Spreading God’s Grace

With all of the survey results and polling data being reported as the nation moves toward the presidential election, you may have missed the results of the survey conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life. It reports that one-fifth of the U.S. public—and a third of adults under 30—are not affiliated with any religion today. That’s a 15% increase in just the past five years.

In other words, 46 million Americans do not identify with any religion. Of those, 13 million are self-described atheists and agnostics (nearly 6%); and the other nearly 33 million people say they have no particular religious affiliation (14%).

Despite the rise in the religiously unaffiliated, Pew also found that more than two-thirds of those people believe in God. One-in-five say they pray every day. According to Pew, the spiritually engaged but religiously unaffiliated do think that “churches and other religious institutions benefit society by strengthening community bonds and aiding the poor.” Most of them acknowledge faith as a positive human urge, but are increasingly turned off by the institutions that claim to represent faith.

In the midst of his public ministry Jesus commissioned around 70 of his followers and sent them into the towns and villages where he was planning to go. “These were his instructions to them: ‘The harvest is great, but the workers are few. So pray to the Lord who is in charge of the harvest; ask him to send more workers into his fields’” (Luke 10:2). Jesus’ last instructions to his disciples were to “go and make disciples” (Matthew 28:19).

The time we have spent learning how to share the good news in a graceful pattern has prepared you to take your place in the field. The results of the Pew survey are just one more reminder that this is work that needs to be done. I encourage you to renew your commitment to pray for those in your life who are “unaffiliated.” Look for opportunities to engage them in conversations about life and faith. Share your faith story with them with humility and love. Let them know that there is a community of believers where they can experience the love of God in meaningful and tangible ways. And let us all resolve to allow the Holy Spirit to shape us into that community that is more interested in making God’s love real than it is in anything else.