An international survey reveals a strong correlation between regular attendance at religious services and higher levels of individual flourishing.

The link between well-being and regular attendance at religious services was among the key insights gleaned from the first wave of data released April 30 from the Global Flourishing Study.

The study is a collaborative research project carried out by Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion, the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University, Gallup and the Center for Open Science.

Launch of Baylor Institute for Global Flourishing

In conjunction with the release of the first round of data, Baylor University announced the launch of its Institute for Global Flourishing, an initiative university officials said aligns with the university’s Pro Mundo (for the world) vision and its Baylor in Deeds strategic plan.

“I am grateful that Baylor’s mission aligns so perfectly with the bold vision to launch the Institute for Global Human Flourishing,” said Byron Johnson, inaugural director of the Institute for Global Human Flourishing, co-principal investigator of the Global Flourishing Study and current director of the Institute for Studies of Religion.

“This extraordinary commitment positions Baylor to be a leader not only in advancing scientific knowledge via the Global Flourishing Study and related research, but it will also provide the infrastructure to offer much needed resources and tools to support the application of this knowledge to power a global flourishing movement.”

Creating the Institute for Global Flourishing advances Baylor’s “vision of human flourishing that is evidence-based, practical, faith-animated and inspirational,” said Provost Nancy Brickhouse.

“The Institute for Global Human Flourishing is uniquely positioned to serve as a catalyst for transformative impact on individuals and communities, while also engaging students, alumni, faculty, staff, Texas and the world in a shared pursuit of human flourishing, fostering a life of purpose, well-being and meaningful contribution,” Brickhouse said.

First round of data offers insights

The five-year, longitudinal Global Flourishing Study involves about 200,000 individuals in more than 20 countries, representing 45 languages.

Researchers measure global human flourishing across six domains including happiness and life satisfaction, physical and mental health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, close social relationships, and financial and material stability.

“The first round of findings from the study showed attendance at religious services appears to be an important element related to flourishing across almost all countries,” the report “What Contributes to a Life Well-lived?” states.

“Attendance is generally associated with greater flourishing, even after controlling for other well-known predictors.”

In most countries, the report notes, the positive relationship between flourishing and attendance at religious services is more prevalent than between flourishing and civic participation.

“A statistically significant positive relationship exists between flourishing and religious service attendance in 21 out of 23 countries and territories, compared with 15 out of 23 between flourishing and civil society participation,” the report states.

About 50 Global Flourishing Study researchers spent the past year gleaning insights from the first wave of data.

In addition to the correlation between flourishing and attendance at religious services, they identified two other key insights.

• Global differences in flourishing: The study revealed many middle-income developing countries were doing better in terms of meaning, purpose and relationships than the richer developed world. Countries like Indonesia, Mexico and the Philippines fared particularly well, while other nearby countries like Japan, Turkey and the United Kingdom did not.
• Younger generations lagging:The study revealed younger people appear to be not doing as well as older people when compared to the generations that came before them. Flourishing tends to increase with age in many countries including Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Germany, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. Many the youngest age group (18- to 24-year-olds) reported the lowest levels of flourishing.

Based in part on information provided by Lori Fogleman of Baylor University Media and Public Relations.

NASHVILLE (BP)—Although a recent Pew Research study says more teens are becoming aware of the negative effects of social media, that doesn’t mean they’re ready for anything resembling a large-scale break from it.

The study says nearly half (48 percent) of teens say social media sites have a mostly negative effect on peers, an increase from 32 percent who said so in 2022. The increase could be linked to a focus on mental health among teens, who have turned to platforms like TikTok for information on the subject.

The 16-point swing in such a short time toward seeing social media as a negative influence on mental health may lead to the conclusion that teens are on the cusp of a movement away from it. However, the same study also revealed only 14 percent of teens felt social media affected them personally in a negative way.

In other words, it’s everyone else’s problem.

That points to social media’s cultural hold not just on teens, but on society in general, said Chris Martin.

Martin, director of content for Moody Global Media and author of The Wolf in Their Pockets: 13 Ways the Social Internet Threatens the People You Lead, wonders about the correlation between social media sentiment and its use.

“I have found what teenagers say about their social media usage and their actual practices to be at odds,” he said.

So, that doesn’t mean teens are using it less.

“People engage in habits and substances they think are bad for them, because they are afraid of what may happen if they stop,” Martin said.

‘It’s not going away’

Social media has become much more than staying in touch with friends, said Zac Workun, a Lifeway Student Ministry training specialist based in Tulsa, Okla. It is where they get education as well as entertainment.

“It’s not going away,” Workun said. “Teens may not be aspiring to be the influencers we thought they would, but TikTok and YouTube have become their key media platforms for learning about the world.”

Teens’ mixed feelings about the negative effects of social media may be the reason flip phones have seen a resurgence, “but they’re probably not going to quit it,” Workun said.

While more teens are acknowledging how social media can affect one’s mental health negatively, Workun pointed out another factor observed more often by student ministry leaders.

“They’re distracted,” he said. “Even if in the room, so many of them aren’t present. Adults can also be guilty of that, of course. We’ll try to be in multiple places at once and on our phones to answer an email or text.”

Many youth ministries create “phone-free zones” to keep kids’ attention in the room.

A significant number of teens said social media hurt the amount of sleep they get (45 percent) and their productivity (40 percent).

However, they also said social media helped rather than harmed friendships, 30 percent to 7 percent. Most (43 percent) described such platforms’ effects in neutral terms.

And while 44 percent of teens said they have cut back on their social media and smartphone use—an increase from 39 percent for social media and 36 percent for phone use in 2023—more than half (55 percent) say they have not cut back on either.

NASHVILLE (RNS)—American organized religion is a bit like a scene from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” It has been on the decline for decades, but churches aren’t dead yet.

A new survey from Nashville-based Lifeway Research found 94 percent of Protestant pastors believe their church will still be open in 10 years, with 78 percent strongly agreeing that will be true.

Four percent of pastors say their church will close, with the other 2 percent saying they don’t know, according to the survey released April 15. Conducted over the phone, it surveyed 1,003 randomly selected Protestant pastors between Aug. 8 and Sept. 3, 2024.

Those pastors may be right, say researchers who study the American religious landscape.

Duke University sociologist Mark Chaves, who runs the National Congregations Study, said past studies found about 1 in 100 churches close each year. So, the idea that most churches will be around in 10 years isn’t surprising.

“An interesting thing about churches as organizations is that they have ways of staying alive in a very weakened state,” Chaves said in an email. “Other organizations would close, but weak churches have ways of staying alive.”

Short-term optimism

Scott Thumma, director of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research, said the long-term trends for congregations are more worrisome. But in the short term, congregations have become more optimistic.

In a 2021 study of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on congregations, 7 percent of church respondents reported their existence was threatened, and 5 percent said their church was in serious financial difficulty.

By 2023, 3 percent of churches surveyed said they were in serious financial difficulty. That same year, in a study about how the pandemic has affected churches, 2 percent of church leaders said they were feeling very negative about their church’s future, while 9 percent were somewhat negative.

Lifeway’s findings that few pastors thought their churches would be closing were “within the ballpark,” Thumma said.

He also said small churches with few staff members and that have paid off their building can keep going for a long time. They may have already seen some decline and know how to cope with it.

Things are harder, he said, for midsize churches that no longer have enough people or money to sustain themselves.

“Small churches can be resilient for a long time, especially when their building is paid for,” said Scott McConnell, director of Lifeway Research.

Twenty-year outlook not good

While many churches may survive the next decade, the 20-year outlook is bleaker.

“People who are in their 70s now won’t be gone in 10 years, but they will be gone in 20 years,” Thumma said. “That’s where you’re going to see the real drop.”

Count Nic Mather of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Longview, Wash., among the pastors who are optimistic for the future. The church has seen a slow but steady stream of newcomers in the last few years, mostly people who are seeking spiritual meaning and the kind of close-knit community the church offers.

“There’s a power of being in community with others,” he said. “And that ethos and sense of community is so strong here that it continues to attract people.”

Mather said his congregation is aware people don’t come to church in the way they did in the past. That’s made it focus more on reaching out to neighbors. The church also allows a number of community groups to use its building, seeing it as a resource for those neighbors.

