Show Notes
The phenomenon of de-churching, where individuals who used to attend church regularly no longer do so, has been widely discussed. However, finding the origins of this challenge have proven difficult. On this episode of Nuance, Case interviews Michael Graham, co-author of The Great De-Churching, to discuss the surprising data behind the exodus from the pew.
While the church is facing a seismic demographic shift, Graham gives reason to hope that the church can draw people back. He also provides concrete ways that anyone in the local church can help friends, neighbors, and co-workers to rejoin Christ-centered communities.
Resources from the episode:
The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? https://www.amazon.com/dp/0310147433
Graphs about Religion: https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/
Nuance is a podcast of The Collaborative where we wrestle together about living our Christian faith in the public square. Nuance invites Christians to pursue the cultural and economic renewal by living out faith through work every facet of public life, including work, political engagement, the arts, philanthropy, and more.
Each episode, Dr. Case Thorp hosts conversations with Christian thinkers and leaders at the forefront of some of today’s most pressing issues around living a public faith.
Our hope is that Nuance will equip our viewers with knowledge and wisdom to engage our co-workers, neighbors, and the public square in a way that reflects the beauty and grace of the Gospel.
Learn more about The Collaborative:
Website: https://collaborativeorlando.com/
Get to know Case: https://collaborativeorlando.com/team/
Episode Transcript
Case Thorp
Hello friends and welcome back to this edition of Nuance. I’m Case Thorp and glad to have you with us. Just to remind you, please like and subscribe. It really helps us to get word out there. Well, today our special guest is Michael Graham. Michael, thanks for being here.
Michael Graham
Thank you, Case. It’s good to be here.
Case Thorp
I want to explain to everybody listening, it’s a bit of a new day for the Collaborative as we have expanded our focus to the public square. Certainly faith and work, a key component in that, but thinking about how do we prep and equip professionals, Christian professionals for their life, work and ministry in the public square. And so we’ve even nuanced Nuance, this podcast.
So there are bi-weekly guests on a variety of topics that apply, and we’re throwing in an extra weekly spiritual formation episode, just 10 minutes long called Formed for Faithfulness. And it’s a bit of a devotion and reflection on the public square and it tracks with the Christian liturgical year. So please be sure and check that out.
Well, Michael is a friend and a colleague here in Orlando. I’ve loved getting to know him over the years. I first got to know him when he was a pastor at Orlando Grace Church. And now he is the program director for the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics at the Gospel Coalition. He is a graduate of University of Florida. Go Gators. You know, Michael, my son is awaiting his admissions letter any day now to UF. So, we are on the edge of our seats. The Lord knows.
He has a degree from a foreign theological seminary, husband of one, father of two. And today he is going to share with us about his new highly acclaimed book, The Great Dechurching. The Great Dechurching it’s got a lot of great coverage. Perhaps you’ve heard a bit about it. We will have a link to order this in our show notes. And I just want to encourage you, whether you’re in pastoral ministry or not, this book has a lot to say about our culture right now. The research is intense and it’s co-written with Jim Davis, a son of First Presbyterian Church of Orlando. I’ll have the world know we want to claim him as one of our own. But Michael and I were together at Tim Keller’s funeral in New York and it was such a special, special time.
Case Thorp
So, Mike, let me hand it over to you. And I just appreciate your work here. So, tell us a little bit about you. And if you could then drift into how this book came to be.
Michael Graham
Yeah, Case, thank you. Yeah, so this book came to be because Jim and I were working on the same pastoral staff at Orlando Grace Church here in Orlando, Florida. And we’d come across some data that said that nearly half of our city had de-churched and that we had the same percentage of evangelicals as Seattle or New York City. And so, yeah, we were kind of scratching our head because…
Case Thorp
That blows my mind. Blows my mind.
Michael Graham
You know, Orlando feels a lot different culturally and even religiously than either of those two cities. So we felt like, okay, we need to know more about what’s going on here. And it kind of dawned on us, you know, after a little while, just kind of thinking about it and whiteboarding it that, oh, well, Seattle and New York City are more unchurched cities, but Orlando is more of a de-churched city. And so, you know, people here have more context for having grown up in many ways in the church, but not being in the church here today. And so, you know, we tried to figure out, okay, well, we wanted to get our hands on any and all data that we could. And there wasn’t much there, particularly information that was either granular or recent. And because we needed actionable information if, you know, hey, if half of your city belongs to this particular demographic, and we don’t know much about this particular demographic, well, we felt like we can’t do our responsibility as pastors here in the city of Orlando. And if we don’t have information about who are these people and why did they go and like, can we do anything about it?
