Darrell Bock
Welcome to The Table where we discuss issues
of God and culture.
And my guest today is John Dickerson, who
has written a book on the condition of evangelicalism
in our world as we deal with the seismic change
in culture that is taking place in our midst.
And we hope to have John help us sort our
way through that.
Now, he looks pretty young, but he’s pretty
wise.
So John, it’s a real pleasure to have you
with us today.
John Dickerson
Thank you, Darrell.
It’s great to be here.
Darrell Bock
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
You didn’t start out in the pastorate.
You started out doing –
John Dickerson
Journalism, and mainstream journalism.
Darrell Bock
Mm-hmm.
And what kind – were you an editor or a
writer or –?
John Dickerson
Actually, I’m a little bit of each.
Started as a writer.
Was an editor for a while and went back to
writing.
Did a lot of investigative reporting, a lot
of – it’s called long-form journalism
where you’re doing these 8,000 -10,000 word
stories.
Darrell Bock
Now, so how does a journalist get to the pastorate?
John Dickerson
[Laughter] By God’s providence.
Darrell Bock
Yeah.
John Dickerson
Yeah, so I grew up in a pastor’s home, and
I kind of knew the weight of ministry, and
as a result, dreamed of just being a tent-maker.
You know, wouldn’t it be great to get to
teach the Bible and use your spiritual gifts
but not have some of those extra burdens.
So while I was in seminary working on my M.Div,
I was working as a journalist and hoped to
really just be a layperson who could handle
God’s word well.
But ultimately, God just made it clear he
was calling me to give my life really the
way Christ gave his life, sacrificed himself
for the Bride, not in the same way, but to
follow him in that way, to give up my ambitions,
my desires, set those aside and serve his
church.
So that’s when I surrendered to be a vocational
pastor.
Darrell Bock
And just to show that you weren’t just a
run-of-the-mill journalist, you did win some
journalistic awards, is that not correct?
John Dickerson
Yeah, by God’s grace, Tom Brokaw and Charles
Gibson of ABC News gave me the Livingston
Award.
That’s a pretty notable national one.
A few others.
And I always wondered why God gave those to
me.
I didn’t really feel like I deserved them,
and a lot of the bigger ones came right as
I was leaving journalism to go into the pastorate.
And so you wonder sometimes, “God, why did
that happen in my life?”
And then when I started to really have this
desire to make the Church aware; not that
I’m the one source of truth or anything,
but to help the Church understand how the
culture’s changing and how we fit in, then
it really all came together.
Okay, here’s why God gave me these journalism
credentials.
Darrell Bock
So now, you’re a pastor where?
John Dickerson
Pastor in Arizona, about two hours north of
Phoenix.
It’s called Prescott, Arizona, up in the
mountains.
Darrell Bock
Oh, very nice.
John Dickerson
And we have a great congregation up there
and just trying to love God and love people.
Darrell Bock
Well, let’s talk a little bit about evangelicalism
in your book.
I take it that your journalistic skills really
did help you in putting together the book,
particularly your analysis of culture.
Why don’t you talk a little bit about what
that involved, taking a look at how the culture
worked and the types of things that you were
looking at?
John Dickerson
Great.
So one of the kind of unique things about
the sort of journalism I did, especially the
work that won those national awards, was looking
at really big, complex issues.
For example, oversight of all medical physicians
in the state of Arizona; 20-some thousand
doctors there, and just kind of analyzing
big systems and seeing how they work.
And in that case, figuring out the different
medical boards, their different oversights,
finding the holes.
So that’s just kind of the way God wired
me.
And so really after five years of doing that
kind of work, I don’t know, you almost get
– you just kind of get a feel for looking
at a big system and trying to figure it out
and finding expert sources, which is really
I think what’s unique about the book God
let me write, The Great Evangelical Recession,
is that I didn’t commission any original
research.
I essentially found there’s more than enough
research out there.
The difficult thing is making sense of it
all.
The difficult thing is aggregating it, kind
of wading through it.
And that’s sort of the age we live in.
Aggregation is so important, whether it’s
Google aggregating search for us or Facebook
aggregating our friends [laughter], there’s
so much information, but we need programs
and humans who can make sense of it.
So I started really by reading a lot of the
experts who have done primary research, whether
it’s Christian Smith from Notre Dame, or
George Barna, dozens of others, and really
started by spending about half a year just
reading about 40 of the leading books at that
time 2 or 3 years ago to just start to get
a sense of the big picture.
