are more Baptists than people in Texas.

Read the rest of the article here. Stetzer’s interpretation generally agrees with my own: evangelicals are growing, denominations in general are down. I also agree with his observation that many evangelical Christians don’t know or care what particular denomination they subscribe to–when I was visiting Restoration Church in Dover, NH, even the pastor didn’t emphasize the church’s membership in the Assemblies of God.

I’d love to hear what you think in the comments: do you agree with Stetzer that denomination doesn’t matter, and that it’s becoming obscured? Do you think that evangelicals are being over or under-counted?

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