Being highly religious, professing a religion, being a member of a church means nothing really.

The Pharisees, the Nazis, Islamic terrorists, every minister and minion of evil has been or is highly religious. Many people belong to a church while being utterly dead within their hearts, clueless as to the truth, unbelieving of the Word of God. Faithful to a church, a pastor, a priest, a preacher, and a denomination but unfaithful to God, to the Lord Jesus Christ, to the Holy Spirit, and to the Word of God.

The Christian Post, Gallup, and even Barna resort to categorizing all this according to American politics. American political party affiliation (read the article below) when it is all about, only about has an individual repented? Truly? Has an individual been renewed of mind and spirit, truly regenerated, truly transformed into a new creature by their repentance, their confession of their sin, and there being receptive to the infinite power of in the person of the Holy Spirit to work within their cold, dead, sinful heart and to cleanse them with the free gift of grace, the free gift of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and to become one of the elect, a true disciple of Jesus?

And those numbers are few.

But a remnant.

All this talk and writing of religion, politics, churches, denominations, so many professing to be Christian nad never reading the Bible, not really knowing what it truly means to be a Christian.

Being religious, wearing a cross around one’s neck, belonging to a church is not being a Christian.

Being a true disciple of Jesus, being a true believer, being a true Christian requires allowing and desiring a complete change of heart. A complete change in thinking, a complete change in how one lives.

Not by works or their effort — but by their faith in the infinite power of the person of the Holy Spirit, the power of the Spirit of God, the cleansing blood of Jesus Christ to create in them a new creature. A new person in essence. To take up one’s cross with Christ. To endure. To suffer. To live a Biblical life in this world still in the flesh, but not of the world.

Numbers do not really matter. None of them are ever accurate anyway.

Being religious doesn’t matter — except to more likely condemn than to save (always reference the Pharisees, among the most religious people to ever walk the earth and they were dead bones, whited sepulchers, blind and utterly lost refusing the truth).

There is always, only but a remnant that truly exists.

And this remnant needs to seek, pray for increased strength, spiritual wisdom, and understanding and prepare for the increasing persecution, the signs and wonders to come that unless they, we, are ever stronger in our faith? Ever more fluent and stronger in the contents and context and understanding of the Holy Bible? Ever stronger in our prayer life? Many will fall away. As many already have.

Do not be deceived.

Do not be lulled into believing being religious means anything good or righteous.

Do not be lulled into believing if a member of a so-called Christian church you’re in. Able to coast and it’s that church, that denomination, the pastor, preacher, minister, a priest that will guide you to heaven and eternal life.

Do not be deceived.

Do not fall prey.

Grow in the knowledge and wisdom of God’s Word.

Grow in boldness and strength in prayer.

Grow in the full armour of God in this escalating spiritual war all are in whether on the Evil One’s side, or on God’s, Jesus’, and the Holy Spirt’s side.

Every person is on one or the other.

And there is only a remnant here on earth on the right side.

Church membership means nothing. A denomination means nothing. A cross around one’s neck means nothing. It isn’t about being a conservative or a Republican, it isn’t about being liberal and or a Democrat. It isn’t about being an American, or any nationality, ethnicity, age, or gender.

It is what is in the heart, in the mind, in the daily walk, in the living of the life daily that matters.

Purely, plainly, only.

Each person is either crucified and resurrected with Christ, in faith, by the free gift of God’s grace, in Christ alone…or they aren’t.

And that’s all that matters. Now. In the end. For all eternity.

Ken Pullen

Thursday, April 1st, 2021

ACP — A Crooked Path Made Straight By the Word of God

Fewer than 50% of Americans have formal church membership for the first time in 80 years: Gallup

TUESDAY, MARCH 30, 2021

By Leonardo Blair

Reprinted from The Christian Post

While America remains a highly religious nation with seven in 10 claiming affiliation with some kind of organized religion, for the first time in nearly 80 years, fewer than half of them now say they have formal membership in a specific house of worship, according to a new Gallup analysis.

In 1937, says Gallup, when they first measured formal membership in houses of worship, some 70% of Americans had formal church membership and that measure remained steady for the next 60 years until it began a steady decline in 1998. In 2020, formal membership in houses of worship stood at 49%.

The Washington, D.C.-based analytics and advisory company was able to highlight several factors for the decline through responses from more than 6,000 U.S. adults each time across three-year aggregates from 1998 to 2000, 2008 to 2010, and 2018 to 2020 when formal membership in houses of worship first dipped below 50%.

One of the biggest factors Gallup found strongly correlates with church membership is age. Some 66% of traditionalists — U.S. adults born before 1946 — have formal membership in a church, compared with 58% of Baby Boomers, 50% of those in Generation X and 36% of millennials. Current but limited data on members of Gen Zers who’ve already reached adulthood suggest their church membership rate is similar to millennials.

The analysis also pointed to the growing number of Americans who express no religious preference. In the last 20 years, the share of Americans who do not identify with any religion has grown from 8% in 1998 to 2000 to 21% in the last three years. Only 4% of people from this group said they held formal membership in a church, synagogue or mosque. Between 1998 and 2000 that figure was 10%.

“While it is possible that part of the decline seen in 2020 was temporary and related to the coronavirus pandemic, continued decline in future decades seems inevitable, given the much lower levels of religiosity and church membership among younger versus older generations of adults,” wrote Gallup Senior Editor Jeffrey M. Jones.

“Churches are only as strong as their membership and are dependent on their members for financial support and service to keep operating. Because it is unlikely that people who do not have a religious preference will become church members, the challenge for church leaders is to encourage those who do affiliate with a specific faith to become formal, and active, church members,” he added.

Among religious groups, Catholics suffered the steepest decline over the periods measured dropping from 76% to 58%. Protestants fell 9% from 73% to 64%.

The data also showed that declining church membership in the last two decades was greater among Eastern residents and Democrats.

Political conservatives, Republicans, married adults and college graduates experienced lower declines and tended to have higher rates of church membership, along with Southern residents and non-Hispanic black adults, Gallup said.

In his analysis of data from the General Social Survey of five-year windows in which individuals were born spanning from 1965 to 1984 and published by the Barna Group in 2019, Ryan Burge, an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University and pastor of First Baptist Church of Mt. Vernon, Illinois, showed that younger generations raised in the church weren’t typically returning to church when compared with members of the “Baby boomer” generation born between 1945 and 1964.

For anyone concerned with church growth, Burge says, “this should sound an alarm.”

“Many pastors are standing at the pulpit on Sunday morning and seeing fewer and fewer of their former youth group members returning to the pews when they move into their late-20s and early-30s. No church should assume that this crucial part of the population is going to return to active membership as their parents once did,” he explained.

“The data is speaking a clear message: the assumptions that undergirded church growth from two decades ago no longer apply. If churches are sitting back and just waiting for all their young people to flood back in as they move into their 30s, they are likely in for a rude awakening. Inaction now could be creating a church that does not have a strong future,” he added.