Darrell Bock
So you were pooling a whole lot of information
that is out there?
John Dickerson
That’s correct.
And exactly.
It just hasn’t been – the dots hadn’t
been connected on the particular information
that’s in this book.
Darrell Bock
Okay.
Well, let’s talk about what you found.
And the way you did it was – the way the
book is set up, which is so nice, is that
you go through six key things that are happening
really to churches and to Christianity currently.
The focus is pretty much North America, is
that correct?
John Dickerson
That’s correct.
Darrell Bock
Yeah.
John Dickerson
And even in the United States, a lot of the
data is just United States.
Darrell Bock
Okay.
So let’s talk about these six areas.
You highlight six things that are going on,
and I think the most efficient way to do this
is to just talk about them one at a time.
So you talk about inflation, but you don’t
– we aren’t talking about what’s happening
in the monetary or economic system.
We’re talking about something else.
What’s inflation about?
John Dickerson
We’re talking about the actual size of the
evangelical movement and our perception, at
least for many of us, the circles I was raised
in, that evangelicals are one-third or even
one-half of the population.
Logically, as I was reading all these different
great primary research works, I felt like
logically we had to establish a baseline of
what percentage of the population are we roughly.
It’s a given that it’s impossible to know
for sure.
Like any good sociologist would say that I
think Jesus said that when he said there’s
wheats and there’s tares.
[Laughter]
We can’t really know exactly what percentage
of the population we are.
But what I found is four separate researchers
who used four separate methodologies that
were all really thorough.
This isn’t just a phone survey kind of methodology.
And these four researchers all found that
we’re about 7 percent; one found 8.9 percent.
The other three were in the 7 percent of the
U.S. population, so less than 1 in 10 Americans
who are actually an active evangelical Bible-believing
Christian.
Darrell Bock
Which means that rather than thinking about
ourselves as kind of a significant plurality,
we’re actually much more of a minority than
we tend to think.
John Dickerson
Yeah, unfortunately.
And there’s a lot of confusion on it because
still to this day, if you ask Americans, “Are
you a born-again Christian”, we know 30
to 40 percent will say yes.
But then if you ask that same group, “Is
Allah the same God as Jesus”, half of them
will say yes.
So obviously those people who say, “I’m
a born again Christian,” but believe Allah
is the same God as Jesus, they’re not quite
in our camp [laughter] theologically.
Darrell Bock
Right.
John Dickerson
And so that’s where it gets difficult and
I think the best numbers are those researchers
– come from the researchers who’ve really
spent three or four years figuring it out
because it’s a complex thing.
Darrell Bock
Okay.
So what do you think is the significance of
the fact that the numbers are smaller than
we tend to think?
John Dickerson
Great.
So I named the book The Great Evangelical
Recession to parallel with the great financial
recession.
And a number – there were a number of triggers
under the great financial recession.
But a lot of economists agreed that a primary
trigger, if not the primary trigger, was the
inflation of home values.
The mortgage market and other factors had
inflated home values in a lot of markets far
above their actual value.
So in a lot of ways, the great financial recession
was actually just a market correction.
The market was correcting.
Houses that were selling for $300,000.00 that
are really worth $120,000.00 went back down
to $120,000.00.
And when markets that big correct, there’s
a whole lot of ripples that go out as a result.
And so we saw the stock market lose half its
value.
We saw millions of Americans lose their retirement
and their home equity.
Well, in a similar way, culturally, evangelicalism
in the United States has acted and behaved
and claimed in many circles from the early
1980s until recently that we are a majority
in the country, or at least almost half the
country.
Darrell Bock
Yeah, one of the largest pluralities around,
yes.
John Dickerson
So if these numbers are true, and I say at
the beginning of the book, “I hope I’m
wrong.
[Laughter] I hope I’m wrong about all these
findings.
I really do.”
But if this 7 percent, if we’re 1 in 10,
if that’s true, well, that’s a huge market
correction.
That’s going to show in our political influence.
It’s going to show in a whole bunch of ways
that essentially the culture I believe is
starting to realize we’re not as influential
of a group as we’ve claimed.
Now, we’re still obviously a very significant
group.
One in ten Americans almost, that’s a lot
of people, lot of resources.