“We are truly a hub for our community. So many people come into our building for things that aren’t church that I can’t imagine this place not being here,” he said.

Bob Stevenson, pastor of Village Baptist Church in Aurora, Ill., also is optimistic about his congregation’s prospects.

“We’re 40 years old and we have weathered quite a bit, and so unless there is some scandal or some major change socioeconomically in our area, I don’t see anything changing in terms of the church itself,” he said.

Stevenson said the church, which draws about 120 worshippers and is ethnically diverse, has taken steps to “future-proof” itself. That includes paying attention to the integrity of its leadership, something some churches have ignored to their peril.

He also said the church has a strong, committed core of members, which will help it continue for the long term.

Still, he said, COVID-19 taught him and other church leaders that no one can predict the future.

Know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em

Ryan Burge, a former pastor and author of The American Religious Landscape, said it’s hard to know when a church is ready to close. Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University, was the longtime pastor of First Baptist Church in downstate Mount Vernon, which closed last summer.

His church, which was more than 150 years old when it closed, had been on the decline for years but rallied more than a few times. Eventually, as older members of the congregation died, there were no young people to take their place.

“All it takes is two or three people to die in close succession, and it’s game over for a lot of those churches,” he said.

The new Pew Religious Landscape Study found 85 percent of Americans ages 65 and older identify with a religion, and 78 percent identify as Christian. However, only 54 percent of Americans under 30 identify with a religion, including 45 percent who say they are Christian.

Lifeway Research found some indication the rate of churches closing might have increased. The survey includes a look at data from the Southern Baptist Convention showing that 1.8 percent of congregations disbanded or closed in 2022, the last year with data available.

If that annual percentage were to hold steady over the next decade, it would mean about 18 percent of churches would close during that time, which is more than pastors surveyed would have predicted.

McConnell also said some of the churches that closed may not have had a pastor, which could explain the difference between how pastors feel and the statistics.

“But if we assume the pastors’ survey is accurately reaching enough churches close to shutting down, then yes, Southern Baptist pastors would seem to be more optimistic than the statistics say they should be,” he said in an email.

Still, Burge said pastors are by nature optimistic about the future. That’s part of the job.

“Revival is always around the corner—if we just get one thing to break our way, things will be better,” he said. “You don’t want to have the mentality that we are going to close.”

And even if pastors know churches will close, they may often believe it will happen to other churches, but not theirs.

“Everyone thinks that churches are going to close,” Amanda Olson, the longtime pastor of Grace Evangelical Covenant Church on Chicago’s North Side, told RNS in 2022, just before the church’s last service. “But nobody thinks it is going to be their church.”

(RNS)—In the 1890s, a pair of British archaeologists began digging in an ancient rubbish heap at the edge of the ruins of Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, looking for a glimpse into the city’s past.

They’d eventually find tens of thousands of documents, written on papyrus and preserved in the desert for centuries, ranging from official documents to personal letters. Among them was a fragment about 11 inches long and 2 inches wide that detailed shipments of grain on one side.

On the other side were the music and lyrics to a song. That song would turn out to be one of the oldest Christian hymns ever found.

“We have about 50 examples of musical compositions with musical notation from antiquity,” said John Dickson, a former songwriter turned biblical scholar.

“This is the only Christian one. And it predates any other notation of a Christian hymn by many centuries.”

Scholars have known about the fragment, known as P.Oxy. 1786 or the Oxyrhynchus Hymn—a reference to the Oxyrhynchus Papyri collection—since 1922, when the text of the hymn was first published in English.

The song is filled with Christian imagery, with worshippers telling the stars and wind to be silent as they praise God, “the giver of all good things,” but the tune is hard to sing. It’s not the kind of song to turn up in a megachurch worship service.

The late Martin Marty, a famed Christian historian, once wrote: “If you complain that it’s a bit bumpy and hard to sing, or that it’s ‘one of those old hymns’ and not catchy like the ones that show up on screens, you are right.”

New old hymn debuts—again

But Marty, who was wrong about few things, might have spoken too soon. A new version of the Oxyrhynchus Hymn debuted last week, courtesy of a new translation from Dickson and help from Chris Tomlin and Ben Fielding, two of the most popular modern worship songwriters.

Christened as “The First Hymn,” the new song arrived just in time for Holy Week, along with a documentary about the hymn that debuts this week at Biola University in Los Angeles and at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C.

Dickson said there are earlier Christian hymns—including several in the text of the New Testament—but none of them has the musical notation found in the P.Oxy. 1786.

He said scholars can still read that notation, which comes from an ancient Greek style of music, and so they know what the hymn would have sounded like. The documentary features Dickson singing a bit of the original melody in the ruins of an ancient cathedral.

“I think the most theologically significant thing is that it’s a hymn to the Trinity—Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the century before the Nicene Creed,” he said.

A former songwriter and musician who now teaches biblical studies and public Christianity at Wheaton College in the Chicago suburbs, Dickson said he’s long dreamt of hearing this ancient hymn sung by modern worshippers.

Ancient text, modern melody

But there were a few challenges. One was the hymn’s original melody likely would not work for a modern audience. The other was some of the words of the hymn were missing in the fragment.

So, he wrote a new translation of the lyrics that remain and gave them to the two songwriters to work with. They used all of his translation and added a more modern melody.

A studio recording of the song begins with an Egyptian vocalist singing along with a guitar part that echoes the original melody of the hymn, followed by a new melody from Tomlin and Fielding.

There is also a live version of the song recorded at a stadium-style concert, and one sung with a choir.

“All powers cry out in answer,” the new lyrics read. “All glory and praise forever to our God, the Father, Son, and Spirit, we sing amen.”

Marc Jolicoeur, director of worship studies at Kingswood University in New Brunswick who is part of a worship leader worship project, said other adaptions of old, traditional hymns and texts—such as the Doxology, the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostle’s Creed and a blessing from the Book of Numbers—have been adapted into popular modern worship songs that “meet a Venn diagram of needs.”

He hopes to use this new version of the first hymn in worship.

“It’s quite appealing to me as a worship leader—beautiful song, laid out in a familiar and engaging arrangement, deeply connected to the ancient pillars of the faith,” he said.

Jolicoeur also said the new version from Tomlin and Fielding is a bit of a “Ship of Theseus” puzzle—in that the song has some new lyrics, in a new language and melody.

The Ship of Theseus is a reference to a philosophical puzzle—if all the parts of a ship are replaced over time, is it still the same ship or something new? Is The First Hymn really the old hymn resurrected or a hymn inspired by an ancient song?

Song of joy in midst of persecution

Shannan Baker, a postdoctoral fellow at the Dunn Center for Christian Music Studies at Baylor University, said the new hymn is different from some of the other work Tomlin and Fielding have done.

Tomlin is best known for songs such as “How Great Is Our God” and “Good, Good Father,” while Fielding co-wrote “Mighty to Save” and “What a Beautiful Name” for Hillsong, the Australian megachurch.

“There is a draw toward things that feel more authentic because they are from the ‘early church,’” said Baker.

Dickson said the song comes from a time when Christians were under persecution in the Roman Empire. Yet, they sang with joy about their faith, something he hopes will inspire modern listeners.

“I look at this hymn and think it’s joyful confidence in the midst of persecution, instead of Christians punching back,” he said.

He also hopes Christians of all kinds of backgrounds will embrace the song.

“Here is a version of Christianity before all our squabbles, before all our denominations,” he said. “I like to think of the song as a token of unity.”

It’s a misconception Russians worship a strong central government and have no place for freedom of conscience or religious freedom in their history, historian Wallace Daniel said.

“It doesn’t hold true to the reality,” Daniel asserted.

Daniel is distinguished professor of history at Mercer University and emeritus professor of history at Baylor University. He introduced his latest publication, Freedom and the Captive Mind: Fr. Gleb Yakunin and Orthodox Christianity in Soviet Russia as part of the Baylor Libraries Author Series.

Daniel’s lecture, titled, “Speaking Truth to Power: The Revolt of a Russian Priest,” countered the “widespread view that the Russia people are essentially authoritarian by nature.”

Rather, if one looks closely at Russian history, many examples of nonconformists, dissidents and “of people who do not agree with the state” will be found, Daniel said.

