Dr. James Emery White

TechReport recently released a set of video statistics for 2023. Fifty, to be exact. Here are the ones that stood out to me:

• Internet users tend to recall 85% of information that comes to them through video, but only 10% of what comes to them via texts.
   
• YouTube has more than 2.6 billion monthly active users worldwide. The world’s population is now more than 8 billion people.
   
• In 2022, 82% of all internet traffic was made up of videos.
   
• Every week, the average internet user spends six hours and 48 minutes consuming videos. In the United States, adults spend an average of 62 minutes every day consuming videos.
   
• 77% of U.S. adults, 26-36 years in age, watch videos on YouTube.
   
• 88% of internet users confess that viewing a brand’s video gives them confidence in the brand and its products, motivating them to patronize it.
   
• TikTok users spend more than 1.5 hours watching videos on TikTok every day.
   
• 76% of social media users search for products on social media platforms using videos.
   
• More than image and text content combined, social video generates 1200% of shares.
   
• People recall 80% of what they watch, 20% of what they read, and 10% of what they hear.

Headline? 

Well, if you’re wanting to reach our world,

… maybe you should start using videos.

James Emery White

Sources

Jeff Beckman, “50 Video Statistics You Should Know in 2023,” TechReport, July 17, 2023, read online.
 

About the Author

James Emery White is the founding and senior pastor of Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, NC, and a former professor of theology and culture at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, where he also served as their fourth president. His latest book, Hybrid Church: Rethinking the Church for a Post-Christian Digital Age, is now available on Amazon or from your favorite bookseller. To enjoy a free subscription to the Church & Culture blog, visit churchandculture.org where you can view past blogs in our archive, read the latest church and culture news from around the world, and listen to the Church & Culture Podcast. Follow Dr. White on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at @JamesEmeryWhite.

James Emery White is the founding and senior pastor of Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, NC, and a former professor of theology and culture at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, where he also served as their fourth president. His latest book, Hybrid Church: Rethinking the Church for a Post-Christian Digital Age, is now available on Amazon or from your favorite bookseller. To enjoy a free subscription to the Church & Culture blog, visit churchandculture.org where you can view past blogs in our archive, read the latest church and culture news from around the world, and listen to the Church & Culture Podcast. Follow Dr. White on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at @JamesEmeryWhite.

UFOs (or UAPs – “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena,” the government’s official term for UFOs) are back in the news.

Mainstream news.

A highly credible U.S. Air Force whistleblower has made dramatic new claims about their existence, and that we have remains from craft and even alien beings. The Pentagon has verified that various photographs of UAPs are, indeed authentic, but is not speculating on what they are. But it has established a website for all things UAP, including hotspots for seeing them.

The question “Are we alone in the universe?” is one that haunts all of us, but none more than the scientific community. Those who study the cosmos for a living have many compelling questions, such as:

Is that life like us?

How are we related?

Can life move from planet to planet? Or, whether like us or unlike us, is it simply the combination of the right environment and a spark that generates life based on the chemical environment that it’s in?

And yes, those are compelling scientific questions.

But what we shouldn’t have to wonder about are the spiritual questions. The Bible offers no explicit or direct teaching about the possible creation (much less existence) of life on other planets. It does, however, offer three theological truths that can guide our thinking:

First, God is bigger than we think. This is good to remember when it comes to things like life on other planets or any other scientific discovery that might present itself. Remembering the size of God reminds us to be humble and to be slow to draw conclusions. All of science is simply finding out what God has designed, and it’s an ongoing process of discovery.

Second, all life is from God. No matter where we find it, or what it’s like, it’s from God. The opening verse of Genesis speaks of God creating the “heavens and the earth,” which literally refers to everything that is. What “everything” means, we do not know. There could be many worlds, many universes, many realities and many dimensions that God may have created. To think that we’re the extent of His creative energies borders on arrogance.

And just as an aside, beware of those who will trumpet the discovery of life on another planet as disproving the need for a God. How did life on Earth come from non-life? It’s simple. They will say, “From another planet.” This is called panspermia—the idea that the first life, along with the beginning complexity, was seeded here from another planet, such as Mars. So, no need for a God. 