But not the same as being almost half the
country.
Darrell Bock
Okay.
So that’s inflation.
Now, switch the metaphors here.
We’re going to go to bleeding, which is
not the most pleasant image in the world.
[Laughter] So what is bleeding represent?
John Dickerson
So bleeding, obviously we all know – we
are the body of Christ.
We’re told that over and over in the New
Testament.
Bleeding is the loss of people from the body,
not the failure to generate new believers.
That’s a different chapter.
But the actual loss of people who are born
into evangelical households.
So the biggest demographic of that group is
the 18 to 29 year olds.
And David Kinnaman’s done such great work
with You Lost Me.
Drew Dyck over at Leadership Journal has done
some great work with Generation Ex-Christian.
And we know from multiple sources, from Barna
to LifeWay to even UCLA that two and three
who have been attending an evangelical church
will stop attending, and other ones stop believing.
There’s multiple surveys on this between
the ages of 18 and 29.
Now, the great hope is that a lot of them
will come back.
And there’s not a lot of hard data on how
many do.
One of the reasons is I just turned 31, so
if I was the 18 to 29, well, how long will
it take to know if I was a prodigal, if I
came back.
It might take another 30 years.
So you know, people get upset that there’s
not more hard data on that, and we have to
understand the constraints of research, that
we don’t really know what the 31-year-olds
right now will do until 29 years from now
or something.
[Laughter] But we’re definitely seeing anecdotally
and from the research that does exist on it
that it’s not the majority who are coming
back.
One suggests that it’s about a third of
those who leave who do come back.
And we get into anecdotal anecdotes here as
opposed to objective research because of what
I described.
But we see that the ones who do come back
typically return not right where they left
off.
You know, if they’ve, for their 20s, been
away from the Lord, they’ve made a whole
lot of lifestyle choices during that decade
that typically set a course for your life.
So whether it’s alcoholism or pornography,
just other really they’re sins that enslave,
and so even the ones who do come back, it’s
not like they come back and right away start
leading a home group or [laughter] discipling
other people.
They come back kind of wounded, limping in,
and hopefully, we put our arms around them
and restore them.
Darrell Bock
So if I’m getting this right, you’re saying
out of the group that we’re talking about,
we have one-third that stay; we have two-thirds
that leave; we might get one-third back, but
even that means that one out of every three
doesn’t remain.
John Dickerson
That’s right.
Darrell Bock
And so obviously, dealing with the age group
that is 18 to 29 is important and I take it
that part of what emerges out of what you’re
looking at is the idea that we really need
to pay careful attention to that age group,
the 19 to 29-year-old group, which actually
translates into paying really good attention
to them when they’re in their teenage years
and earlier before they get there.
John Dickerson
That’s exactly right.
And that’s my heart in this is thinking
of the future church.
My concern is not that the evangelical movement,
if we could call it that, evangelical Christianity,
the Bride of Christ.
Let’s just call her that.
My concern is not that the church is going
to fall apart in the next year or two.
We’ve got great resources, great momentum.
My concern is that all of these trends come
together in a very consistent pattern of gradual
decline, and yet, the – in addition to that,
the culture’s rapidly changing, and that
seems to be contributing – it seems like
the decline is accelerating in the face of
cultural change.
So theologically, I should couch this, that
in Matthew 16, Jesus is so clear; “He will
build his church.
The gates of hell will not prevail.”
There’s certain folks that come across my
research and say, “Well, you obviously don’t
trust the sovereignty of God.”
Well, I do trust the sovereignty of God.
I know his church is going to prevail.
And yet, I think we have to be careful about
claiming the sovereignty of God as an excuse
to not be honest about what’s going on in
the country where God has placed us.
So we know his church is going to prevail.
But I think that especially those of us who
are leaders in ministry, we have a responsibility
to really be aware.
The church has prevailed since the 1600s in
the world.
But it has definitely declined in England
and in Scotland and in Germany.
And if we’re now on that track in the United
States, what can those of us who God strategically
placed in this country, first of all, what
do we need to understand and then what does
God’s word say about it?
Darrell Bock
Well, we’ll come back to how to deal with
some of these because they’re important
issues related to how this works.
But this particular age group is also a concern
that we have seen in some of the conversations
we have.