Case Thorp
But at this point, you had not done your own research. You were motivated by another study.
Michael Graham
Yeah, so we looked at some stuff from Borna and then I had talked with Justin Holcomb and him and Glenn Lucky had done some research back in 2014. But yes, the data is all about recency and it’s all about granularity in order to be able to have information that’s pastoral and philosophy of ministry-wise being actionable. And so that level of granularity, nor the recency, neither of those things were there. So we needed to go and commission something that was new. And we wanted to do it right as COVID was, you know, kind of after COVID was over for not just red states, but blue states.
Case Thorp
So then you reach out to Ryan Burge now to do the research. He is a sociologist. Why Ryan? And I imagine it was a pretty expensive effort. How’d you pay for it?
Michael Graham
Yeah, so we raised the funds. I had some good friends in a church in Missouri who were very helpful for us that we wouldn’t have been able to do this were it not for their assistance and fundraising. And then Ryan, if you know Ryan at all, he’s the best religion data person in the country. And he has a unique vantage point because he’s an ordained minister in the ABC USA, the American Baptist Church, which is a mainline Baptist denomination. He actively pastors on a week in, week out basis. His primary work is his work as a social scientist at Eastern Illinois University. In addition to that, he’s a very prodigious publisher of religious data. It’s crazy.
If you’re listening to this, you need to subscribe to his newsletter, which can be found at graphsaboutreligion.com. So Ryan produces two articles a week, one on Monday, one on Thursday, and they’re always must-reads. So Ryan, we wanted to work with somebody as a data partner who would have the ability where we could publish not just in evangelical circles, but we wanted to be able to publish much more broadly than we needed to be able to publish in a way that it could be cited by academics, where it could be cited by any of the journalistic outlets on those things. We learned that some of the journalistic outlets won’t publish data from a number of data sources that evangelicals will publish from because of research methods and a lack of a university review board process. And so, yeah, so that’s why.
Case Thorp
Okay. Now, did you go find Ryan because of his reputation or you already knew him.
Michael Graham
I didn’t know Ryan personally before this process. I knew his reputation and had been following it for some time. So we reached out to him with the project and he basically said, yeah, if you can raise the funds, let’s do it together. And then he looped in another really excellent political scientist, Paul Jupe, who helped us with the survey design because we wanted our study to be able to parallel and co-linear and to be able to speak intertextually with other studies that have existed. And it’s a way to also…sometimes you’ll ask questions that are identical, that are in other studies, so that you can make sure the integrity of your data set is sound, so that you can compare the outcomes from your study with another study and make sure that they’re in the ballpark of each other.
Case Thorp
Right. Right. Okay. So, speaking of outcomes, give us sort of the snapshot of the big findings.
Michael Graham
Yeah, so I don’t want to bury the lead. The most important thing that we learned was that we’re in the largest and fastest religious shift in American history. So we had a hunch that that was the case. So this is, you know, we’re talking 40 million adult Americans who have left houses of worship. And so, “de-churched” in our definition is somebody who used to go to church on a monthly or greater basis and now goes to church or a house of worship less than once per year. So essentially not at all.
So that means we didn’t count you as de-churched if you just went on Christmas last year or just Easter, you know, last year, there’s several million other people that, you know, are just Christmas and Easter only people. We call them CEOs Christmas and Easter only.
Case Thorp
We call them Creasters. We love our Creasters, but we’d love to see you more often.
Michael Graham
But yeah, no. So the previous fastest shift before was the 25 years after the Civil War, basically from 1870 up through 1895. And then the number of people who have left is larger than the First Great Awakening, Second Great Awakening, and all of the Billy Graham Crusades combined. So…
Case Thorp
Now is that adjusted for population?
Michael Graham
Yeah, adjusted for population. It’s the fastest shift. Yeah.
Case Thorp
Wow. Wow. Okay. Let’s, let’s dwell on that for a bit. Cause that really moved me. So even though we’re probably 300 million right now in America…okay, 350, even though in those days they were radically less, the percentage boost from the first great awakening. So what mid-1700s, the percentage boost and by boost, I mean people finding faith and going to their local church.
