Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias said the reason many mainstream churches across the U.S. have experienced a decline in numbers is that they have “lost the real Gospel” and focused too much on “feel-good moments.”
“Some of the mainliners have lost numbers and they should’ve lost numbers because they lost the message,” the 73-year-old author told Fox News. “If you’ve lost the real Gospel, people are going to say, ‘Why am I coming here? Is this an ethical society or a feel-good moment on Sunday morning?’
He added, “But the evangelicals have grown in numbers.”
“Some of the churches that are biggest and most packed are those where the Gospel message of Jesus Christ is being given to the young and to those who are even thinking seriously about what life is all about.”
The founder of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries also weighed in on the advancement of technology and its impact on the younger generations, noting that while “we have progressed immensely in our capacity to communicate,” we are also “living in front of a screen and missing out in relationships.”
“[S]o the questions are getting larger and larger and the soul is getting emptier and emptier,” he said, adding that when he began his ministry decades ago, apologetics heavily focused on debates regarding God’s existence. Now, he said, the questions “are more existential.”
“All the questions you ask can only be answered after you have found the answer to the first question: Why you actually exist,” he noted. “And when you find that relationship with God through Jesus Christ, as I believe, then all the other questions are justified and the answers are forthcoming.”
Zacharias’ comments come on the heels of a recent survey that found that the youngest generation in America, Generation Z, ranks spirituality as their lowest value. The survey explains that a trend that sets this “digitally native” generation apart is the way they consume media.
Additionally, an April survey from Gallup found that an average of 50 percent of Americans in 2018 said they belong or are members of a church or other religious institution, representing a 20-percentage-point decline in church membership over the past 20 years.
In contrast, an earlier Gallup polling chart showed that weekly church attendance among Protestants has remained steady at around 45 to 46 percent in polling data compiled between 1983 and 2017.