We’re in the process of mapping many college
campuses across the country and asking what
the pressures are on students who go into
college, particularly colleges that aren’t
Christian colleges.
And then the backside of that is, well, how
do we prepare students who go into those environments
for what they’re going to face, both socially
and intellectually.
And it’s an important concern, and it means
that youth ministry is a very, very important
and strategic part of the church.
We tend to view it sometimes, perhaps, as
just simply people maintenance or kind of
expensive form of entertainment and babysitting.
But it actually is a very, very important
part of the church program.
John Dickerson
Absolutely.
And American children outside of the church,
as a whole, are growing up younger and younger.
And they’re making their life decisions,
life – setting their life courses younger
and younger.
And absolutely if we wait until college, we’re
way too late.
And that’s one of the other things where
there’s not a lot of hard data, but anecdotally,
it seems that a lot of – it’s Kendra Dean
from Princeton who concluded a lot of these
young people who walk away – and this is
her conclusion – that perhaps many of their
families, they didn’t really see the power
of God.
They didn’t really see what it is to be
sold out to God.
They saw a more nominal Christianity.
They saw – and obviously this isn’t the
case with everyone who walks away.
Darrell Bock
Right.
John Dickerson
There are kids who walk away from homes where
the mom and dad are, you know, as we’d say,
on fire for the Lord.
But her conclusion from her research was that
essentially, they’re reflecting what their
parents are doing the other six days of the
week.
Darrell Bock
Right.
John Dickerson
They lived in households where Christianity,
following Christ didn’t affect everyday
choices.
It was something that was done on Sunday and
they decided, “Well, it’s not really – why
play the game?”
Darrell Bock
Right, right.
Well, that’s bleeding.
That’s a pretty important category.
The next one sounds equally ominous.
Bankrupt.
[Laughter] So we’re bleeding and we’re
inflated and we’re bankrupt.
So what’s bankruptcy about?
John Dickerson
Well, bankruptcy returns to the financial
analogy, and it’s literally about our finances,
that evangelical machine, we don’t want
to call it that, but the organizations we
have, the way they run, they run on the fuel
of dollars.
That sounds really evil or greedy.
It’s not.
But it is the way it works in America.
If you take an honest look at our network,
our web of ministries from Navigators, Campus
Crusade, Focus on the Family, to local churches,
to our missionaries overseas, there’s a
lot of different components to this big machine.
But they all run on one fuel in the American
model, and that is dollars.
And again, there’s nothing wrong with that.
But I think we could argue that historically,
compared to a lot of other churches, and even
contemporary churches in China and India,
places where the church is embattled but thriving,
we could argue that we’re a lot more dependent
on the dollar here, if you could have a dollar-to-disciples
ratio.
[Laughter]
Darrell Bock
Yeah.
John Dickerson
And so I guess the concern there is if the
amount of fuel, the amount of dollars coming
in, stays consistent, then the gradual path
of decline that we’re on could stay consistent.
But if those dollars were to begin dropping
rapidly, then the good that we are doing would
also decline.
It’s very dependent.
I mean, right now, most of our ministries,
if not enough dollars come in, we have to
lay off staff.
We have to lay off the people who are doing
the heavy lifting of evangelism and discipleship.
So I really looked into how are we financially
for the next 15 years, for the next 30 years;
what are the giving trends generationally
because I had seen, as probably most ministry
leaders have seen in anecdotal experience,
that the older generation givers are very
consistent.
The younger generation givers tend to be sporadic,
tend to give emotionally.
Many don’t give at all.
Many younger generation American evangelicals
are less consistent not only in their giving,
but even in their attending.
They’re more likely to show up to church
once or twice a month as opposed to three
or four times a month for the older generations.
So I worked really hard to find some hard
data on this, and there’s not [laughter]
there’s not much.
But I did find this group called Blackbaud.
They do non-profit analytics in the United
States.
And they had some figures and they – their
figures that 46 percent of giving in Christian
churches comes from the 65 and older generation.
Now, the next generation down, the next oldest
generation, gives the next 20-some percent.
So combined, it’s 68 percent, almost 70
percent that comes from these oldest two generations.
Now, we know the oldest one, which gives almost
half, in the next 15 years, most of them are
going to be called home to Heaven.
So there’s this huge transfer of wealth
in America beyond our circles of about $2
trillion a year.
