Chasing a Shadow: Why Christians in America Are a Shrinking Minority and What to Do About It (Unabridged‪)‬

Trump and trumpism, storming the Capitol, Antifa and culture wars.... How did we get into all this? More importantly, how do we get out? 

The entanglement of the church with ungodly sociopolitical worldviews didn't start with Trump - or Bill Clinton, for that matter. It goes back 2,000 years. But we can fix this. In Chasing a Shadow, the author digs deep to get to the root causes of the problem, then leads us to the solution. Hold on tight, because this is quite a ride....

In the 1980s, a Gallup poll showed that more than 70 percent of Americans said they belonged to a church, synagogue, or mosque. In the year 2020, the figure was only 47 percent. That’s quite a drop. But don’t be shocked. It gets worse. You see, those are the figures for “membership in houses of worship”. Figures for actual church attendance have always been lower. Much lower.

A study carried out in 2004 by Olson et al. of the Evangelical Covenant Church showed that 17.7 percent of the US population attended a Christian church on any given weekend. So, contrary to popular belief, more than 80 percent of Americans were likely non-Christian or nominally Christian at best. These studies show two harsh realities. Firstly, Christians are in the minority. Secondly, the church is shrinking, not growing. This book highlights three of the root causes of this decline. They are like three millstones that hang about our necks. It's hard to get the job done when we're carrying that sort of weight. Many have tried to downplay the results of studies like these. They claim that the secular media exaggerates the issue. Maybe. But maybe not so much. We’ll talk about that in the book, too. But all is not lost. We really can “lay aside every weight”. We can indeed stop “chasing shadows while leaving the substance behind”.