Michael Graham
Yeah, it’s about 350 million adults.
Case Thorp
And the second great awakening, which is early 1800s. And then you say there was this huge boost after the Civil War. And then the Billy Graham crusades of 20th century. So we have lost percentage-wise more here recently than those gains in those eras.
Michael Graham Yes.
Case Thorp
Wow. And that’s just a lot to process and think in, to take in. Okay, go ahead, sorry. Finish your big finding.
Michael Graham
Yeah, so that shift is 25% faster than any of those other periods that you mentioned. So obviously those things are disconcerting, it’s troubling. However, we were kind of surprised at the highest altitude. I think there were two storylines that people had to kind of explain this shift, because I think people have felt that shift. And if your media diet leaned maybe a little bit to the left, then the story that was there was, well, lots of people have left houses of worship because of racism, misogyny, political syncretism, clergy scandal or clergy abuse. And then if your media diet leaned a little bit to the right, then the storyline there had been, well, people have left houses of worship because of secular progressivism or because of, say, the sexual revolution.
And can you find a few million people who fit either of those storylines? Yes, yes you can. So neither of those storylines are false storylines. But what we learned was that the largest thing was actually a much more boring story than the story coming out of either of those, the left leaning or the right leaning story. And that was most people left houses of worship for really boring things. So for example, the top three reasons why people de-churched, was number one, I moved, number two, attendance was inconvenient, or number three, some kind of family change, divorce, remarriage, the birth of a child, those different kinds of things. And after that, you start to see some things that are maybe morphed into some of those other storylines. But really, it’s just been the habits and rhythms of American culture, society, and these kinds of things, really pedestrian things that seem…
I mean, maybe the best word to put around it is pragmatic. And so the good news with that is, yeah, go ahead.
Case Thorp
Hmm. If I may, if I may, I want to sit on that just because as an evangelical and our particular church moved from a more mainline progressive denomination to a more conservative evangelical one, which a lot of other churches are in the process of doing or have done. And, you know, our convictions, were it was the more progressive agendas in the denominational hierarchy that led to the precipitous decline in church participation and yet you’re saying actually no. Is that what I hear you saying?
Michael Graham
What I’m saying is that it’s complicated. The mainline decline, it is complex. You’ve seen decline among the mainline, more decline among progressive mainline than some of the more conservative parts of the mainline. However, there’s been pretty precipitous decline for both of those things. There’s complexity to that. Some of that has to do with just the, you know, where mainline churches are. And you know, you have a lot of decline both in the Midwest and the Northeast from a de-churching standpoint. And so, you know, some of that’s in the mix. The movement in Christianity, particularly among evangelicals, is away from denominations and towards non-denominational, and/or networks instead of denominations. So there’s some complexity to some of those things.
Case Thorp
Okay. So we’re not saying those progressive theologies and practices were not a factor, but the top three factors were more pragmatic in nature.
Michael Graham
Yes, but those things are definitely, I mean, it’s not that those two stories were false stories. You can find plenty of evidence of both of those stories there in the data. It’s just in the book, we talk about how there’s at the highest altitude, there’s two different kinds of de-churching. There are people who left casually and that’s, you know, these pragmatic people, or it’s just kind of habits and rhythms. And it kind of seems like they left church unintentionally. And that’s about 30 of the 40 million people. And then about 10 million people definitely left church highly intentionally. And we called those people, de-church casualties. So, casually de-churched, de-church casualties. And the casualties, they left intentionally because there was some kind of, you know, at least one or more many problems that they were experiencing in church. And so some of those things happened at the individual level and other of those things happened at the institutional level. And for some people it was happening both on the individual and institutional levels.
Case Thorp
Right. Okay, so that is interesting. The de-churched casually, is that right?
Michael Graham
Casually de-churched and de-churched casualties.
Case Thorp
The casually de-churched, it was kind of unintentional. They didn’t just get up and storm out for something. And yet neither though, does it say to me that their discipleship was deep enough that their faith sincerity drove them to reconnect or stay connected. And that’s where later I want to get in the conversation, like to what degree do we as pastors are complicit in this or as church leaders that our discipleship was kind of shallow. It needs to be deeper.