Not so fast.

If all the scientific challenges surrounding life beginning on its own on Earth can be solved by saying that life began somewhere else and got here on the back of a meteorite, well then how did that life start there? You cannot escape the challenge of life, at some point, having to come from non-life.

Finally, all of creation matters to God. No matter where there is life, that life matters to God and should be valued by us. Going further, if we find intelligent life on other planets, we can be assured that God loves them just as He loves us and has provided a way for them to know Him and to share eternity with Him.

So, while the scientific community may be bracing for the discovery of life on other planets,

... this Christian will simply enjoy the unfolding discovery of all of God’s creation.

James Emery White

Sources

Rich Cohen, “The View from Here,” Air Mail, July 15, 2023, read online.

Tony Diver, “Japan a Hotspot for UFOs, Says New Pentagon Website,” The Telegraph, September 4, 2023, read online.

About the Author

James Emery White is the founding and senior pastor of Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, NC, and a former professor of theology and culture at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, where he also served as their fourth president. His latest book, Hybrid Church: Rethinking the Church for a Post-Christian Digital Age, is now available on Amazon or from your favorite bookseller. To enjoy a free subscription to the Church & Culture blog, visit churchandculture.org where you can view past blogs in our archive, read the latest church and culture news from around the world, and listen to the Church & Culture Podcast. Follow Dr. White on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at @JamesEmeryWhite.

The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Christian Headlines.

Photo courtesy: ©GettyImages/Artem Peretiatko

James Emery White is the founding and senior pastor of Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, NC, and a former professor of theology and culture at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, where he also served as their fourth president. His latest book, Hybrid Church: Rethinking the Church for a Post-Christian Digital Age, is now available on Amazon or from your favorite bookseller. To enjoy a free subscription to the Church & Culture blog, visit churchandculture.org where you can view past blogs in our archive, read the latest church and culture news from around the world, and listen to the Church & Culture Podcast. Follow Dr. White on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at @JamesEmeryWhite.

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It’s not exactly news, but there are fewer people attending church now than before the pandemic. What we’re finding out now is just how big of a drop it was. According to a survey by the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University, the percentage of people ages 39 to 57 who attended a worship service during the week, either in person or online, fell to 28% in 2023. That is down from 41% in 2020.

That.Is.A.Big.Drop.

So what happened?

It can’t be explained solely by the rise of the nones. The post-pandemic reality is that many who were churched, who were anything but a “none,” simply didn’t return to their community of faith.

And it can’t be explained by ideological divides that led people to leave their church during the heated height of all things COVID. There certainly were a number of people who left their church for another congregation due to positions on vaccines, masking, meeting in person and more, but that would account for migratory patterns, not a 13-point overall plunge.

So what did happen?

Did they simply get out of the habit of attending when many churches were closed to in-person gatherings?

Did they enter a stage of life in which it became more difficult?

Did they become disillusioned with churches in general due to the ideological rancor that was often exhibited?

Were they already drifting away from the church beforehand, and the pandemic allowed them to “quiet quit?”

Did their church’s stance (or lack of one) on various social and racial issues push them out of the door?

Did they become disillusioned by high-profile leaders falling into moral disarray?

Were churches simply not challenging enough to arrest their attention, as argued by Jim David and Michael Graham in The Great Dechurching? Or, as Jake Meador writes in The Atlantic:

Contemporary America simply isn’t set up to promote mutuality, care, or common life. Rather, it is designed to maximize individual accomplishment as defined by professional and financial success. Such a system leaves precious little time or energy for forms of community that don’t contribute to one’s own professional life or, as one ages, the professional prospects of one’s children. Workism reigns in America, and because of it, community in America, religious community included, is a math problem that doesn’t add up.

Daniel K. Williams, writing for Christianity Today, suggests that the deeper issue is a weak ecclesiology at the heart of most Christian’s theology, particularly evangelical theology, something I’ve written on and lamented for many years (see my Christ Among the Dragons). As Williams puts it:

What if the problem with dechurched evangelicals is not their faulty understanding of faith, but rather evangelical theology’s own lack of emphasis on the church? Relative to other forms of Christianity, evangelicals have historically maintained a rather low view of the church, compared to their high view of a believer’s individual relationship with God.