As evidence that “the belief dissidents and nonconformists don’t exist among Russians” is a “western construct,” Daniel cited dissenting Baptists.

He also pointed to “a famous group called the Old Believers, or many of the most violent peasant rebellions in modern European history that attempted, and almost did on several occasions, overthrow the state,” and other writers and thinkers who went up against the state in Russia’s past.

“One of the most courageous and one of the most outstanding of those nonconformists, those dissidents” is Father Gleb Yakunin, Daniel claimed.

“Father Gleb fought for freedom of conscience in some of the most difficult conditions that one can imagine, through some of the darkest years of Soviet Russia in its history,” he said.

When Vladimir Lenin came to power, he decreed war on religion, “the belief of the naïve,” Daniel explained, and saw it as something that must be overcome in order to create a scientific, industrial civilization.

To overcome Christianity, Lenin believed it must be attacked from all sides, externally but also from within the religious tradition, Daniel said, setting the backdrop for his talk on Yakunin.

Yukunin finds his way to faith

Yakunin’s father died when he was 9 years old. His mother, a bookkeeper who was devout in the Russian Orthodox faith, raised him in a house filled with candles and religious icons.

However, schools were atheistic and required students to take classes in atheism. At the age of 14, “Yakunin declared himself to be an avowed atheist,” who would never change.

“But he did change,” Daniel noted, through a relationship he developed in university with Alexander Men, a man whose witness and friendship would “reshape his life.”

The two bonded over books, the sciences and world religions. Before Men and Yakunin became friends, he was already on the road to becoming a Christian or had at least developed an interest in the religion, Daniel recalled Yakunin telling him.

But, “Men convinced Yakunin that there was a much deeper and more interesting world than he’d been exposed to in his schooling,” Daniel said.

Additionally, Yakunin sought out banned books in Moscow’s bookstores and was especially interested in Eastern religions. “He was a rebel,” a nonconformist, who came to believe the Bolshevik requirement to worship a strong leader was wrong.

“I was a born fighter,” Daniel recalled Yakunin saying. And he chose a fighting vocation, when he was ordained to the Russian Orthodox priesthood in the 1960s at age 26, Daniel said.

Yakunin gained worldwide attention for being a dissenting voice from within the Russian church and for letters he wrote about religious persecution asking global Christians to come to the aid of Christians who were suffering.

Daniel explained it was astounding to Westerners of the time that such a letter was coming out of the Soviet Union.

Then, in 1976, Yakunin held a press conference in Moscow, with Western and Soviet journalists in attendance, where he announced the creation of a “Christian committee for the defense of believers’ rights in the Soviet Union.”

“‘Our purpose,’ he said, in that committee, ‘was to collect stories of priests and stories, also, of believers who were being persecuted,’” Daniel quoted Yakunin.

The stories were sent to an entrepreneur in San Francisco who published them in 12 volumes, nine of which are housed in the Keston collection in Carroll Library at Baylor University.

Confronting truth and telling it

Yakunin confronted, with facts, the Soviet Union lie that there was no religious persecution happening, and he had “no fear” of confronting the hierarchy of the church or the government or of violating the Soviet Constitution.

He knew doing so was dangerous and he might pay a heavy price, but he “spoke truth to power” anyway, Daniel said.

Yakunin believed “wholeheartedly” in freedom of conscience, “that it was a person’s right to believe or not to believe.”

He also said, “When Christianity and nationalism become entwined with each other, when the mind becomes captive to power, the person, and a whole society will lose their way,” Daniel noted.

Yakunin uncovered and made public corruption and duplicity at the highest levels of his country.

Daniel explained Yakunin saw speaking the truth as his Christian calling. He said a society should not be afraid to look at every part of its history and bring it out. It must do so to be healthy.

Yakunin believed, “Truth, not duplicity nor fantasy, would cleanse us.”

“That statement is as relevant to Putin’s Russia today as it was when Yakunin wrote these words. It is also relevant to our own country—to healing its wounds, to bringing us together again as a people,” Daniel concluded.

The Keston Center for Religion, Politics and Society was established by Baylor University to receive, maintain, preserve, expand and make available to scholars the Keston Archives and Library—the world’s most comprehensive collection of materials on freedom of conscience and religious persecution under communist and other totalitarian regimes.

The Keston collection, originally located at Keston College in Oxford, arrived in Waco in 2007. The Keston Center became part of the Baylor Libraries in 2012.

NEW YORK (RNS)—A 17th-century letter considered the blueprint for religious freedom in the United States was displayed for the first time in seven years at the New York Public Library on April 8.

The Flushing Remonstrance, signed by 30 settlers and opposing a ban on Quaker worship, will be on display through April 10.

The “Flushing Remonstrance: Let Everyone Remain Free” exhibition celebrates the 60th anniversary of the New York City Landmarks law. For the occasion, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, which selects landmarks and historic sites, partnered with the New York State Archives to display the highly protected document.

“I always look for some symbolic project to start the anniversary,” said historian Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, an organizer of the event and chair of the New York City Landmarks60 Alliance.

A preservationist, Diamonstein-Spielvogel thought this forgotten episode of New York’s history would be a perfect fit.

“I was thinking of something worthy. And of course, I think this document is hallowed,” she said of the 1657 letter widely considered to have inspired the religious freedom clause in the First Amendment.

Though most people know about the First Amendment, few outside of Colonial history enthusiasts know of the Remonstrance, noted Brent Reidy, director of New York Public Library’s research libraries.

The exhibition is a “fantastic opportunity to share a piece of American history that is so vital but maybe is not forward in people’s minds as it could be,” he said.

“Something of this magnitude and rarity is really a special occasion for our public,” Reidy added.

The Flushing Remonstrance was sent by residents of that community—now the Queens borough of New York—to Peter Stuyvesant, the administrator of New Netherland, and condemned his ban of Quaker worship in the Dutch colony.

In 17th-century Colonial America, Flushing stood out in the New World for its tolerance toward religious minorities. In 1645, the Flushing Charter, an agreement between the first English settlers and the Dutch West India Co., granted “liberty of conscience” according to the “custom and manner of Holland” to the new residents of Flushing.

The religious openness attracted European immigrants fleeing persecution, including French Huguenots, Swedish Lutherans and Portuguese Jews.

Quakers targeted

A 1656 ordinance issued by Stuyvesant banned all religious practices outside of the Dutch Reformed Church. Stuyvesant’s ordinance targeted Quaker worship, promising fines and evictions for anyone hosting a Quaker meetinghouse.

As a result, dissent grew in the colony, and a group of 30 Flushing residents, eight of whom were among the 18 English settlers who founded the town, wrote a letter strongly condemning Stuyvesant’s decision. Their Christian beliefs, read the letter, compelled them to stand up against the ordinance.

“We cannot condemn them (Quakers) in this case, neither can we stretch out our hands against them, for out of Christ God is a consuming fire, and it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God,” state the settlers.

The document lauds the colony’s religious freedom standards as a great Dutch legacy that should be continued.

“The law of love, peace and liberty in the states extending to Jews, Turks and Egyptians, as they are considered sonnes of Adam, which is the glory of the outward state of Holland,” reads the letter.

The exhibition also features documents from the trial of John Bowne, a Flushing resident who publicly opposed the ordinance. Bowne, an English settler, was arrested and sent back to Europe for hosting Quaker meetings in his house.

During his trial with the Dutch West India Co., Bowne invoked the “liberty of conscience” principle enshrined in the Flushing Charter. He was exonerated in 1664 and allowed back to the Colonies.

“That trip took him three years from beginning to end, and it was the first successful legal test of religious freedom in America, and 100 years later, there it was codified in the First Amendment, because of the John Bowne trial, the right to assembly and freedom of speech,” said Diamonstein-Spielvogel, who is also a steward of the New York State Archives Partnership Trust.

Before the archives agreed to lend the Remonstrance, it ensured that the library met the environmental and security standards required to display the letter.

To avoid damage, the letter is rarely exposed to light or transported. As its brown curly edges show, the document was damaged in the 1911 New York State Capitol fire.

The letter is now maintained and transported in a special storage unit equipped to monitor humidity level and temperature.

“Whilst we’re very protective of the document, we also appreciate that the purpose of keeping documentary evidence is so that people can see it, appreciate it, enjoy it,” said Monica Gray, director of archival services at the New York State Archives.