Michael Graham
Yeah, that’s the embarrassing thing. You know, I’ve been clergy most of my adult life. So, you know, it wasn’t initially I was like, oh, well, all these people left casually. Well, that’s kind of good news. But most of the people who left, particularly among the casualty church, most of them are willing to return right now. So that’s good news. A lot of good news in the middle of the bad news. However, yeah, it’s definitely embarrassing when you kind of drill down and you’re like, oof, man, this faith is really shallow. Of the 15 million of the 40 million people who left, left out of evangelical contexts.
And when you look at the kind of the orthodoxy scores in the book, and orthodoxy score for us is basically just like Nicene Creed-level Christianity. So things like the Trinity, humanity of Jesus, divinity of Jesus, sinlessness of Jesus, the atonement and the resurrection of Jesus and the reliability of the Bible. Those seven things looked really bad among about 10 of the 15 million people who left evangelical churches. It looks like about 5 million of them have at least an accurate understanding of the gospel, but the other 10 are in a pretty rough shape. Of the 15 million people who left, we devote a chapter for…
Case Thorp
Wow. Wow.
Michael Graham
We developed four profiles from the data. And the first of those profiles we called cultural Christians. This is 8 million of the 15 million people who left evangelical churches. And only 1% of cultural Christians said that Jesus is the son of God. And so, yeah, it’s kind of difficult to call those people like, you know, regenerate in the faith, like walking with Jesus when you have such a low view of him and his personhood.
Case Thorp
Yep. Wow. Well, and as I’ve read the book and heard even more of the interviews you and Jim have done, it’s dawned on me. You needed from a sociological research basis to get more to general practice rather than, uh, I don’t sense that your data gets too much into the specifics of poor discipleship, those sorts of things. Would you concur?
Michael Graham
Yeah, I mean, we flew the plane pretty high in terms of overarching insights. There’s definitely some insights there into the kinds of weaknesses of spiritual formation and particularly also just the ways institutional churches relate to their contexts and relate to the people in their city.
There’s some things there. We built another resource on this website, dechurching.com. We built a 20-point audit for churches. So that’s there. That’s for free. So if you’re listening to this and you’re a clergy or you’re a church leader, there’s a 20-point audit of basically 20 areas that definitely impact de-churching. And…
Case Thorp
Oh, that’s great; audit of you as an individual or your church?
Michael Graham
No, audit for the institutional church. So, you know, it’s basically, hey, how is our church doing on these 20 areas that all impact de-churching? For example, one of those things would be like, do we have a process for when people move out of our city? Do we help them find a good church in a new city? Or do we have a process for when people are moving into our city to help them get connected to our local church?
And 19 other things kind of like that, that definitely impact de-churching all with an empirical basis. So that audit is there for free on dechurching.com. There’s also some worksheets that you can pay for if you’re like, oh, well, how do we get better on, we decided we failed on five of these 20, so how do we do better? There’s a paid resource there, but the most value there is in that audit.
Case Thorp
Okay. So as a pastor, I get a little, uh, picky when people talk about, Oh, I’m going to church. I’m like, no, you really mean you’re going to worship because you know, is the church the building, the church is the living fellowship of the people, but y’all use the word church. And, when you say going to church, I believe you’re assuming by that Sunday morning worship or a worship service, whatever time. It’s not a calculating for a Bible study, small group, maybe a service project, or if your kid plays on the church baseball team.
Michael Graham
Right. Yeah, we have mainly in mind just kind of corporate worship. But when we were studying this, we studied all religious traditions because you have to in order to be able to publish academically for these things. It’s just that well over 90% of people who attend or used to attend, it’s all out of one of their Christian traditions.
Case Thorp
Okay, okay. Well, if I can, thank you for this overview. And listeners, I had asked Michael, I wanted to kind of go in a little bit different direction than his and Jim’s interviews have been in other formats. And my goodness, I mean, Michael, y’all have gotten such great hits. Like the book’s been mentioned in the New York Times, the Ben Shapiro Show, right? I want you to brag a little bit. Tell us some other places your book has been featured.
Michael Graham
Oh, geez. Okay, yeah, those places, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, NPR, C-SPAN, National Review.
Case Thorp
That’s right, C-Span came and did a whole episode with y’all.
Michael Graham
Yeah, dispatch Christianity Today. TGC.
