Fastest growing religious group in the U.S. are 'unaffiliated'
By Matthew Miller
Lansing State Journal
LANSING, Mich. (AP) - This wasn't church. It was a bar, the Loft in downtown Lansing on a Tuesday night in October.
But the tables had Bibles next to the beers and popcorn, and Kevin Brown, a pastor at Crossroads Church, was sitting behind a keyboard on the stage.
"We hope you didn't bring any of those non-Christian people tonight," he said to the dozen members of the audience. "Tonight is about getting all the kinks out."
The next hour would be a trial run, preparation and practice for how an evangelical congregation might do services without prayers or hymns or altar calls, according to the Lansing State Journal.
Because The Loft is on the second floor of a building on Michigan Avenue, Crossroads is calling the project The Upper Room. Because they want people to come whose relationship with church is tenuous or non-existent, the pastors have promised to buy a drink for every first-timer.
The drink is a gesture of friendship, said Noah Filipiak, the 31-year-old founder of Crossroads.
"We think it communicates something to people that are very leery of church and very leery of the church being very judgmental about things," he said.
Two summers ago, Filipiak spent a three-month sabbatical from his small downtown congregation playing safety for the Capital City Stealth, Lansing's minor league football team. He invited other players to come to Sunday morning services.
"I feel like our church is 'cool,' you know," he said. "We serve coffee and pie, and we're laid back and you don't have to dress up, and the things that Christians normally think, 'Oh people who don't go to church will come because we do these things.'"
Only the people he invited mostly didn't come and, when they did, they mostly didn't come back. It got him thinking about one of the perennial questions for pastors and church planters: What was it about church, even a casual church with pie, that kept them away?
"There are concentric circles of people," he said. "I think that your blue jeans and coffee and rock and roll band on Sunday morning church plant is reaching a certain concentric circle, and that demographic has now been pretty saturated."
He wanted to try to reach the next circle, those who might have "a seeker sort of interest, but they're just not going to go to church on a Sunday. They're skeptical of that. They're uncomfortable about that." He and other members of the church began asking questions of their non-church-going friends and acquaintances.
The fastest growing religious group in the United States is those who say they belong to no religious group at all. The unaffiliated, the "nones," as they're sometimes called, now make up about one in five Americans, one in every three under 30.
While some are atheists, most of them aren't. Two-thirds say they believe in God, according to a 2012 survey by the Pew Research Center's Forum on Religion & Public Life. One in five says they pray every day. Overwhelmingly, they say they aren't looking for a church.
The response, from a small number of experimentally-minded evangelicals, has been to start churches that try to win them over by moving as far away from the traditional church mold as possible.
"Many in the American public like the person of Jesus much more than organized or institutional religion, or they view themselves as more spiritual than religious," said Warren Bird, director of research and intellectual capital at Leadership Network, a firm that follows church trends, "and so street-wise church planters are experimenting with new forms to house the timeless and unchanging truths of the Gospel."
In a sense, it's not a novel strategy, he said.
"From Jesus and the Apostles to today, church leaders have tried to take the Gospel to where the people are," Bird said. "This meant using public places, as well as houses of worship."
But the change in venue is just the beginning.
"We are not going to pray at The Upper Room ever, unless it's over a conversation and someone wants to pray," Filipiak told the audience at the October trial run.
There won't be religious songs either "because we've learned through talking with people that don't go to church that it's weird to sing to a God you don't believe in."
And so Crossroads pastor Curt Wright performed a Death Cab for Cutie song that night. Youth pastor David Singleton did a spoken word piece about a Christian proselytizing a wealthy man who had rejected God. Filipiak preached and he explained what would happen on opening night, set for Nov. 11.
"It's not going to be what will happen to you if you die tonight," he said. "It's not going to be scare tactics of hell. It's not going to be anything like that."
John Yunker, a 36-year-old construction worker, stood near the back of the room, a member of Crossroads for most of its existence.
"I was struggling on and off with Christianity, grew up with it," he said. "When I started going to the church, it felt like it was actually geared toward me, not somebody who had been a Christian their entire life."
Bringing services out into The Loft felt "organic," he said
There were maybe 60 people in the room on Tuesday night. There was a video clip, Mel Gibson in "Signs," and a cover of the Fun song "Some Nights". Filipiak took both as jumping off points for his sermon.
"How do you process the end of the world?" he asked. "We could go around this room and you could share at your tables, 'Here is the chaos that I have felt in my life.'"
"What does God have to say about our chaos," he said, "and how can he take our chaos and bring order to it?"
Published: Thu, Nov 20, 2014
