Pew Report - US Religious Landscape Survey 2008

The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life?s just released US Religious Landscape Survey 2008 is the most comprehensive (35,556 adult telephone interviews) I? have encountered. It sub-classifies Protestant churches into three groups:

Evangelical

Mainline

Historically black

While not listed specifically in many places in the 140 page report, on page 105 the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship is listed under Baptist in the Mainline Tradition under Mainline Protestant Churches. So presumably, as to count inclusions, any CBF folk in the 35,556 are grouped under Mainline. Whereas folk who identified themselves as SBC folk are included under Evangelical.

The interviews were conducted from May 8 to August 13, 2007, resulting in more recent data than most reports tracking national trends.

While the report received a flurry of articles in the media, much of the most informative data remains buried in the numerous detailed tables such as the one entitled ?Family Composition? on page 65.

You can download the full PDF report from here:

http://religions.pewforum.org/reports

Posted at 08:22AM Feb 27, 2008 by Gene Prescott in General | Comments[5]

Mature Males Only

If you are between ages 50 and 70 and either black or white, this study is for you. Become "highly fit" by frequent brisk walking and reduce rate of death by 70%: Live Longer The main factor is not increasing life span, however, it is maintaining useful and fun functionality including the extra years as the chart at this link shows: Squared Off Curve

Posted at 08:14AM Jan 23, 2008 by Gene Prescott in General | Comments[10]

Better Health

The Memorial Baptist Church, Greenville, NC, has recently presented a series of programs on Better Health. As an outgrowth of that initiative the church has now opened a Neighborhood Walking Trail on its premises. You can learn about the walking trail at: Better Health Progressively items will be added covering much of the content of the earlier, live, presentations. Readers can use the "comment" feature of the blog to ask questions.

Posted at 12:18AM Nov 24, 2007 by Gene Prescott in General | Comments[4]

Hollifield Article

((....."With "exploding" growth, Hollifield said North Carolina is "an educated population" with more research and development jobs than New Jersey or Washington, and is the sixth fastest growing state. Church growth planners realize "we are not the Old South - we are finding that the people moving here have very little appreciation for all things religious," he said. Not only are newcomers not southerners, Hollifield said, they "look at North Carolina Baptists as some sort of strange being.")) The above comments in recent BR article warrant discussion. The net in-migration patterns into North Carolina are not uniform state-wide. Actually, while North Carolina is growing robustly, some counties are losing population. So "doing church" in a regressing county will be different from "doing church" in a growing county. The growing counties also have many issues to understand. For instance, Pitt County (a growing county) has net out-migration among young adults graduating from college. That is, our children tend to migrate to Wake, Mecklinburg, Guilford, Forsyth, and other states. We get some net in-migration from other North Eastern North Carolina counties, some of which are losing population. We also get net in-migration from the North Eastern US and a significant Hispanic population. Among those from the NE, there is a net in-migration of African-Americans, Catholics, and many with no active church affiliation at all. Many of the African-Americans still elect to associate with predominantly African-American churches, the Catholics normally seek out Catholic churches, and Hispanics generally associate with other Hispanics even if they are missions of traditional protestant churches. The net in-migration from other NE NC counties is not enough to sustain growth in all existing churches. So for traditional churches to grow they have to evolve relationships with the un-churched, African-Americans, Catholics, Hispanics, or some measure of all of them. NONE of these folks are apt to show up in our worship services as visitors from their own initiative. So we can't expect to sustain adequate growth from our traditional pool of visitors. Ironically enough that means we have to become missionaries where we are .... that is, become credible friends with non-believers or different kinds of believers. Increasingly, meaningful relationships will have to precede any expectation of the newcomers ever becoming visitors in an established church.

Posted at 10:46AM Oct 09, 2007 by Gene Prescott in General | Comments[3]

About Change