Case Thorp
And now new ones, right? Like put us up in the pantheon. That’s right. There you go. Ah, there you go. Shout out to Jake. All right. So in the last, I guess fifth or maybe chapters of your book, you shift to lessons for the church. And I really appreciate that you didn’t just give us data and tell us there’s a problem, but it’s an attempt to course-correct the present church. And it’s not just programmatic quick fixes.
Michael Graham
Yes, nuance and mere orthodoxy. Shout out to Jake.
Case Thorp
And why did you approach it that way? I know I think that’s very important because pastors have the tendency to look for the next golden bullet. But rather than you resisted giving them that, why is that?
Michael Graham
Well, I mean, think, you know, pastoring in any time, but especially in our own cultural moment, it’s just, it has a lot of complexity to it. So I’d rather speak principally than, you know, cause I don’t think there are, there’s not silver bullets for these things. I mean, on the one level. Yeah. Cause look, we can make a difference in terms of how we relate to people personally.
Case Thorp
I said golden bullet. You’re right. Silver bullet.
Michael Graham
Okay, as individuals, we can grow as in building healthier institutions. And so we need to do both of those things kind of at the same time. And so we wanted to talk about, okay, what can we do as individuals to relate better as we’re interacting with the people that God is regularly putting in our lives. And then we need to grow in our ability of what does it look like for our local church to be engaging with our community as well. So how do we do both of those things at the same time? Well, you know, on the individual front, there’s a lot of work that looks like it needs to be there on the way that we relate interpersonally. So we unpack in chapter nine, we talk about six keys to relational wisdom.
In that chapter, we talk about God-awareness, self-awareness, others-awareness, awareness of how other people are experiencing you, and then cultural awareness and emotional awareness. And when we have…
Case Thorp
And you’re not just talking about pastors with these things. You’re talking about all Christians, uh, you would suggest move in this relational wisdom direction.
Michael Graham
Yes, all of us. Yeah, because, you know, so many of the things of when we were looking particularly at the de-church casualties, so many of these things boil down to just the way that either people related to them or the way that the church related to them. And so, well, that’s good news because if people are experiencing pain because of how we related to them or how the church related to them, well, those are things that are in my control.
I can’t control secular progressivism. I can’t control the sexual revolution. I can’t create institutional reforms across Roman Catholic mainline evangelical churches. But what we can do is I can inspire other people to relate with increasing wisdom with the people who God’s put in their life, and we can inspire local churches to promote a gospel that’s true, good, and beautiful all at the same time.
So those are things that are within our control. And actually, I mean, that’s been like the greatest news about, you know, everything in the middle of all this bad news is there’s a lot of things that are in our control that are low hanging fruit that we can do better on. And actually, the things that are most central and that are animating the most people’s concerns really just have to do with things that are more in our control than those much larger…things that are well outside of our control.
Case Thorp
Well, I hear you. It does sound like good news because it’s not like your findings showed that people are rejecting the Christian worldview. Right. It’s not that people have investigated the worldview options and found Christianity wanting rather. It’s the nature of the church and it’s people today that they’re walking away from. Would you concur?
Michael Graham
Yeah, it’s more that, you obviously, you know, are you going to have people who have intellectual objections to the faith? Sure. But by and large, it looks like things that are just a lot more pragmatic than that. And it looks like things that, yeah, you know, if we as Christians tell a better story and tell a story that’s faithful to the text, most importantly, namely that we have a gospel that is actually true.
Jesus did live a perfect life. He died a substitutionary death for his people and raised himself from the dead. But it’s also, the Jesus path is also good and beautiful. We believe, and I think genuinely, rightly, and supported by not just our sacred text, but supported by real life, that when we seek to walk the path of discipleship that Jesus has put before us. It’s a path that leads to human flourishing. That doesn’t mean, you know, human flourishing doesn’t mean just like health and wealth, but what it does mean is we become more whole people and we become healthier people in our whole person as we seek to put off ourselves and put on Christ. And when we seek to also walk in, you know, the 59 one and others, and we seek to walk with the fruit of the Spirit and not in the flesh, we become more healthy and whole people. It is a path that leads to human flourishing, even though there is sacrifice to those things and there is suffering in that. This is a treasure in the field. There is a cost to discipleship. But when we understand that what God has put before us is worth putting every other thing that might have the love of our heart.
