Barna’s findings on the church

• Bible reading undertaken during the course of a typical week, other than passages read while attending church events, has declined by five percentage points. Currently an estimated 40% of adults read the Bible during a typical week.
• Church volunteerism has dropped by eight percentage points since 1991. Presently, slightly less than one out of every five adults (19%) donates some of their time in a typical week to serving at a church.
• Adult Sunday school attendance has also diminished by eight percentage points over the past two decades. On any given Sunday, about 15% of adults can be expected to show up in a Sunday school class.
• The most carefully watched church-related statistic is adult attendance. Since 1991, attendance has receded by nine percentage points, dropping from 49% in 1991 to 40% in 2011.
• The most prolific change in religious behavior among those measured has been the increase in the percentage of adults categorized as unchurched. The Barna Group definition includes all adults who have not attended any religious events at a church, other than special ceremonies such as a wedding or funeral, during the prior six month period. In 1991, just one-quarter of adults (24%) were unchurched. That figure has ballooned by more than 50%, to 37% today.

Teen participation in small groups

According to Barna, small group involvement among teens is the most recent of the ‘big three’ to hit the skids – falling from 30% of teens being regularly involved in some sort of small group, back in 1997, down to just 21% at present.

quote

Beliefs come first; reasons second. That’s the insightful message of “The Believing Brain,” by Michael Shermer, the founder of Skeptic magazine. In the book, he brilliantly lays out what modern cognitive research has to tell us about his subject—namely, that our brains are “belief engines” that naturally “look for and find patterns” and then infuse them with meaning. These meaningful patterns form beliefs that shape our understanding of reality. Our brains tend to seek out information that confirms our beliefs, ignoring information that contradicts them. Mr. Shermer calls this “belief-dependent reality.” The well-worn phrase “seeing is believing” has it backward: Our believing dictates what we’re seeing.

intollerance in groups

Intergroup contact and friendships work well (and often best) among intolerant and cognitively rigid persons—by reducing threat and anxiety and increasing empathy, trust, and outgroup closeness.

Couples Who Cohabit Before Engagement Are More Likely To Struggle

University of Denver (DU) researchers find that couples who live together before they are engaged have a higher chance of getting divorced than those who wait until they are married to live together, or at least wait until they are engaged. In addition, couples who lived together before engagement and then married, reported a lower satisfaction in their marriages.

Feminism And Romance Go Hand In Hand

Contrary to popular opinion, feminism and romance are not incompatible and feminism may actually improve the quality of heterosexual relationships, according to Laurie Rudman and Julie Phelan, from Rutgers University

They found that having a feminist partner was linked to healthier heterosexual relationships for women.  Men with feminist partners also reported both more stable relationships and greater sexual satisfaction. According to these results, feminism does not predict poor romantic relationships, in fact quite the opposite.

Quote of Study on PTSD

There’s a study they did with Vietnam vets who’d had—clearly—a lot of trauma during the war. Twenty years later, they measured their levels of pain before and after they showed them intense footage from Vietnam. Pretty much across the board, after they saw this really intense, violent footage from the war, their levels of pain went down. Because when trauma doesn’t get to work itself through your system, your system idles at a heightened state, and so getting more really intense input calms your system down.” Which is why, she explains, “A lot of folks who’ve survived trauma end up being really calm in crisis and freaking out in everyday life.”

 

Taken from http://www.good.is/post/how-violent-sex-helped-ease-my-ptsd/

be warned, it is very graphic

Study on defensive beliefs

In the U.S., for example, staunch Democrats and hard-core Republicans hear the same data but, predisposed to interpreting them differently, they walk away with opposing conclusions. In an fMRI study conducted at Emory University prior to the 2004 presidential election, Democrats and Republicans were given a reasoning task in which they were asked to evaluate damaging information about their own candidate. Notably absent among the subjects involved in this study was any activation of the neural circuitry implicated in conscious reasoning once they were confronted with the damaging evidence. The researchers concluded that emotionally biased reasoning leads to the “stamping in” or reinforcement of a defensive belief, associated with the participants “revisionist” account of the data with positive emotion or relief and the elimination of distress. The result is that partisan beliefs are calcified, and persons can learn very little from new data. (p. 119)

Quote on Why Therapy works

The efficacy of psychotherapy (Acta Neuropsychiatrica 18, 61-70, 2006).  Psychotherapy works because it helps patients reshape and reform their neural circuits. Clinical improvements are correlated with empirical data showing specific regional morphological or functional changes in the brain. Before and after brain imaging is showing researchers how these therapies make observable changes in the activity of the brain.

Statistics for Pastors

• 80% of pastors say they have insufficient time with spouse and that ministry has a negative effect on their family.
• 40% report a serious conflict with a parishioner once a month.
• 33% say that being in ministry is an outright hazard to their family.
• 75% report they’ve had significant stress-related crisis at least once in their ministry.
• 58% of pastors indicate that their spouse needs to work either part time or full time to supplement the family income.
• 56% of pastors’ wives say they have no close friends.
• Pastors who work fewer than 50 hrs/week are 35% more likely to be terminated.
• 40% of pastors considered leaving the pastorate in the past three months.

Feeling dizzy? Take a breath. Here’s some more statistics:

• Fifteen hundred pastors leave the ministry each month due to moral failure, spiritual burnout, or contention in their churches.
• Fifty percent of pastors’ marriages will end in divorce.
• Eighty percent of pastors and eighty-four percent of their spouses feel unqualified and discouraged in their role as pastors.
• Fifty percent of pastors are so discouraged that they would leave the ministry if they could, but have no other way of making a living.
• Eighty percent of seminary and Bible school graduates who enter the ministry will leave the ministry within the first five years.
• Seventy percent of pastors constantly fight depression.
• Almost forty percent polled said they have had an extra-marital affair since beginning their ministry.
• Seventy percent said the only time they spend studying the Word is when they are preparing their sermons. [compiled by Darrin Patrick]

death by ministry?