The Barna group shows that millions of adults (in the US - and likely proportionately in Canada) are trying out new forms of spiritual community and worship, with many abandoning traditional forms altogether:
The study, based on interviews with more than five thousand randomly selected adults . . . found that 9% of adults attend a house church during a typical week. That remarkable growth in the past decade shoots up from just 1% to near double-digit involvement. In total, one out of five attend a house church at least once a month.
Gerard Kelly (RetroFuture: Rediscovering our Roots, Recharting our Routes) observes: "Experimental groups seeking to engage the Christian faith in a postmodern context will often lack the resources, profile or success record of the Boomer congregations. By definition, they are new, untried, relatively disorganized and fearful of self-promotion. They reject the corporate model of their Boomer forebears, and thus do not appear, according to existing paradigms, to be significant. But somewhere in the genesis and genius of these diverse groups is hidden the future of Western Christianity. To dismiss them is to throw away the seeds of our survival."