And this is the number one: love. Well, when we rightly order that love with all of these other loves, yeah, it is a path that leads to us being more whole human beings. So I think when that’s the story that not just we tell, but it’s a story that we live individually, and it’s a story that we live as communities, as local churches, then I think that that’s something that’s really going to be compelling.
Case Thorp
Dude, I love it. I mean, you’ve shifted from author researcher to preacher. Your pastor’s heart is clear. And it just, I mean, it makes me feel a little guilty, but like we and the church have just done a poor job of forming our people. How do I just can’t help, but carry or feel some of the blame and know that we’ve got to disciple differently. And that’s a big passion of mine. I’m working on a book on discipleship for the 21st century. And it’s got to be different than it was for me in my suburban Atlanta mainline experience. I’m grateful, so grateful for those men and women that loved me. And my parents did the best they knew. But it worked for me, but most not for most of my peers. So I don’t know how to, I just feel a lot of burden.
Michael Graham
I think one of the reasons why, you know, Case both you and I are fond of Tim Keller and took the time to go and experience his memorial service in New York City was because Tim was good at bringing multiple different traditions together. You know, he had this kind of confessional reformed strain, this missional strain and this pietistic strain that he kind of brought all together in one person and that the mixture and the cross-pollination of the best parts of each of those things. So the best parts of thinking, the best parts of feeling, and the best parts of doing, when you kind of put those things together, you end up with a more coherent faith in one that, okay, all right, well, my individual Christian life does matter, you know, that pietistic perspective and then, okay, the life of the mind and having accurate thinking in general or special revelation.
Well, that’s important, you know, the confessional reform strain. And then the missional innovation piece of, okay, what does it look like to appropriately contextualize the gospel to whatever my community is. And when we put those three things together, I think we end up, from an institutional standpoint, being able to put a compelling vision of the truth of the gospel, the goodness of the gospel, and the beauty of the gospel all at the same time. So I think when we’re able to do that, I think that that will be, when we do that in our churches, we will be able to help close the back door in ways that where it’s probably been a bit more wide open over the last few decades.
Case Thorp
So true. Now, for our listeners, I hope that you get a sense of wherever you may be in your work life, in your neighborhood relations, that there are a number of de-churched folks around you and engaging them with a sincere and a deep faith and a genuine authenticity is a good, helpful thing. So I’m leading up to Michael. Share the surprising and very low bar answer y’all found to one of the ways to help the casually de-churched re-engage.
Michael Graham
Yeah, so over half the people who left evangelical churches are willing to return today and it’s the overwhelming majority of those who are casually de-churched. So in the book, we kind of outline that there’s three different levels of engagement for some people. And so, you know, for many people there’s the first category of just needing a nudge.
So the second profile in the book, the mainstream de-churched evangelicals, these people left very recently, really just around the time of COVID. And 100% of them are willing to return to an evangelical church. They look Orthodox. You’re talking two and a half million people. Like, hey, as simple as like a water cooler moment or a text message, that’s something to the effect of like, hey, I’m going to church this Sunday, would you want to come with me and grab lunch after or, Hey, I’m leading this thing, you know, at church, I’m speaking at this thing or I’m doing this Bible study. I’m really excited about it. Like, would you be interested in coming with me? Almost all the people who are in that category, that they just need that nudge in order to, to return and they want to be back.
Case Thorp
I want everybody to hear this. Like the nudge is enough. Tell about the church in Missouri that practiced the nudge.
Michael Graham
Yeah, so the same church that was helpful for us on fundraising, we gave them a lot of access, early access to kind of the research findings. And they began incorporating some of that into just two things in their church. Their preaching, they started talking about some of the de-churching in their preaching. And then they developed some digital strategies to kind of identify some of the people that just kind of needed a little bit of a nudge. And they gave them a digital nudge and they saw a few hundred people, yeah, they saw a few hundred people, you know, de-churched people begin to come to church. That was above and beyond what they would have otherwise seen normally.
Case Thorp
Digital nudge. Wow. So they had just from nudges, invitations of remarkable response.
Michael Graham
Yeah, it just makes sense. I mean, it’s like, okay, in our very digital age, apart from weddings, funerals, and things that are of a sales nature, and birthdays, when was the last time that somebody gave you a personal invitation to something? And how did it make you feel? Doesn’t it make you feel loved and wanted and seen when you get to, somebody says, hey, I want your presence. I want more of you.
