Young, evangelical, and African American churchgoers ask the most.
When churchgoers show up to their church’s worship service, they’re often hoping to have a guest with them.
A Lifeway Research study of US Protestant churchgoers finds 3 in 5 (60%) say they have extended at least one invitation in the past six months for someone to attend their church, including 19 percent who have made one invitation, 21 percent with two invitations and 20 percent with three or more invitations.
A third of churchgoers say they haven’t invited anyone to a worship service at their church in the past six months, while 7 percent say they aren’t sure how many invitations they’ve made.
“Churchgoers were not asked the typical net promoter score question of whether they recommend their church. They were asked if they’ve actually invited someone in the last six months,” said Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research. “For most churchgoers, invitations are not just an aspiration but a current practice.”
Extending invites
Compared to a similar Lifeway Research study six years ago, a similar percentage of churchgoers say they haven’t invited anyone recently—33 percent now versus 29 percent in 2017. Fewer churchgoers, however, are making three or more invitations. In 2017, 1 in 4 said they’d extended at least three invitations for someone to visit their church in the previous six months. Currently, 20 percent say the same.
“It’s not surprising the proportion of churchgoers extending invites is not growing, since the proactive nature of inviting people to church is counter-cultural,” said McConnell. “People in America are not being more relational, but an invitation to church is an invitation to join you in activities ...
The public square is increasingly hostile to religion. But don’t be surprised when Olympic athletes overflow with thanks to God.
The opening ceremonies of the Olympics are extravagant celebrations of national glories and global unity. But if you watch past this week’s opener to the Games themselves, you’ll notice an unusual pattern: Athletes are always talking about God.
If you caught last month’s Olympic trials, you’ll have noticed the same thing. Athletes of every kind continuously gave God the credit, often in explicitly Christian terms. It was almost like a competition within the competition to see who could outdo the others in redirecting praise heavenward.
For my money, US track star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone won. After breaking the world record (again) for women’s 400-meter hurdles, she answered a reporter’s question this way: “Honestly—praise God. I was not expecting that, but he can do anything. Anything is possible in Christ. I’m just amazed, baffled, and in shock.” The reporter laughed nervously and moved on to the next qualifier.
It’s not news that athletes thank the Lord for their success. But watching these public displays of piety made me wonder: Why is this still normal? The Oscars couldn’t be mistaken for church. Neither could large gatherings of writers, journalists, musicians, venture capitalists, or politicians. Sporting events appear to be the last refuge of “acceptable” public faith in our secular culture.
After all, almost no one slams McLaughlin-Levrone and other publicly Christian athletes for their praise. It’s allowed. Reporters may find it quirky or even bizarre, but athletes generally aren’t punished for religiosity. And even if they were, it’s clear they wouldn’t care. In a time when belief ...
The candidate's "unburdened by what has been" and "coconut tree" lines push her party toward a troubling partisan divide over the past itself.
President Joe Biden is out of the 2024 race, and Vice President Kamala Harris is angling to lead her party’s ticket. In the surge of interest in her revised candidacy this past week, online attention has focused on two of her turns of phrase. One is a line Harris has apparently been repeating for many years, returning to it so often that a four-minute clip of her saying it dozens of times is trending on social media.
That line—a call to envision and work toward “what can be, unburdened by what has been”—has been widely placed in tension with the other phrase in which Harris, quoting her mother, scoffs at those who “think [they] just fell out of a coconut tree.” No, she says, “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”
Such a tension would be interesting—if it existed. It’d suggest a thoughtful balancing of progressive and conservative impulses, of aspiration for benevolent advancement and respect for wise tradition, of acknowledgment of the real ills of history alongside a quest for the careful preservation of its goods.
Unfortunately, this supposed tension is not evidenced. The contradiction is not within the vice president’s thinking but across the partisan divide, as Harris looks likely to lead Democrats toward a simplistic condemnation of bygone times while the GOP just as simplistically embraces a nostalgia so rosy it is sometimes false.
Listen to the coconut comment in context, as the line itself suggests we should, and you’ll find Harris isn’t speaking about respect for prior generations or retrieval of the virtues of the past. She’s accounting for the evils and woes of history so as to better progress ...
Meet Olympians who love God from around the world.
Many Olympics lovers learn that their favorite athletes love Jesus through social media posts or postgame interviews following their success on the field, court, or track or in the pool. But the overwhelming majority of Christians competing in the Games won’t end up on the podium.
For many, simply arriving at the Games will be a testament to overcoming injuries, mental health challenges, or grief due to the loss of loved ones. Below are the stories of Christian athletes from 13 sports and 20 nations, all eager to make their countries—and their Lord—proud.
With reporting by Annie Meldrum, Isabel Ong, Angela Lu Fulton, Franco Iacomini, Mariana Albuquerque, and Morgan Lee.