Seeing “the original gives you that connection with the past, which is, I think, really thrilling for most people.”

The exhibition also will include documents providing context on religious practices of that era in Flushing, such as photographs of a Quaker meetinghouse and records on Quaker practice in the community.

Texas Monthly recently released its annual college guide, including profiles on BGCT-related colleges, which at first glance seems to paint a troubling picture in a few of the highlighted categories.

College guides such as Texas Monthly’s are intended to help parents assess which college best suits their soon-to-graduate child. How does their information support an informed decision?

Specifically, how can Texas Baptist parents and students interpret data on Baptist General Convention of Texas-related colleges included in some of these guides to make informed decisions about the undergraduate education offered at BGCT-related universities?

Context is key

Context is key in interpreting such statistics and is necessary for college guides to provide the value to which they aim, according to several BGCT-related colleges profiled in Texas Monthly’s report.

For instance, Texas Monthly’s guide reported Wayland Baptist University has a four-year graduation rate of 9 percent.

Wayland President Donna Hedgepath said in an email: “The data referenced comes from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), which only accounts for first-time, full-time students with no prior college experience.”

While she said the university could not dispute the graduation rate reported by Texas Monthly, Hedgepath pointed out Wayland “serves a diverse range of students, including graduate students, those at external campuses, military personnel, and online learners. When considering all students, Wayland’s graduation rate is significantly higher.”

Cindy Marlow McClenagan, Wayland’s vice president of academic affairs, noted the undergraduate enrollment numbers cited in the report also bear scrutiny. She said for fall 2024, Wayland-Plainview’s full-time enrollment was 707 undergraduate students—including both first-time, full-time students and transfer students.

Additionally, 204 graduate students were associated with Wayland-Plainview in fall 2024, McClenagan noted.

In addition to Plainview, Wayland has campuses in Lubbock, San Antonio and Hawaii. To arrive near the 2,090 enrollment the college report cited for Wayland, all of the university’s combined campus enrollments for undergraduate and graduate students would have to be tallied. That still only brings enrollment up to within about 400 of the number provided by Texas Monthly, she explained.

Improving student success

While Wayland representatives indicated understanding the numbers requires better context, they also were clear on Wayland’s commitment to improve student success.

McClenagan said Wayland is focused on meeting student need through several key programs, including its Summer Bridge program and Title V grant, and by moving to a new form of faculty collaboration, Pioneer Pulse. The platform allows faculty to communicate student needs quickly, as soon as they learn of them, to other faculty who need the information. Better communication among faculty leads to more efficient, effective and holistic interventions, she explained.

Wendy McNeeley, assistant vice president for student success at Howard Payne University—whose four-year graduation rate was reported to be 25 percent—explained some of the ways the university is working to meet student needs and improve outcomes.

The Center for Student Success at HPU “was started as a part of our strategic plan to impact the student experience,” McNeely said.

“As we work to impact the academic needs of students as they begin their studies at HPU, one of our goals is to positively impact retention,” which she anticipates will lead to the university seeing a direct impact on graduation rates.

“We have been tracking the use by students of the center’s tutoring and coaching resources. Prior to pulling these resources together and emphasizing them and making them more visible, we recorded 89 total tutoring sessions for the 2022-2023 academic year,” she explained.

“In 2023-2024, the year we opened the center, we increased these contacts to 191 for the academic year, and this past fall semester, that number increased again to 251 contacts, with three months in the academic year remaining.”

McNeely noted: “We are pleased to see our students are using the resources more consistently. Our coaching program began in fall 2024 and is beginning to gain steam as students recognize that there are dedicated staff who want to assist them in being successful students.”

Understanding student populations

Understanding the students served by the universities profiled by Texas Monthly also gives context to the statistics, the universities who spoke with Baptist Standard agreed.

Gabriel Cortés, Hispanic education director for Texas Baptists, notes Texas’ Hispanic population reached 12 million in 2022, becoming the state’s largest demographic group (40.2 percent).

He said recent census estimates showed “49.3 percent of Texans under 18 are Hispanic, [yet] only 26 percent of Hispanics over 25 have an associate’s degree or higher.”

In creating Cortés’ position, Texas Baptists demonstrated increasing Hispanic education is a priority. Several BGCT-related universities—including Howard Payne, Houston Christian and Wayland—already meet the threshold of a 25 percent Hispanic student population to qualify as Hispanic-serving institutions, and the other schools are not far off.

Cortés educates Texas Baptists about the anticipated enrollment cliff, when the “U.S. will hit a peak of around 3.5 million high school graduates sometime near 2025.

“After that, the (traditional) college-age population is expected to shrink across the next 5 to 10 years by as much as 15 percent.”

He said Forbes reported in December 2024, Hispanic students and multiracial students are the only two demographic categories projected to increase.

And in January, NPR reported “in places where the number of high school graduates remains stable or increases, it will be largely because of one group: Hispanic students,” Cortés explained.

¡Excelencia in Education!, a Washington D.C.-based network dedicated to “accelerat(ing) Latino student success in higher education,” reports four-year graduation rates for Hispanic students in Texas across all four-year institutions is 48 percent, while white students’ four-year graduation rate in Texas is 58 percent.

“Our student retention and graduation rates compare favorably with other minority-serving institutions nationwide, especially given the unique challenges that students often face who struggle to continue due to financial difficulties,” noted Samantha Bottoms, dean of student success at Houston Christian University. HCU’s four-year graduation rates were reported as 38 percent.

Changes that lead to improvements

Among BGCT-related schools in the report, Baylor University’s four-year graduation rates were notably high among BGCT-related colleges at 70 percent.

J. Wesley Null, vice provost for undergraduate education and academic affairs at Baylor University, explained in his 14 years at Baylor, the university has made improving graduation rates a priority.

As a result, Baylor has seen rates for first-year, no-prior-college students’ four-year graduation improve from 54 percent to about 74 percent for the 2021 incoming class who will be graduating this May.

During Null’s tenure, Baylor also has seen a 10 percent jump in fall-to-fall retention for first-time freshman, from 81 percent to 91 percent with 2024 incoming freshmen.

Perhaps the most consequential change Baylor made in the last decade to see improvements in these numbers, Null said, was revising the core curriculum. The core was reduced in 2019 from between 75 and 80 hours to 50 hours now, cutting out about two semesters’ worth of coursework.

He said there were a lot of reasons to reduce the core, but prior to 2019, the last time Baylor had reduced its core was during World War II.

Additionally, Baylor has created supports for special student populations—such as first-generation college students, veterans, or high-financial-need Pell-Grant-eligible students—to better support their needs and increase retention.

The Baylor Benefits Scholarship—instituted by the board of regents—for example, covers 100 percent of tuition and fees for students whose families make $50,000 or less, Null said. Of these scholarship recipients, 99.4 percent were retained from fall 2024 to spring 2025.

The programs Baylor has implemented to meet the needs of students who aren’t doing as well are making a significant difference, Null explained.

“Scholarship based on need is a powerful tool, at these private institutions, in particular,” Null noted, when considering which among the changes Baylor has made might be strategies transferable to other BGCT-related universities.

Other BGCT-related universities with whom Baptist Standard spoke already have identified these areas as strategic and are making strides toward them.

Editor’s note: Corrections were made after publication in paragraphs eight and twelve to correct a first name and the name of the communication platform to Pioneer Pulse.

(RNS)—Gospel composer Andraé Crouch sang, played the piano and preached for decades—often all at once.

Ten years after his death, a new biography aims to capture both the genre-defying range of Crouch’s music, as well as his ability to build bridges through his evangelistic ministry.

Co-authored by a white former Billboard gospel music editor and a Black gospel musician, the book chronicles how Crouch’s music, rooted in the historically Black Church of God in Christ denomination, became popular among white evangelical audiences.

Soon and Very Soon: The Transformative Music and Ministry of Andraé Crouch, by Robert F. Darden and Stephen Michael Newby, is a 400-page narrative of the life of Crouch, who died in 2015 at the age of 72, that reviews more than a dozen of his albums, with popular selections such as “Jesus Is the Answer” and “Take Me Back.”

“We didn’t figure we could understand the man without doing a deep dive into the music, and we couldn’t understand the music ’til we did a deep dive into the man,” said Darden, emeritus journalism professor at Baylor University and founder of its Black Gospel Music Preservation Program, in a joint interview with Newby.

“He is so part of his music, more than anybody I’ve ever experienced through a lot of interviews.”

The authors detail the wide range of musicians the Grammy winner welcomed into his home—the place where, his twin sister and collaborator, Sandra Crouch, informed them, her brother had some 1,500 of his unheard songs on cassette tapes.

Newby, music professor and ambassador for Black gospel music preservation at Baylor in Waco, said they hoped the book would be not just be a resource for readers, “but hopefully they would still be curious and listen to this guy’s music.”

Newby, 63, a member of the National Missionary Baptist Convention of America, and Darden, 71, affiliated with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, talked with RNS about Crouch’s legacy, how he once hoped to marry another gospel music star and examples of secular artists who influenced his music.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Can you describe Andraé Crouch’s performances and how they seemed to be about music, but also were what you call ‘colorblind evangelism’?

Darden: Andraé could have gone the standard route of wonderful Black quartets and essentially sang to the choir, or he could roll the dice, take a chance and go out and penetrate a market, not just with the evangelical message, which is at his core, but that in Christ, there is no Black or white, Christian, Jew, male, female, slave, free. And it was one of the three driving forces, in our opinion, of his career: ecumenicalism, evangelism and eschatology.

Why do you call Andraé Crouch ‘the most musically adventuresome artist in gospel or contemporary Christian music’?

Newby: He had a theological imagination that was otherworldly. He refused to succumb himself to the ways of the world, to the standard norms and boxes that people wanted to put him in, and he decided that at the end of the day, my family looks like the family of God—diverse.

And his innovation is second to none. Everything we hear in contemporary gospel music today, we find its rootedness musically, theologically, and all of this performativity back to Andraé Crouch.

You talked about how he would secularize his gospel music in order to appeal to a wider audience. Can you give an example of a particular song that achieves that effect?

Newby (occasionally vocalizing to illustrate): If you listen to the “This Is Another Day” album. You listen to “Perfect Peace.” It’s a funk groove. There’s Clavinet (electric clavichord). You listen to it on the “Live in London” version—the tempo, it sounds like Sly and the Family Stone, it sounds like Earth, Wind & Fire.

Yet, it is the voice of God speaking directly to all creation: “I will keep you in perfect peace if you keep your mind stayed on me.” It’s an amazing theological text. It comes right out of Scripture. You hear the popping on two and four. You hear the horn lines. Nobody was doing that in church, because the Clavinet D6 as an instrument didn’t exist in the church of that day.

How successful were those efforts to do that amalgamation?

Darden: As long as he was doing it for all markets, his album sold well. He toured. He had Black and white audiences. He did venues that Christian artists—Black or white—had never done. And then he gets a chance to record for Warner Bros., a secular label, and take the music much wider from a distribution standpoint, and it flops.

The previous albums usually came out of live performance. He would stay up all night composing something and then he would introduce it to the band 30 minutes before the show. They would play part of it, and he would judge the audience response, and then go back and perfect it. And he did that for years.

He was criticized by conservative elements of the church—both Black and white. What were their main concerns?

Darden: The churches, by their nature, are traditional, conservative. And here was a young man with different musicians—male, female, Black, white—coming in giving the same message. Ain’t no difference between his lyrics, until later, than any other gospel artist, but he was playing it with instruments they weren’t used to. He was playing in keys and time signatures they were not used to.

Newby: We know with the “Don’t Give Up” album how he came in like a bulldozer, speaking about male prostitution, abortion and all of this other stuff in his music, and the church just didn’t want to deal with that. Some white people would say, “It’s too Black for me.” Some Black people would say, “It’s too white.” But, he felt like, “Well, what God is saying: It’s not about Black and white. It’s what is right.”

There’s this idea of the harmony is greater than the dissonance. It was so in Andraé’s DNA to think about the idea that God so loved the world—everybody.

The book describes how Andraé Crouch had fallen in love with Tramaine Davis, who had been singing with him in the group the Disciples, and was devastated when she announced she was leaving and marrying Walter Hawkins. How did that change him and his music?

Darden: He never married. I’m not sure he ever got over it. Frankly, “Through It All” is an extraordinary hymn, but it’s also, when you know the context, a really painful love-lost song.

You cite many collaborators and fellow musicians in your book, but you focus on his twin sister, Sandra, a percussionist.

Darden: Sandra was the prototypical big sister. She was Andraé’s bodyguard, personal manager. Andraé, by all accounts, struggled in daily conversation. He said he got over his stutter, but as you listen to tapes later, he expressed himself better in song and sermon, and so Sandra shielded him from a lot of things through a good portion of their lives.

Her work with Motown very early, when she became a legitimate Motown session player, enabled him to bring in Motown musicians and producers much earlier than probably he would have, and she had a level of professionalism that she brought with that.

You note in your conclusion that Crouch was considered both the founder of contemporary gospel music and the popularizer of praise and worship music. Do those two subgenres of gospel music reflect a divide that remains?

Darden: Andraé, maybe alone, has been able to bridge that. The two things that he helped create were really different facets of the same thing, and other people go one way or the other.

Newby: Andraé never allowed the technology to hinder his creativity. But when you strip all that away and you look at the text, the melody, the harmony and the theology, I think those things make a great song.

And great songs geographically build bridges everywhere. From the north to the south to the east to the west, it forms the cross.

Crouch was always in the epicenter of what really mattered. And for Andraé, everything was so centralized at the core. Jesus Christ was at the core.

(RNS)—At a meeting of mostly evangelical Christian communicators, activists and lawyers that took place in Dallas in February, more than a few panel discussions and hallway conversations repeatedly circled back to the same topic: same-sex marriage.

Having helped to engineer the demise of Roe v. Wade after half a century of anti-abortion activism, attendees at the National Religious Broadcasters conference openly discussed plans to make shorter work of Obergefell v. Hodges, the landmark 2015 Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.

“Obergefell is on very shaky ground,” Mathew Staver, founder of the conservative Christian nonprofit legal group Liberty Counsel, told the audience of one panel at the conference. “It’s not a matter of, in my opinion, if it will eventually be overturned, but when it’ll be overturned.”

It’s a brazen claim critics and legal analysts have dismissed as unlikely in the short term. But conservative Christian advocates say they are emboldened by President Donald Trump’s election and the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022.

They hope justices eventually will respond to a growing list of efforts to overturn Obergefell cropping up across the country.

Among them is the legal case surrounding Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis, who made headlines after Obergefellwas decided when she refused to grant a marriage license to a same-sex couple, citing her conservative Christian faith.

She has lost repeatedly in court and even spent time in jail for her defiance. But in July 2024, Staver and the Liberty Counsel filed an appeal on her behalf, arguing the Supreme Court overstepped in Obergefell, only to be denied in early March.

Staver has vowed to press on, but Micah Schwartzman, professor at University of Virginia Law School and director of the Karsh Center for Law and Democracy, said the prospects for a Davis victory remain thin.

“That case is going nowhere, as best I can tell,” Schwartzman told RNS.

While Justice Clarence Thomas left room in his concurring opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization for the court to reconsider the Obergefell decision, no other justices joined him.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh declared in his own concurrence that “overruling Roe does not mean the overruling of those precedents, and does not threaten or cast doubt on those precedents,” referring specifically to Obergefell.

Strong support for same-sex marriage

Support for same-sex marriage remains high among Americans, according to a 2024 report by Public Religion Research Institute, which showed that about 67 percent agreed it should be legal.

Solid majorities of white mainline Protestants, white Catholics and Hispanic Catholics back same-sex marriage, as do high percentages of Jewish Americans (80 percent), Buddhists (82 percent) and religiously unaffiliated Americans (86 percent).

But Schwartzman said those who depend on or support LGBTQ rights still have reason to be concerned.

“There are political constituencies that want to see Obergefell reversed, and they know that a majority of the justices, at least with respect to writing on a blank slate, objected to Obergefell and thought Obergefell was wrongly decided—including the chief justice, John Roberts, who dissented in Obergefell,” he said.

Lawsuits aren’t the only route to getting Obergefell back in front of the justices. Speaking on a panel to the religious broadcasters, Katy Faust, who founded the activist organization Them Before Us, suggested her group was focused on a legislative challenge.

“Just because gay marriage was legalized in 2015 that does not mean this is a dead issue,” she said.

“We have to fight against it, because five Supreme Court justices do not determine whether or not children deserve, need or have a right to their own mother and father.”

In an interview, Faust pointed to legislative efforts already underway intended to chip away at Obergefell.

Covenant marriage legislation

Oklahoma state Sen. Dusty Deevers, a Calvinist Southern Baptist pastor who co-authored a 2023 statement in support of Christian nationalism that defined “marriage as the covenant union of a biological male and a biological female” as a core value, introduced two bills in January seen as targeting Obergefell.

The first, the “Covenant Marriage Act,” would create a $2,500 state tax credit for people who opted in to “covenant marriages” that are “based on the traditional understanding of marriage” and could only be dissolved “in cases of abuse, adultery, or abandonment.” The tax credit could be carried forward for up to five years.

The effect of the bill, Schwartzman said, would be to create “two classes of marriage, one that’s privileged and one that’s treated as second class or disadvantaged.”

In the last few months, similar bills have been introduced in Tennessee, Missouri and Texas. Versions of covenant marriage are already legal in Arizona, Arkansas and Louisiana, where House Speaker Mike Johnson married his wife in a covenant ceremony in 1999, according to The Associated Press.

Deevers’ bill, which died in committee last month, appears to be unusual for its inclusion of a tax credit for covenant marriages.

Less attention has been paid to another bill introduced by Deevers: the Promote Child Thriving Act. It creates a $500 annual state tax credit per child for a mother and father filing jointly and escalates to $1,000 if the child was born after the marriage of the parents.

Faust suggested Deevers’ bill appears patterned after a template produced by her group, whose aim is to create a “competing track” that focuses on “biological connections between parents and child, and rewarding that family formation.”

“It takes the focus off of the adults and their relationship, and their own identification and romantic bonds, and puts it on to what marriage is and historically has been—which is an institution that is responsible for the procreation and raising of the next generation,” she said.

Legislation is not ‘an end in itself’

The legislation is not an end in itself. If the Promote Child Thriving Act or a bill like it is signed into law and faces a constitutional challenge, “that could create the kind of live issue that the justices could then rule on,” Faust said.

Staver agreed the strategy “certainly has legs” and could constitute a “direct challenge” to Obergefell if passed.

Staver and Faust also pointed to a resolution passed in January by Idaho’s lower house asking the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse its 2015 ruling. The resolution, known as a memorial, argued the ruling misunderstands “liberty” to mean people should “seek dignity from the state” instead of God, and that the result causes “collateral damage” to other liberties “including religious liberty.”

In South Dakota, a seemingly identical resolution recently passed out of committee, while a North Dakota version passed that state’s House but failed to win approval in its Senate. A version in Montana was recently tabled by the state Senate, and another in Michigan is currently languishing in committee.

While Staver admitted the resolutions are largely symbolic—“If you filed suit against it, there’s no enforcement aspect to it,” he said—the movement “sets the tone” for other efforts.

Introduced by state Rep. Heather Scott, who has argued the United States is a “Judeo-Christian based country,” Idaho’s resolution also called Obergefell “illegitimate overreach” and asked the justices to restore the “natural definition of marriage, a union of one man and one woman.”

During debate, state Rep. Clint Hostetler repeatedly quoted the Bible, saying, “We could go hours and hours pointing to Bible verses in Scripture that validates the institution of marriage given by God and how it’s between a man and a woman.”

The tone has not been unified, however. Rep. Ilana Rubel, a Democrat representing Boise and the minority leader of the Idaho House, later fired back: “We talked about Scripture—we don’t legislate according to Scripture.”

In many cases, locals, including one United Church of Christ pastor, have testified against the resolutions, objecting that they don’t represent all religious Americans or even all Christians.

In South Dakota, Sioux Falls resident Christine Morgan told a committee hearing: “My church and many other churches are open, supportive and welcoming of LGBTQ+ couples. This feels like a very pointed attack from one specific subset of a large belief system.”

Schwartzman said the raw number of cases challenging same-sex marriage is more determinative than any individual effort. “One of the strategies that led to Dobbs was that states were willing to ping the court repeatedly to test whether the court’s commitment to Roe was sound,” he said.

“It’s not just that there was one case that did it—there were many cases over many years asking the court to reconsider its earlier decision.”

Schwartzman said the combined activism he’s seen so far resembles the “early stages” of the campaign to overturn Roe v. Wade. Their success “doesn’t turn on whether any of those particular efforts win or lose,” Schwartzman said.

Instead, “it turns on whether they gain momentum and show that they have sufficient public support to give the justices enough reason to reconsider the earlier decision.”

Overturning Roe, of course, took decades. Yet Staver and his allies insist they’re working on a shorter timeline. Asked when he thinks Obergefell will be reversed, Staver initially said “within my lifetime” before clarifying he had an even smaller window in mind.

“Within the next four years,” he said. “I think we’re close. We just need the right case.”

NASHVILLE (BP)—Five years after the COVID-19 pandemic, a Gallup study is sharing parents’ perspectives on how that time has affected their children’s social skills and mental health, as well as its impact on academics.

Nearly half—45 percent—of parents surveyed observe a negative impact of the pandemic on their school-age children. Out of that figure, about 22 percent say social difficulty is ongoing.

Approximately 42 percent of respondents say the pandemic negatively affected their child’s mental health, with half characterizing it as persistent.

Lisa Moore has served in student and children’s ministry pretty much since marrying her minister husband Rick 36 years ago. That’s also the amount of time she has been a nurse, the last 30 years in pediatrics.

Moore’s observations through her full-time work in the Pediatric Developmental and Behavioral Health department at Atrium Heath Navicent in Macon, Ga., and 10 years as part-time children’s minister at Lawrence Drive Baptist Church overall align with the study’s findings.

The pandemic’s effects on children appear to be far less noticeable on those she sees heavily involved in church. There is another side she has observed, though.

“There are a number of kids who previously came to church and participated who have not returned,” she said. “I feel a lot of that is due to social anxiety.”

She also has seen a change in how eager children are to become involved. There is a noticeable hesitancy among some, a nature she also observed at times to be passed along by parents.

Impact of social isolation still seen

The fourth and fifth graders of the pandemic are the freshmen and sophomores of today. She said the amount of social isolation from then still can be seen.

“Some kids were able to be around others, whether it was siblings or another close family where it was decided they wouldn’t be completely isolated from others. But some kids weren’t able to be around anyone else.”

That could’ve been the case because they were the only child in the home or the family decided to isolate completely. Either way, those children weren’t left with much more interaction than a screen.

“Electronics played a huge role,” she said, noting how screens were instrumental not only for socializing, but for school.

Melody Wilkes is the director of Preschool and Children’s Ministry at First Baptist Church in Brunswick, Ga., as well as on the leadership team for a private Christian school. She has monitored the pandemic’s impact on children from both roles.

Although not as pronounced as its impact on mental health, the Gallup study nevertheless reported 36 percent of parents saying their children’s math skills were negatively impacted, as were reading (31 percent) and science (30 percent) proficiencies.

The survey affirms what she has noticed among elementary and middle school-aged children.

“The overall academic scores for our students are down from pre-COVID levels,” she said. “I don’t know if that is due to COVID or teachers and leadership at individual schools, but the fact remains that our kids are still behind where they used to be.”

Busy schedules create other problems

Children and families in her direct line of observation have largely overcome social challenges from the lockdown, Wilkes said. That can be attributed to an abundance of activities available since then and a desire to get outside. But that also has come with a cost.

“Schedules are very busy, with some parents engaging their kids in multiple activities during the week as well as on the weekends,” she said. “Those build social skills and friendships, and that’s healthy. But my concerns lie with overscheduling our children without prioritizing Christian training.

“A lot of that falls to the church to provide those opportunities. However, many churches cut back on their activities during COVID and didn’t fully re-engage, taking the opportunity to reset the ministry. I believe this has impacted our children’s faith journey in a big way.”

Moore’s church has refocused on community and how to make it more prominent for families and children. The principles come from Flip the Script, a resource from Lifeway Christian Resources NextGen director Chuck Peters.

“It stands for Friends, Leaders, Influencers and Pastors,” she said. “These are the main influences on if kids stay in church. If they have a friend—and if their parents have friends at the church—they will be more likely to come and get plugged in.”

The rest of the acronym brings home the importance of community, Peters said.

“Coming out of the pandemic, we did a study with Lifeway Research in partnership to learn about the specific needs of Gen Z and Gen Alpha from a cultural standpoint,” he said. “Their worldview is fundamentally different.

“The millennials are the first generation in North America where less than half identify as Christian or attend church regularly. It continues to decline among generations. Gen Z is the first where the majority are not Christian but have a secular viewpoint.”

The result is a generation that no longer has a “cultural gauge” for determining what is good, or right from wrong, he added.

Peters has been in his role at Lifeway for 11 years and in children’s ministry for 16 years. His anecdotal observation is many adults have put the mental health effects of the pandemic behind them. For those children who endured it in their formative years, though, the memories and impact linger.

It’s a generation that has experienced “toxic stress and trauma” while becoming more connected than ever, digitally speaking, he said. The church must be ready to help them.

Every child and every student needs an advocate in the church who isn’t their parent, an adult who genuinely cares for them. That adult helps instill and model a biblical worldview. Introduce them to a personal relationship with Christ while modeling it.

“It’s not enough to know about Jesus. We have to know him personally and relationally for a generation longing for relationship,” he said. “Give them the gospel. Be a leader that loves them and gives them a biblical worldview.”

BRENTWOOD, Tenn.—Anecdotes often portray parents and student ministry leaders at odds, but both groups share a desire to see the next generation grow spiritually. Each also believes they have a positive, healthy relationship with the other.

A study from Lifeway Students and Lifeway Research explores the perspective of churchgoing parents of teenagers and student ministry leaders in local churches. Both emphasize the spiritual health of their students and say they want to work together to see the next generation become disciples of Christ.

“For believing parents, a key goal is that their teenagers develop a genuine faith in Christ—a desire shared by student ministry leaders,” said Chad Higgins, coauthor of Define the Relationship: Growing a Parent Ministry that Brings Families and Churches Together, a book based on this research.

“Both want students to grow spiritually healthy and mature in their walk with Christ. To align on this, we need to move beyond tracking church attendance as the sole measure of faithfulness and help parents understand and discuss terms like ‘spiritually healthy’ or ‘growing in Christ’ in meaningful ways.”

What do Christian parents say?

Lifeway Research surveyed 1,001 parents who regularly attend church and have at least one child in grades 6-12. They shared hopes for their children, experiences with student ministry and if they feel they could use some help.

When asked their biggest priority for their student’s future, 2 in 5 (41 percent) say their main goal is spiritual well-being. Around half as many point to emotional well-being (19 percent) and physical well-being (18 percent).

Fewer choose financial well-being (9 percent), having a profession they enjoy (9 percent) or relational well-being (4 percent).

Most parents place spiritual (71 percent), emotional (66 percent) and physical (60 percent) well-being of their student’s future as one of their top three priorities.

Almost half (45 percent) say financial well-being, a third (32 percent) choose their student having a profession they enjoy and a quarter (25 percent) say relational well-being is one of their top three highest priorities.

“All the potential priorities listed for parents are good things,” McConnell said. “This is the tension that exists in every Christian home. Parents are forced to consider if seeking the kingdom of God and encouraging their student to do the same is of first importance or one of many things they want.”

Seven in 10 churchgoing parents (71 percent) actively encourage their students to be engaged in the Christian faith, including 37 percent who strongly encourage them.

Far fewer say they leave their spiritual development up to their student (12 percent), share information about different faiths without trying to influence their student (11 percent) or leave their student’s spiritual development up to their church (6 percent).

Most parents feel their encouragement has paid off. Seven in 10 (72 percent) say their student often or consistently lives out a belief in Jesus Christ, with 42 percent saying their student does so often and 30 percent saying they do so consistently. One in 5 (20 percent) say their student has shown interest in following Jesus.

Still, parents have concerns about their student and their spiritual growth. More than 9 in 10 (93 percent) are at least a little worried their student will become distracted by worldly things. Nine in 10 (90 percent) have some concern about their student giving into peer pressure.

Almost as many (87 percent) say they have some level of concern about their student focusing on professional growth while neglecting their spiritual growth. Four in 5 (80 percent) are at least a little concerned their student will feel unsure about their faith.

Additionally, 5 in 6 (85 percent) say they’re at least a little concerned about their student regularly attending church once they move out.

“Church leaders often notice students’ high commitment to sports and extracurriculars and can feel like they compete with church involvement,” said Higgins, co-host of the Youth Ministry Booster podcast.

 “Without real relationships with families, it’s nearly impossible to have priority conversations that don’t come across as accusatory or speculative. This lack of connection can fuel the perception of conflicting goals, even when the core desires of leaders and parents align.”

Most parents (62 percent) say they’re equipped to help their student develop spiritually, while 36 percent feel the opposite. Yet, 94 percent agree they want to become more equipped for this, and just 5 percent disagree.

This may be where parents would like help from student pastors. Only 2 percent say they’re not willing to partner with their church’s student leader to help their student grow spiritually, but 72 percent say they are open to that partnership. One in 5 (20 percent) aren’t sure, and 7 percent say their church doesn’t have a student ministry leader.

What do student ministry leaders say?

For their part, student ministry leaders want to partner and work with parents, but many have limited time and feel overwhelmed. Some leaders are full-time staff members, while others serve as volunteers.

“Student ministers and other leaders are working hard to create a safe, nurturing environment where students can grow spiritually,” Higgins said.

“They’re also seeking true partnership with families, moving beyond a one-size-fits-all discipleship model. Leaders want to communicate where students are and collaborate on the best ways to foster spiritual growth together.”

The average week for a student ministry leader includes a large portion of their time engaged in preparation work alone (11 hours) or with church staff (seven hours).

Most other time is invested in the students themselves, including four hours at student ministry activities, two hours with students one-on-one and two hours with students at their extracurricular activities or hanging out. Much less time involves adult volunteers in the ministry (two hours) or parents (one hour).

Still, equipping parents is an area in which student ministry leaders want to improve. When asked what they’d love to see their ministry do more of next year, if they could do it well, leaders often pointed to increased involvement with parents.

Around 7 in 10 say they’d want to increase their equipping of parents with tools to disciple their students (70 percent) and training of parents to disciple their students (67 percent).

Many also say that if they could do it well, they would love for parents and student leaders to grow in their relationships with each other (46 percent) and for parents to grow in their relationships with each other (41 percent).

Almost as many leaders say they’d want to improve sharing information with parents to keep them aware of new elements of youth culture (38 percent).

Half of student ministry leaders (52 percent) say they would want to train Bible study leaders of students next year. Fewer point to a priority of offering big events to attract more students (33 percent). Another 23 percent would want to offer girls’ ministry activities.

As leaders see a need to do more training and equipping of parents, they also see parents who want to be engaged in the spiritual development of their student.

Three in 4 (76 percent) say parents in their church are concerned about their student’s spiritual development. Additionally, 7 in 10 student ministry leaders (71 percent) say parents in their church are proactive in encouraging their student to engage in the Christian faith.

Despite all the desire to partner with parents and do more training, most student ministry leaders (57 percent) say they don’t have a clearly defined strategy for ministering to parents.

 “Student ministers should recognize it’s tough for parents to replicate something they’ve never experienced,” Higgins said.

“If parents grew up without a model of discipleship in the home, they’re learning from scratch. Understanding this can help ministers approach parents with empathy and support as they navigate their role.”

Student ministry leaders aren’t only concerned about what happens at church. Around 3 in 4 (73 percent) say they have sought to partner with parents to encourage spiritual activities at home, but some have been disappointed with the results.

More than 2 in 5 leaders who have tried to partner (43 percent) say parents don’t even try to engage at home in the spiritual activities they suggest, while 40 percent of leaders say the parents at least try it.

Three in 10 (30 percent) say the parents like it, but half as many (15 percent) say the students enjoy it.

A quarter believe the activities have worked for many families for a short time (25 percent), 7 percent say these activities worked for many families for a long time and 15 percent don’t think they’ve worked for most families. Around 1 in 6 (17 percent) say the results have been very encouraging.

