Psalm 78
"tell a future generation"
Psalm 78 is among those psalms that retell the story of Israel. Psalm 78 is framed as intergenerational communication, the older generation sharing the story with the younger:
My people, hear my instruction;
listen to the words from my mouth.
I will declare wise sayings;
I will speak mysteries from the past—
things we have heard and known
and that our ancestors have passed down to us.
We will not hide them from their children,
but will tell a future generation
the praiseworthy acts of the Lord.
In his book Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America, Stephen Bullivant dives into data on the "Nones," those who check "None" when asked on census surveys to identify their "religion" or "religious preference." Roughly one out of four Americans are "Nones."
This category, the religiously unaffiliated, has been steadily increasing in the United States, accelerating with every generation. According to Bullivant's data, 11%-16% of the Silent (1928-1945) and Boomer (1946-1964) generations identified as None. Among the Millennial (1981-1996) and Gen Z (1997-2000) generations, the Nones have increased to 35% and 29% respectively.
But who are the Nonverts?
A "Nonvert" is Bullivant's label for a person who was raised in a religious tradition but who now identifies as a None. That is to say, a Nonvert is a person who has left the faith. Instead of converting to a religion, you are deconverting and disaffiliating to become a "None." Nonverts are those who are leaving the church.
In short, within the None group there are two subgroups, who Bullivant calls "Cradle Nones" and "Nonverts." Cradle Nones are Nones who were raised without a religion and have remained religiously unaffiliated. Nonverts, by contrast, were raised in a religion and have left that faith to identify as having no religion. According to Bullivant's data, of the total None group, 27% are Cradle Nones and 73% are Nonverts. And again, these trends are increasing with each subsequent generation.
When compared to data on religious conversions, the picture becomes very alarming. As Bullivant describes, for every Cradle None who converts churches lose five Nonverts. Last year, I called this the "evangelism gap": For every one convert we lose five Nonverts.
The take home point in all this is that churches are not holding their younger cohorts. Churches are losing their children.
Which brings me back to Psalm 78. We tend to think that evangelism is taking the gospel to the lost, to those outside the church. But the reality is that the majority of the Nones have grown up in churches. Evangelism, therefore, needs to pivot to focus on the home and the pew. Churches have become mission fields. Which means that evangelism is increasingly intergenerational. Telling a future generation the praiseworthy acts of the Lord.
The first step would be to demonstrate as much self-reflection and lament over one youth group dropout as over one wealthy boomer who moves to the church down the road where "they still preach the gospel like they used to".
The problem is, as many books and articles have shown, churches that do demonstrate this shift in emphasis tend to financially implode. Perhaps part of the answer is to engage older generations directly in the task of telling their stories of faith to the next generation, _and listening to the hard questions that come back_, so that the task of tying together the generations does not fall exclusively to the staff and family ministry volunteers.
But I don't have full answers.
Scot McKnight’s substack was recently reviewing a book about this very thing, “Religion for Realists,” saying that evangelism is in some ways a “numbers game,” where the groups that have more children and create a sense of belonging with those children grow more than those who have fewer children or who relegate religion to a belief system, rather than something you belong to. At least that’s what I took from what he was saying - I haven’t read the book.