Case Thorp
Right.
Michael Graham
So I think, you know, one of the things that I want to, you know, that Jim and I want to inspire people to is that for most people, not all, but most, you know, doing, taking some relational risk and giving a nudge or having somebody, you know, to your dinner table and having some nature of spiritual or religious conversations or an invitation to church. These are not relationship-ending conversations.
Case Thorp
And yet we feel like they could be because, you know, it’s one thing to invite somebody to go see a theatrical show, but we get a little weird when it comes to, hey, come to my church. Cause I think the culture tells us people here. Hey, come let me indoctrinate you.
Michael Graham
Yeah, and I think some of this, particularly, we’re both in our 40s. And I think growing up with that era in America, we were always told that religion and politics were taboo. But it’s like, you go online and what do people want to talk about? It’s like, well, people are talking about those things. So it’s actually not taboo. And I think that there’s really, I’ll give you a…
Case Thorp
That’s my favorite topics. Yeah.
Michael Graham
I’m a collector of good questions. And I think questions are things that help unlock people’s hearts and they’re things that unlock people’s loves. And so when I think about, as you’re relating to people, I think about this acronym, FORD: family, occupation, relationships, and dreams. Family, occupation, relationships, and dreams.
Case Thorp
So this is pure Michael Graham. O.G. Right.
Michael Graham
Yeah, this is just like what I’ve developed in my head. So when I’m, you know, when I moved, you know, we moved this past year, okay? So we’re in a new neighborhood. And these are the kinds of things I’m talking about. I want to know about people’s family first. And tell me about your work, you know, you’re spending 40-plus hours a week, and something like, tell me what you do. Why do you like it? How did you get into that? You know, tell me the evolution of those things. What’s the best part? What’s the hardest part?
Case Thorp
Okay.
Michael Graham
And then you get into relationships and dreams. So I think once you’re at least to like the R in terms of forming new relationships with people, and this is just, I don’t even think about these things consciously in my head. It’s just, when I’m forming new relationships, this is just the natural progression of things. One of the things that I’ll ask once I’m to the place of like, well, what are some of the more important relationships?
Case Thorp
Hmm. Yeah.
Michael Graham
I’m interested in what are the important relationships to you individually, friends, but I’m also interested in what relationships to institutions do you have. When we’re talking about key relationships, I’m not just talking about relationships to individuals, I’m talking about relationships to institutions.
Case Thorp
Mm, yeah, yeah. Which is what’s suffering and waning so much right now in America.
Michael Graham
It is. And so here’s the here’s the question I want to give everybody who’s listening to this. This is a question that I think is very unoffensive. And I think it’s something that’s very open-ended. And even in a highly secular context, this question has never gone sideways for me. You ready for it? Here’s the magic question. Are you a person of faith?
Case Thorp
And that has never gone sideways for you?
Michael Graham
Never gone sideways for me. Because, you know, if somebody isn’t a person of faith, well, a lot of times people will ask questions about, well, their lack of faith with derision or, you know, with some level of disrespect. Are you a person of faith allows, you know, it’s agnostic to any particular tradition. It also allows for the people who don’t identify as anything, but maybe they’re spiritual in nature, spiritual but not religious. It’s open-ended enough basically for anybody to share the evolution of their thoughts on big questions. And it’s like, at the end of the day, that’s what I want to know. Tell me the arc of your story on how you process life’s biggest questions.
That one question of, are you a person of faith, will often yield for me all sorts of information about, okay, well, what’s the best way that I can relate to you? And, you know, is there pain? Is there not? You know, is your relationship to these things transactional, pragmatic, frustrating, painful? Like those things, a lot of those things, you know, just kind of begin to surface in that. There’s another deeper question that I don’t always ask, but you know, another place when people are going through something that’s hard, another question I’ll ask people that sometimes helps bridge the gap into deeper things spiritually is, are you a person of prayer?
Case Thorp
Yeah, that was going to be my thought. I’ve never had anybody turn me down for prayer.
Michael Graham
Yeah, so those things I think are just easy ways to get a foot in the door into conversation that aren’t offensive, that are encouraging, and won’t get you into much, won’t really get you in trouble.
Case Thorp
Now, would you distinguish that from, can I pray for you?
