God is Back...!

CBS ran a piece on their website yesterday saying that a Baylor survey concluded that 82% of Americans are Christians, but that they are expressing their faith in very different ways than 40 or 70 years ago. While Barna's book, "Revolution," portrays Americans as increasingly withdrawn from traditional church, Baylor's survey said half of all Americans attend church at least once a month and describe themselves as "Bible believing." I wonder if those Barna portrays have really stopped attending church altogether, or if they just attend less frequently as part of their highly individualized approach to Christian faith.

I was also struck by the fact that half of our nation's population does not believe the Bible is authoritative. Communicating Christ effectively to them requires far more than just "repackaging" our communication style to make it more media rich. My experience as a resident missionary in France centered around touching this very kind of person and I quickly learned one very important lesson - convincing a total non believer of the truth of the Gospel is only accomplished via a supernatural work of the Holy Spirit. The good news is, God wants to touch people far more than we do and He will work powerfully in their hearts if we will commit ourselves to communicating His message to them!