Badminton
Anthony Sinisuka Ginting (Indonesia)
Known as badminton’s “Giant Killer” for defeating the sport’s greatest stars, Anthony Sinisuka Ginting took home the bronze medal for men’s badminton singles in Tokyo. This year, he’s headed back to the Olympics with fellow Indonesian and Christian badminton player Jonathan Christie.
Ginting was born in Cimahi in West Java and is of Karo ethnicity, a people group from North Sumatra where Christians make up 70 percent of the population. His father introduced him to badminton when he was five, and he started competing at age nine. Since then, he has medaled or won in numerouscompetitions.
On his Instagram account, Ginting isn’t shy about his faith. In a post from March, he noted finishing second to Christie at the All England Open, writing, “Thank you Jesus for your goodness. It was all beyond my expectation.” In response, Christie commented, “We made history together that we never ...
The Book of Psalms reminds us that worship demands our unequivocal devotion and allegiance.
The Psalms capture the full range of human experience. Personal and collective, sorrowful and rejoicing, remembering God’s faithfulness and wondering what has become of it—the biblical book, prayed by generations of believers, invites us to enter God’s presence with piercing honesty.
For those of us weaned on the positivity of American evangelicalism, the psalms of lament can take us aback. The authenticity of their angst pushes the boundaries of what we have witnessed in corporate prayer. It calls us to reject toxic positivity and embrace godly grief. And while this wake-up call to embrace the psalms of lament is still badly needed, I suspect we need a similar reckoning when it comes to the psalms of praise.
The claim of the praise psalms is startlingly unique in its context and powerfully relevant in ours, especially in an election year that is charged with political energy. As candidates vie for our votes, Christians hotly debate which contender best reflects our values and which issues most deserve our attention. On top of this, as Jared Stacy noted in a recent article for CT, we are experiencing a rise in politically motivated violence.
While lament is surely appropriate in times like these, maybe the best thing we can do is engage in audacious praise!
I’ve often felt about the praise psalms the way a mom feels about getting a store-bought Mother’s Day card proclaiming in all caps that she is the “BEST MOM EVER.” We know the company has printed thousands of these cards—and I’m the only mom my children have ever had, so how would they know any better?
But when Israel exclaimed, “Praise the LORD!” they were making far more audacious claims than that of a generic ...
As smartphones steal potential readers in Indonesia, booksellers are looking to new ideas.
Only 1 out of every 1,000 Indonesians is an avid reader, according to UNESCO’s 2012 reading interest index. The country also ranks second to last in a list of the world’s most literate countries, which examined tests as well as “literate behaviors” such as the number of libraries and newspapers and the availability of computers and years of schooling in a nation.
In such a challenging climate, can local Christian publishing survive?
Indonesian pastors and publishers say yes, although it might look different from the golden years of the early 2000s. It may include collecting donations to give away books to the impoverished, drumming up excitement over book releases with Zoom talks, or polling local seminaries and churches to determine which books they should translate into Bahasa Indonesia.
Indonesians can also learn from one of Indonesia’s most prolific Christian writers, Andar Ismail, whose 33-book Selamat series sold tens of thousands of copies in the late 1990s and 2000s.
Even as reading falls out of the zeitgeist, Christians believe it has an important role in spiritual maturity.
“Congregations should not rely only on weekly sermons to strengthen their faith,” said Susanto (who goes by one name), a pastor and current chairman of Gloria Foundation, which oversees two Christian publishing companies. “They need to develop their spiritual journeys themselves, such as through quality books.”
An industry in crisis
The low interest in reading points to Indonesia’s strong oral culture, where stories and knowledge were traditionally passed through spoken rather than written word. Researchers also point to underfunded libraries, expensive book costs, and an education system ...
UPDATE: The chair of the board of trustees, Kevin Smith, has resigned.
The Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) announced Monday evening that its president Brent Leatherwood suddenly lost his job—only to retract the statement the next morning.
The board of trustees stated on Tuesday that the decision had been made without an authorized meeting or vote and that Leatherwood “remains the President of the ERLC and has our support moving forward.”
The chair of the ERLC board of trustees, Kevin Smith, took responsibility for the unilateral move and has resigned.
In remarks to Baptist Press on Tuesday, Smith said he believed there was consensus to remove Leatherwood, and “in an effort to deal with it expeditiously, I acted in good faith but without a formal vote of the Executive Committee.”
“This was an error on my part, and I accept full responsibility,” he said.
The initial statement from the ERLC had given no reasoning for Leatherwood’s termination but came a day after he issued remarks applauding President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the 2024 race.
“I deeply appreciate everyone who has reached out, especially our trustees who were absolutely bewildered at what took place yesterday and jumped in to set the record straight,” Leatherwood wrote on X on Tuesday. “More to come.”
Leatherwood has been on staff with the ERLC—the public policy and advocacy arm for Southern Baptists—for the past seven years and has been president of the entity since 2021. Just a few hours before his termination was announced Monday evening, Leatherwood was still working and sharing ERLC resources on social media.