Michael Graham
Well, that’s the follow-up question, right? You know, if somebody asks are you a person of prayer? Well, they might say, no, you know, no, but, well, hey, I am, and would you be willing to let me pray with you? So I think those are…even if the answer to the question is no, there’s still that opportunity for a follow-up there.
Case Thorp
Yeah, got it.
Yeah. Well, and I’ve never had anybody tell me no. And because it’s so rare, even sadly in the church amongst active Christians, it leaves a very meaningful impression and helps folks draw close. In closing, I want to hit one more thing there. So for our listeners, remember these two questions, use these in your family, neighborhood, and workplaces. Are you a person of faith? And are you a person of prayer? Those are great ways to then help reengage the de-churched. I want to close on this point you make, Michael, about the institutional and here at the Collaborative, we’re big believers in institutions because they change culture in profound ways. They are multi-generational beyond ourselves. They bring up and colgate in positive ways, hopefully the next round of participants, whether they be workers, members, whatever the institution might be and send them along in life’s journey. And because of this anti-institutional sort of feel and reaction right now amongst Americans and for partly good reasons, because a lot of institutions have failed to make ways.
How would you guide someone in their desire for people to know Christ as they manage the personal and the institutional, meaning I want my neighbor to know Jesus and I want him or her to be in a church, to be active, whether it’s my church or not. I know the good that greater community can do for them in their walk.
Any words, thoughts on that?
Michael Graham
Yeah, I think, just like in anything, we when we exercise relational wisdom, people boil down to really kind of two things, wants and fears. And those wants and fears come out of how are the loves of their heart ordered and how have the loves of their heart played themselves out in the experiences of their life? And so when I think about wants and fears…when we have relational wisdom, we know whether somebody can kind of… whether they need to come in the front door of the church or if they need to come in kind of the side door. And so I think that when we exercise relational wisdom, you know, the people who need a nudge, well, they’re coming in the front door. But the people who need our dinner table, well, they’re probably coming in the side door of the church.
They need to experience, you know…relational intimacy with us at our dinner table. They probably need maybe to be connected to something like a small group or something like that where they can have some more of their questions answered and kind of see oh, well, maybe this was a little bit different than either what I grew up with or this thing that maybe was hard or challenging or even painful for me.
So I think when we when we exercise relational wisdom in how we are interacting with the people that God’s consistently putting in front of us, then we will know with…we’ll have a greater sense with that sensitivity to the spirit of, okay, who is this person? What is their story? What are their wants and fears right now? And how does the gospel speak to that? And what are their, you know, what are the needs that are there?
And so, when we do those things and religious kind of think through those things, we pray through those things. And, you know, ideally we’re not doing any of these things just like as one-off people. It’s good for people, you know, just like, when you go to buy a vehicle, you look at multiple different things before you land in the same way, like it’s good for people to have multiple different vantage points on us.
Case Thorp
Right.
Michael Graham
Give them multiple vantage points so they can see kind of what, it’s not just, oh, they’re coming kicking our tires. Give them a chance to kick the tires of some people.
Case Thorp
Sure. Well, and I hear too, you know what? It starts with us. Are we walking close to God and hearing his spirit and being authentic and loving? It is out of that, that these questions should arise. And it’s out of that, that the gospel is seen and felt and draws people. Michael, thank you. I really, really appreciate your time. I know you’re in a very busy season, but y’all have done a great work in this book and I want to encourage everyone to go get your copy of The Great Dechurching. We’ll have a link for that in our show notes. Michael, thank you so much.
Michael Graham
Thank you, Case. It’s been a pleasure.
Case Thorp
I’d like to thank you, our listeners, for being with us. Please, again, like and subscribe, share this with someone that they might be so edified. Visit us at CeollaborativeOrlando.com to get our bi-weekly blog, see other videos, check out our library of content and even events that are coming up. We really want to help you as you live your faith in the public square. And of course, we’re across all the social media channels.
Check out the episode description for helpful links and resources noted in this interview. Formed for Faithfulness, our 10-minute devotional, hits every single week. In the meantime, I’ll be back in two weeks with a special guest. We’d like to thank our sponsor for this episode, the Magruder Foundation. Couldn’t do it without your support. Hope to see you next time for our next nuanced conversation as we pursue faithfulness to Christ and the public square. I’m Case Thorp.
God’s blessings on you.
