Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Rise of the Religiously Unaffiliated

Diana Butler Bass posted this on Facebook today:
"Coming up on PBS.  Here's a preview of their program on the religiously unaffiliated.  Filmed, in part, at my house and includes an interview with me talking about the impact of the spiritual-but-not-religious on churches and denominations.  Please share this news with yours friends."


If the video quits working, go to PBS to watch it.  The video ends with these words by Diana Butler Bass:
"I think that people who are leaving church — people who call themselves spiritual but not religious — are raising really significant questions about faith, about community life, and about the future of religion."

2 comments:

Zorro said...

http://sojo.net/blogs/2012/10/11/how-should-churches-address-nones

From Sojourners facebook post today
Sojourners Magazine
‎20 percent of Americans consider say they have "no religion" — up from 15 percent only five years ago. Here's some advice for churches.

Zorro said...

I like this from the above article:

"And if faith communities continue to serve those in our society with economic, social, and emotional needs as we have done over the centuries, then we are offering things that the unaffiliateds already see as a strength of organized religion, even as they see our obsessions with money and power and rules and politics as turn-offs. They may even be willing to join in when we feed the hungry or clothe the naked as long as we don’t try to capture them for our flag in the process.

Too often, I think, we view people who have opted out of organized religion as people who need us to save them. If we treated them more as fellow human wanderers through life, maybe we could each learn a bit from the other.

In that process, we not only might find we have things to offer them. We might also find that our own understanding of the divine and of life are deepened and our sense of service takes on new dimensions as we reach beyond our own concerns."