So, with so much to choose from, what is driving the great dechurching? 

The answer, of course, is “all of the above.”  

So what is the way back? There are certainly many things worth pursuing of a practical nature, many of which I outline in my book Hybrid Church, written specifically for churches wanting to thrive in a post-Christian, digital age.

But one key dynamic will never change: The church must be the church. And this is what it has to offer the world that the world does not already have: authentic biblical community.

In an opinion piece for Christianity Today, Luke Helm writes of skipping out on church for three years, only to return out of spiritual loneliness. His reasons for the initial departure?

Faith and church have been tough for a lot of people coming out of the pandemic. I’m one of them. The last three years ushered my wife and me through two job changes, a cross-country move, and months spent hunkered inside, trying to keep our young children healthy and ourselves sane. By the time the world began to reopen, so much felt different.

Until recently, I could count on one hand the number of times I’d physically attended a church service since March 2020. I could give many reasons for our absence – a toddler and a newborn, disillusionment with a church tradition that was once home, enjoying a second weekend morning, sheer exhaustion and more.

But if I’m really honest, one reason stands out: The further I get from church, the less Christian faith makes sense to me. The physical drift begets an intellectual one.

So what brought him back? Helm ended his essay by noting that the “strength of togetherness” was what not only drew him back, but what he noticed most about being back in church.

In the 1970s Hal Lindsay wrote a sensationalist book titled The Late Great Planet Earth, which detailed how much the day mirrored the end times. He even suggested that everything seemed set to take place by the 1980s and the 1970s was already the era of the antichrist. It was alarmist to say the least. It would be easy today to write “The Late Great Planet Church” on the impending demise of the church.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. 

We can orient ourselves anew to the unchurched and the dechurched in our missional strategy.

We can reach out in new, hybrid ways to this new, hybrid world.

We can renew our thinking about the centrality of the church through a renewed ecclesiology.

And we can flesh out the unity and power of the body of Christ—the “strength of togetherness” that only the church can offer the world.

James Emery White

Sources

Clare Ansberry, “Why Middle-Aged Americans Aren’t Going Back to Church,” The Wall Street Journal, August 1, 2023, read online.

Jake Meador, “The Misunderstood Reason Millions of Americans Stopped Going to Church,” The Atlantic, July 29, 2023, read online.

Jim David and Michael Graham, The Great Dechurching.

Daniel K. Williams, “Evangelicals’ Theology of the Church Must Be Born Again,” Christianity Today, August 24, 2023, read online.

James Emery White, Christ Among the Dragons: Finding Our Way Through Cultural Challenges, order from Amazon.

James Emery White, Hybrid Church: Rethinking the Church for a Post-Christian Digital Age, order from Amazon.

Luke Helm, “I Skipped Church for Three Years,” Christianity Today, August 30, 2023, read online.

Hal Lindsay, The Late Great Planet Earth.

About the Author

James Emery White is the founding and senior pastor of Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, NC, and a former professor of theology and culture at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, where he also served as their fourth president. His latest book, Hybrid Church: Rethinking the Church for a Post-Christian Digital Age, is now available on Amazon or from your favorite bookseller. To enjoy a free subscription to the Church & Culture blog, visit churchandculture.org where you can view past blogs in our archive, read the latest church and culture news from around the world, and listen to the Church & Culture Podcast. Follow Dr. White on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at @JamesEmeryWhite.

The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Christian Headlines.

Photo courtesy: ©Getty Images/Evening-T

James Emery White is the founding and senior pastor of Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, NC, and a former professor of theology and culture at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, where he also served as their fourth president. His latest book, Hybrid Church: Rethinking the Church for a Post-Christian Digital Age, is now available on Amazon or from your favorite bookseller. To enjoy a free subscription to the Church & Culture blog, visit churchandculture.org where you can view past blogs in our archive, read the latest church and culture news from around the world, and listen to the Church & Culture Podcast. Follow Dr. White on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at @JamesEmeryWhite.

Related podcast:

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Salem Web Network and Salem Media Group.

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