Don Batten writes (hat tip to Jeffrey Foxmore):
"Churchgoing in Britain is in freefall in the 'mainline' denominations...This realization led to a survey in 2003/2004 to find out why. In all, 14,000 people in Britain and Ireland responded...to say why they were giving up on church."
They wrote their responses instead of replying to a question and answer format. But 91% of them said roughly the same thing:
"'The church needs to give a more robust defense of the reasons for believing.' People pleaded for the churches to answer the sceptics and defend the faith...Respondents wanted evidence for their faith and teaching that upheld the authority of the Bible."
"The second reason for disillusionment was frustration with church leaders not teaching the holiness of God and moral standards. A huge number of respondents grieved over the ordination of homosexuals by the Anglican Church."
"Research in Australia also shows that issues of truth and moral standards are very important in people seeing church as irrelevant."
Batten also notes that:
"People in the United States are also deserting the 'mainstream' denominations that have become infected with liberal theology. The liberal churches are dying and the conservative (Bible-believing) churches are growing."
A lot of pastors and church workers would be surprised to learn that people are leaving churches because they do not defend the faith well enough. That is, they do not hear enough good apologetics! They would also find it hard to believe that what people are looking for is stricter moral teachings. But a survey of 14,000 is about 14 times as big a sample as most pollsters would consider necessary. The bigger the sample, the higher the degree of accuracy. That means these findings would be considered to have a high degree of accuracy.
Should we be listening?
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