Hebrew 12/13: Everything starts with Jesus, pt. @: Living Outside the Camp: 11 - Audio
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>> Hi, I'm Tom Lee Pastor here at Coast. We are finishing our summer series in Hebrews today. I'm very excited about that. But we're going to do it a little bit differently. So here's the thing. It's after Labor Day, and it's an election year, which means that the world that we live in here in the United States of America is about to go completely insane. And four years ago, we were in the middle of COVID, and we had an election and it was incredibly divisive. And this one's going to be as or more divisive. And so I just want for one second for us to think about what the culture is telling us we ought to be paying attention to. Okay, where are our eyes supposed to be? And I have a couple of examples or possibilities here about things that we are being told this is what matters. So obviously the election, Kamala and Trump, the movement of the LGBTQIA+ community. We're being told that's an extremely important thing to be paying attention to. High school shootings, I mean, my gosh, and another one, those are the victims there from the shooting in Georgia. And of course, most importantly, whether or not we're going to be Chiefs fans due to Taylor Swift's involvement with Mr. Kelsey. And I don't want to denigrate any of these things. They're all very important, with the exception of Taylor Swift. But these are all really important issues, and the church has to respond in different ways to them. But I want to take one moment to think about our culture, where we are, and where we've been. Here's some interesting statistics. The first one is this, 27% of Americans have a somewhat or very negative view of us. Of all the religious groups, evangelical Christians are the most disliked. And as a result, we are being increasingly moved away from the centers and avenues of power. There's another interesting statistic. In 1972, only 5% of Americans did not identify with any religion. That is now 30%. Gen Z, here's a thought about Gen Z, only 11% of Gen Zers attend church weekly. Gen Z, for those to get an idea, that's kids born in 2001 or later. 17% identifies atheists 31% as nuns. Nuns are people who are like, well, what's your religion? Like, I don't know. So it's kind of like agnostic, maybe.
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Coast Bible Church, PastorTom Bennett, San Juan Capistrano, CA, www.coastbible.org