Sunday, December 23, 2007

Merry Christmas


peace on earth and goodwill to all the peeps!

Monday, December 3, 2007

Claiming no religious afiliation in Miami

I am taking a class on religious diversity in Latin America with a professor at FIU. Tonight she shared some demographic data with our class that was very surprising to me. The data is taken from the ARDA, Association of Religious Data Archives.

Miami-Dade County, Florida Religious Affiliations, 2000

Evangelical Protestant - 158,052
Mainline Protestant - 49,777
Orthodox - 3,570
Catholic - 542,984
Other - 138,551
Unclaimed - 1,360,428

I am not entirely confident that the data is accurate…it seems to me that the “Independent Charismatic Churches” membership data should be much higher…I am away of several independent Charismatic Spanish speaking churches that are over 2000, one that is nearly 20,000. However, the rest of the data is probably pretty accurate.

http://www.thearda.com/mapsReports/reports/counties/12086_2000.asp

What does this mean for missioners? Where do we go, and how to we connect with the million and a quarter people in our county who claim no religious affiliation? How do we serve them? What are they looking for that organized religions are not providing?

I remember a recent survey by George Barna that claimed that most people were looking for an "experience" with God...only a very small percentage of church-going Christians actually "experienced" God's presence in church over the course of a year.

I decided that "I want to know what love is" by Foreigner would go well here... over a million people within a one hour's drive of my house are likely singing this song in their hearts:

Monday, November 5, 2007

Un-churched and loving it!

Hi friends,

This is a blog discussion group for people of faith who have dropped out of churches or have given up on church life for a variety of reasons. Some may be praying in homes with your families, others might be meeting with a few friends in a house church, at a coffee shop or in a bar for discussion and prayer. If you are in any of these categories, I would be interested in talking with you about your experience. Feel free to email me at joseph.holbrook@fiu.edu or join this group for group discussion about how to live a life of churchless faith.



By-way-of introduction, I am a former pastor and church planter who left organized church life several years ago and began to meet with my adult children and their friends for prayer and fellowship. I recently finished my master's in Latin American Studies at FIU, and am currently pursuing a Ph.D. in History at FIU. I am doing research on religion in Latin America (mostly Brazil, Colombia and Cuba) and this semester, I am working with some other graduate students to do research on unchurched religion in Miami. Please let me know what your experience has been.

We also have a google discussion group where we can upload files at the following URL:

http://groups.google.com/group/un-churched-Miami


Thank you!

Joseph Holbrook
joseph.holbrook@fiu.edu
History Department
Florida International University