So the question is as their children and then
grandchildren inherit this wealth, are evangelical
ministries, whether it’s a church or a para-church,
going to see as much as they’re used to.
Darrell Bock
Yeah.
John Dickerson
And are they going to see it as consistently.
I believe based on research from Purdue and
a number of others that are cited in the book
that we’re not; that we’re going to see
less, but also less consistently.
And so as a result, this machinery that we
have that is – our cylinders are pumping
and we’re on this gradual decline because
of culture shifts.
Well, if the fuel does decrease, if half the
gifts from this one generation, if that’s
half of our giving in a lot of our ministries
or more for many ministries, if their kids
and grandkids don’t radically change their
lifestyles, then we need to be prepared in
our ministries to run on less fuel.
Darrell Bock
Interesting.
Well, the fourth one is dividing.
And I think this one is – we can cover pretty
briefly because I think we all inherently
get this, and that is that the church is fragmented
into different groups and it isn’t as united
as it ought to be or could be.
Is that basically what that’s about?
John Dickerson
Absolutely.
Darrell Bock
Yeah.
John Dickerson
And that’s really the result of probably
the next one we’ll talk about called hated,
the way the culture’s changing in its view
of Bible-believing Christianity where once
it was pretty apathetic towards us; you know,
it wasn’t in love with us, but it was kind
of – there’s those Christians over there.
Well, that apathy is turning into an antagonism
in many circles and actual hostility.
Bills and laws that are being written and
passed that actually target evangelical Christians
and many of our beliefs.
And so as a result of this rapid cultural
change, we’re all trying to figure out how
do we respond to this; how do we adapt.
And that’s, I think, where a lot of these
divisions are coming from.
Some people believe more than ever that we
should get out of politics because that hasn’t
worked, while other good people who believe
and follow the same Christ from good motives
believe more than ever, “Hey, the window’s
closing.
Now’s the time to get more involved in politics.”
So that’s just one example of these divides.
And that divide, that leads to very different
philosophies in ministry.
Darrell Bock
And the strategy, even if you decide to engage,
can be decidedly different because some people
will say, “Well, we need to go in this and
take the view that it is a cultural war and
that we’re really fighting for some form
of survival.”
And then other people are saying, “Well,
let’s be more discriminating.”
I mean, there is a battle.
No one’s doubting that.
But let’s be more discriminating about those
things that we can come alongside on and those
things where we need to be challenging.
And so you’ve got that division as well
also operating.
John Dickerson
Absolutely.
And then we also see divisions in theology,
as you’re much more aware than I am, and
I mean, we live in a fragmented culture.
Again, a lot of these trends are taking place
in the fabric of the United States.
Darrell Bock
And some of those differences are generational.
I mean if you analyze the way one generation
views how to engage with how a younger generation
views how to engage, those numbers aren’t
the same.
Those hearts aren’t beating the same way.
John Dickerson
Yeah.
Darrell Bock
Yeah.
John Dickerson
That’s right.
Darrell Bock
So we’ve done five of them basically; we’ve
done inflated.
Our numbers are exaggerated.
Bleeding, we’re losing young people in particular,
losing people out of the church.
Bankrupt, we may not have the resources that
we’ve had in the past given to us.
Dividing, we’re not as united as we ought
to be.
Hated, the culture’s turning hostile.
I do want to come back to that in just a second.
The last one is sputtering.
What’s that one about?
John Dickerson
Yeah, sputtering goes back to this engine
analogy.
But it has to do with creating new disciples.
If – you know, open up a whole can of worms
– you know, what is Christ’s measure for
our success.
One of the most basic ones is the Great Commission.
“Go and make disciples.”
So we’ve seen that we are losing or not
making disciples of a lot of kids who grow
up within the walls of our churches.
Sputtering looks at as a share of the population,
about 4 million new U.S. residents every year
between births and immigration, so if the
population’s growing by that every year,
are our churches, on a national level; not
just one or two mega churches in a community,
but are all of our churches combined, are
we keeping up with that population growth.
And we are not.
And one of the reasons we’re not is that
we are not converting adult Americans.
Obviously, we all know from our ministries,
we have some converts.
But we’re not converting them at a rate
that would keep us –
Darrell Bock
So evangelism isn’t what it used to be.
John Dickerson
That’s right.
It’s evangelism.
It’s a failure of evangelism.
It’s a failure to convert 
the lost.
