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An Overview of Issues Affecting Evangelization in the United States

By Jim Tebbe


The Church in America is moving toward becoming a people
in exile rather than the majority faith that is often little
more than cultural Christianity.

When I am not working with the Lausanne Movement, part of my “day” job is to direct InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s twenty thousand strong Urbana missions conferences. Although I have lived most of my life outside the United States, for the last six years I have been immersed in North American student culture through Urbana.

Values, morality, means of communication, church attendance, spiritual interest, passions, etc., point to a major change taking place in North America today. This affects how Christians engage with those who do not believe and how they perceive the mandate to make disciples of all nations. Some of these changes are negative; others are not. My observations in this brief article are drawn largely from my experience with Urbana and what I read to equip me for my job. My perspective is from working with students.

The Bad News
How Americans think about and participate in church is changing. Mainline denominations and the Catholic Church have been in decline for years, and with that, denominational loyalty is dying. We will be dropping the question of denominational affiliation for Urbana '09 because it no longer produces meaningful data. Most students do not identify with or perhaps even know the denomination of the church they attend.

Attrition is not just an issue for mainline denominations. There is concern among American evangelicals from a broader spectrum that we are losing our young people. High school students who were actively involved in their church youth groups are dropping out of Christian activity (e.g., church attendance or participation in a college Christian fellowship) at an alarming rate. The Youth Transition Network, a group of agencies which have come together to help students transition from high school into adult faith while in college, believes the attrition rate to be somewhere between sixty and eighty-five percent. In some communities, such as Korean American churches, it may even be higher. This phenomenon is relatively new and, unless changed, will have an impact on the established Church in the next twenty years.

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Jim Tebbe is vice president for missions and director of Intervarsity Christian Fellowship's 20,000 student Urbana Missions Convention. He worked in Asia and the Middle East for twenty-five years with Interserve. Tebbe is North American International Deputy Director for the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization.