Every church leader’s new favorite blog, Church Marketing Sucks, points to a nice investigative piece (being charitable to my former people here) in charismatic magazine Charisma. (I still fondly remember columns by the late editor Jamie Buckingham.) The article asks, plainly, why are there "stay at home saints?" Some of the answers:

• "I’m sick of hearing pastors talking for themselves," she admits candidly.
• David Barrett, author of the World Christian Encyclopedia, estimates there are about 112 million "churchless Christians" worldwide. He projects that number will double by 2025–though it includes both nominal believers and those part of underground churches in nations where they face persecution for their faith.
• "It’s better to be real with the Lord than go to church and play the holier-than-thou church game everyone plays there," Douglas told Strom, who says the dropout saints he interviewed talk about finding deep fellowship with a few other believers.
• "It’s a biblical fallacy to say we don’t need church," Rainer comments. "The New Testament pattern is very clear–that there was some type of formal gathering of believers on a regular basis who had accountability to one another. I quite frankly don’t buy that church can be anywhere."
• "The surprising thing is that they are often the most committed Christians–praying, insightful, deep-thinking," he wrote in his online book, The "Out of Church" Christians. "Most have not given up on Christianity … [but on] today’s church system."
• Slick services and programs at churches with sizeable budgets are similarly disdained by many 20-somethings who want "authenticity" and "connection" over a professional presentation they dismiss as shallow religious entertainment, says 28-year-old publisher Cameron Strang.
• Although the call for more involvement troubled that pair, more typically it’s the lack of demand for it that drives people out, Rainer says. Research he conducted for one large church "was clear that the more the church expected, the more people were likely to attend. The less that was expected, the less they were likely to go."
• "We are not interested in people that are bitter about the system," Moore says.
• Though some church dropouts are finding new expressions of church life, which he welcomes, he does not believe the answer is to bury the institutional church. "We need to get it healthy and dynamic," he says. "There’s no mystery to that–just as there’s no mystery about how to have a healthy marriage and wonderful children."
• He discovered that, far from being people on the fringes of the church, most of those opting out had been heavily involved. More than 90 percent of those he tracked had been in some sort of leadership role, and almost 33 percent were former pastors.
• "Church leadership doesn’t even recognize they are gone," Effler says. "If they don’t show up, they just look to replace them with someone else."

Damn. Does this mean I was a trend setter? Or that the children are our future? Something like that? One of these?