Survey: Non-attendees find faith outside church

Survey: Non-attendees find faith outside church

By Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA TODAY

A new survey of U.S. adults who don't go to church, even on holidays, finds 72% say "God, a higher or supreme being, actually exists." But just as many (72%) also say the church is "full of hypocrites."

Indeed, 44% agree with the statement "Christians get on my nerves."

LifeWay Research, the research arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, based in Nashville, conducted the survey of 1,402 "unchurched" adults last spring and summer. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.
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http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2008-01-09-unchurched-survey_N.htm
Ironic when you think about what just happened to me today working for a church.

I can think of no better place to post this than here at this moment. I've known hypocrites in church. They are the trouble makers who want to make everyone else pay for their own inadequacies. They complain about what anyone else does, either because they feel they could do a better job but are unwilling to do the work, or they simply have never understood what Christ was all about.

The problem is that they are allowed to get away with it and then they end up being the reflection of the church itself. The tolerance level of trying to "convert" the souls of these people infects the rest of the congregation. Instead of getting them to either behave like Christians, they are allowed to keep spewing, hiding behind the Christian label and thus providing the "unchurched" with a bad glimpse of the kind of people inside the doors.

The groups gaining most of the attention are not what most Christians really are. They come off as judgmental, filled with anger and hatred, lacking all the qualities Christ spoke of.

What is really inside are a bunch of people trying to find God. It doesn't really matter what faith they claim as their own or which faith they feel turned off by. Everyone is searching for the meaning of life and a reason to be here. Why do we all feel so much pain? Why do bad things happen to good people? Why doesn't God answer prayers while we are suffering? All these questions and so much more, humans all share.

Christ addressed the issue of hypocrites point blank when he said that it isn't what people say that proves who they are, it's what they do. Maybe churches need to rethink what they do and stop just talking about being what they claim to be. The world would be a lot better off if they didn't need to talk about it because it would glow out of them.