Already Gone-Part 1

I'm in the process of reading Already Gone by Ken Ham and Britt Beemer. I'm about halfway through the book right now. Ken Ham is the founder of Answers in Genesis ministry. Britt Beemer is a marketing research and business analyst expert. Together they set out to survey 1,000 people, between the ages of 20 and 30 who once attended conservative and evangelical churches. They looked at churches that claimed to be Bible-believing churches. Their study was spurred on by other studies (such as one done by George Barna) showing that 61% of today's young adults who were regular church attenders are now "spiritually disengaged." They are not actively attending church, praying, or reading their Bibles. The goal of the authors was this: They wanted to know who was leaving church, why they were leaving, and what (if anything) could be done about it.

When I first heard about this book, I was very interested to read it. I know the people from this study. Though I may not know the particular people of this study personally, they are representative of many of my friends and my husband's friends, people we grew up with, in church, who do not walk with the Lord today.

Here's a few statistics from the book:

Of all the 20 to 29-year-0ld evangelicals who attended church regularly but no longer do so:

• 95% of them attended church regularly during their elementary and middle school years.
• 55% attended church regularly during high school
• 11% were still going to church during college

Those who no longer believe that all of the accounts and stories in the Bible are true:

• 39.8% first had their doubts in middle school
• 43.7% first had their doubts in high school
• 10.6% had their first doubts in college

I find those statistics interesting. Stay tuned for more from this book in the days to come.