Ministry leaders point to several challenges that have limited the success of these efforts. Around 2 in 5 (42 percent) say parents don’t have time to prepare. Three in 10 (31 percent) believe the activities have been things parents did not want to do, while 27 percent say the students haven’t wanted to participate.

A quarter (24 percent) say church leaders don’t have time to plan and communicate the connection between the church’s efforts and parents’ efforts in students’ spiritual development.

One in 10 student ministry leaders say the parent-student activities expected too much time together (11 percent) or the format of the activities has not been enjoyable (11 percent). One in 20 (5 percent) say the topics haven’t been relevant.

Some leaders blame busyness (7 percent), while others say it’s apathy and the activities not being a priority (4 percent). A few say the parents’ efforts are not tied to the church’s efforts because the parents are non-Christian or unchurched (3 percent).

“Holding two informational meetings a year won’t shift the tide of discipleship in the home, if that’s our goal,” Higgins said. “We want to see leaders build ongoing, meaningful connections that empower families to grow together in faith.”

The online survey of 1,001 student ministry parents was conducted Jan. 30 to Feb. 9, 2024, using a national pre-recruited panel. The sample provides 95 percent confidence that the sampling error from the panel does not exceed plus or minus 3.2 percent.

The online survey of 1,056 student ministry leaders was conducted Feb. 8 to Feb. 28, 2024. The sample provides 95 percent confidence that the sampling error does not exceed plus or minus 6.2 percent.

(ALEXANDRIA, Va.)—A “movement” focused on reengaging North America with the gospel that has been brewing for almost a decade is beginning to take a more defined shape, and Texas Baptists have quite a few seats at the table.

Dennis Wiles, pastor of First Baptist Church in Arlington and chair of the Ascent council, welcomed around 200 invited participants—called curators—to the second formative gathering of Ascent.

When asked when the movement began, Wiles said he “would say it began when Jesus ascended into the heavens and gave the church this message and this mission.” However, the Ascent council, a group of eight at the time, first began conversations in 2016.

The initial group included Texas and Virginia Baptists, who felt like they’d lost their denominational home beyond their local and state affiliations—particularly the national and international missions agencies of their denomination.

It became clear in the years of dreaming about this new network, a sense of disenfranchisement from denomination was not limited to moderate Baptists in two states, Wiles explained.

Centrists across denominational lines were finding themselves in a similar place of loss.

Wiles said he’d been praying God would use the gathering—this new group assembled from orthodox, centrist Christians from a variety of denominational backgrounds—to discern together what God is up to in this time.

And like the “200 sons of Issachar” in 1 Chronicles 12:32, “who understood the times and knew what Israel should do,” he hoped the curators would understand the times and know what it is God wants them to do to “re-evangelize North America, and ultimately take the gospel to the world.”

Chris Backert, senior director of Ascent, explained when the group who envisioned Ascent began meeting to talk about a new way to cooperate for the gospel mission, they recognized the world was heading into a time of rupture.

They observed this era of upheaval was evident in social-political shifts and uneasiness. And the council began to wonder if this upheaval might be the sort of upheaval God sometimes uses to bring in a new season of revival in the church.

Starting with the gospel

Backert said they asked themselves: “What if we don’t start with the church? What if we started with the gospel?”

The early council decided to look at things from the perspective not of what does the church need, but of what does the gospel need in order to re-evangelize North America, “and we worked backwards from there.”

As they began to talk about that, “a great unity came around the idea that we really need a fresh evangelization, reengagement, awakening, whatever word you prefer. We really need a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit to see new generations come to faith in Christ all over North America. That’s the gospel need.”

COVID-19 slowed Ascent’s development but accelerated centrist believers’ sense of loss of ecclesial identity for the sake of the mission, Backert said. “People feel not home in their own home … and yet we feel this need, we really want to re-engage North America with the gospel.”

Backert said coming out of the season of rupture exacerbated by COVID, “we’re in a season of realignment—and you can see this playing out all over the world—and we’re in a season of ecclesial realignment.”

The gathering of individuals of diverse ecclesial backgrounds with a common gospel goal “couldn’t even have been conceived of 10 years ago,” Backert noted, but “in 2025, it makes perfect sense.”

As in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, “the old alliances have died.” And in this time of realignment, “it’s time for new alliances that make sense for the days ahead,” he asserted.

Backert explained Ascent is a voluntary, or “opt-in” network—“a cooperation of the willing”—but with the framework of a covenant to provide stability. The guiding covenant comes from the Capetown Commitment of the Lausanne Movement.

Based on the “connectionalism” that led to conventions, conferences, dioceses or other forms of association, Ascent aims to provide a common future for previously disparate groups—cooperating to re-evangelize North America and beyond.

“We’re trying to walk and work together for the sake of the Great Commission,” Backert said.

But Ascent is not going to look like what has been seen before, because it’s composed of individuals who may share a common future, but who do not share a common past, Backert said.

Texas connections

Texas Baptists participated in or moderated several panel discussions, highlighted the ministries they lead and led breakout sessions. Those sessions were treated as “task force” opportunities both to discuss how curators’ ministries currently meet needs in the subject area under discussion and to envision how Ascent can continue developing and/or supporting ministries.

Wissam al-Saliby, president of Baptist World Alliance-connected 21Wilberforce, spoke about the organization’s work to advocate for religious freedom during a panel about “sowing the gospel in the face of opposition.”

Al-Saliby noted sowing the gospel brings persecution. The good news is “churches are present, active and engaging all over the world,” he said, but with that comes challenges of persecution, as well as lower-level forms of discrimination and opposition.

In India in 2023, conflict among tribal groups in Manipur claimed the lives of 200 Christians, destroyed 300 churches and left 28 missionaries without salaries, he noted. The violence there and similar violence in other countries has led to “a hardening of the church’s heart towards the Muslim population,” and that’s also opposition to the spread of the gospel.

Al-Saliby explained 21Wilberforce was founded 11 years ago in Texas, to work with churches “to address the plight of religious persecution” and advocate for religious freedom for everyone, “because either everyone has religious freedom, or no one has religious freedom,” he noted.

Additionally, the organization seeks to strengthen the transfer of advocacy knowledge to locals around the globe so they can advocate for religious freedom in their contexts. Al-Saliby urged Ascent curators to be sure to factor in the mission work being done locally to fight for religious freedom, as the movement continues to take shape.

Todd Still, dean of Baylor University’s Truett Theological Seminary, moderated a panel discussion on sowing the gospel through preaching and developing preachers of the gospel.

Kevin Nderitu, executive pastor of District Church in Washington, D.C.; former Texan Mark Goodman, lead pastor of Rabbit Creek Church in Anchorage, Alaska, a congregation recently removed from the Southern Baptist Convention; and Ashley Berryhill, director of Global Engagement at First Baptist Church in Arlington, participated in a panel discussion on “sowing the gospel through the local congregation.”

Cindy Wiles, of First Baptist Church in Arlington, director of the Restore Hope mission organization; Jim Ramsay of TMS Global; and Jennifer Lau of Canadian Baptist Ministries participated in a panel on “sowing the global gospel … beyond the local congregation.”

John Upton, retired executive director of the Baptist General Association of Virginia, facilitated the discussion on how to do global missions responsibly—out of love, with humility and with a “round table” approach, based in mutuality that breaks down barriers between local and global missions.

Other Texans who presented included: Rand Jenkins, chief strategy officer with Texans on Mission/On Mission Network; Arthur Jones, pastor of St. Andrews Methodist Church in Plano; Craig Curry, pastor of First Baptist Church in Plano; and Bruce Webb, pastor of First Baptist Church in The Woodlands.

Carey Sims of Cliff Temple Baptist Church in Dallas will be project lead for the Junia Network, a yearlong Ascent cohort initiative offering a place for women in ministry to share, learn and resource one another.

The initiative is named after Junia, who Paul affirms along with her husband in Romans 16:7 as being “in Christ” before he was and outstanding among all apostles.

The gathering also included a celebration service recognizing curators who had been ordained or licensed by their churches during the past year and anointing minsters who had assumed new ministry roles. Several current Texas Baptists and others who previously served in Texas were among those recognized or anointed.