Let's all work together and build a Ghetto

Riddle me this? (the following numbers come mostly from the Barna research group)

• Up though the 1990’s church attendance in America was about 26%. It is now … approximately 17.4%.
• Not only did the percentage of people attending church decrease significantly from 1990 to 2007, some studies say that there is not a single county in the United States where there are more people now attending church.
• The number of adults who did not attend church nearly doubled from 1991 to 2004.
• The 2001 American Religious Identification Survey said that more than 29.4 million Americans have “no religion” which is double the number just eleven years earlier.
• If the present trends continue, the percentage of the population that attends church in 2050 will be almost half of what it is today.

Okay, I know I haven't asked a question yet; I will in a minute. Keep reading. Here's a part that makes me go "hmmm????"

While overall church attendance went down from 1990 to 2006 the number of churches that grew to more than 5000 in attendance doubled from 2001 to 2005. There were also more than 20,000 new churches started in the last 16 years. How is it possible that there are less people going to church now than in 1990 in every single county in the United States? And how is it possible that there are 8% less people going to church cumulatively? If you do the math, the number of people in church is down since 1990 by over 8 million. How did we do that?

Sure, some people who were going to church back in 1990 have stopped, and others have died, and some babies have been born since then who aren’t showing up on Sundays, but still … if we were bringing in people who weren’t going to church, the numbers couldn’t look like this. How did we (the church in America) do that? It sure appears like we started collecting most of the Christians into a few bigger churches instead .

Well, it didn't happen without a lot of time, effort, and money. It probabbly started long before 1990, but over the last 16 years we got serious about building a Christian ghetto. You know what a ghetto is, right? Here's a working definition from all things wikepedia: "A ghetto is an area where people from a specific racial, ethnic, or religious background live as a group in seclusion, voluntarily or involuntarily." Voluntarily Christians began to move into seculsion. We separated politically. We started a movement of Christian schools and Christian book stores and Christian clothing (with cute little "evangelistic sayings" that no one outside the ghetto understands). We have Christian radio, that plays Christian music, played and sung by Christian celebrities. All the while pulling more and more away from our "worldly neighbors" and loosing influence.

The numbers I quoted are some of the results of ghetto living. Someone must do something. I say we but out of the ghetto and follow the guy who said said this.