A very challenging book for someone who has been in pastoral ministry for over thirteen years. Recommended reading for both clergy and laity. ( )

A disturbing book but one that should be read by pastors. Warning--you may just throw in the towel if you are a pastor. Duin has great insight and examples but she writes from the perspective of one who was a church drop-out herself. ( )

The author, Julia Duin, is a career reporter on religious issues. She is currently Religion Editor for the Washington Times. This book is an attempt to explain a phenomenon that she, her siblings, and a number of her friends have experienced in recent years -- that of becoming disaffected with their evangelical congregations and of trying to maintain a satisfactory spiritual life either outside of, or in spite of, an established church. The majority of examples she shares, including her own, are of baby boomers who came of age during the Jesus Movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

The subtitle of the book is too long. The author provides many reasons for and examples of people who are fleeing evangelical churches, but she doesn't adequately address the second half of the subtitle: what to do about it. Even the last chapter, "Bring Them Back: If They Want to Come" is merely a rehash of the same topics addressed earlier in the book, presenting more examples of people who have left their churches and more recent research on this trend.

The book is repetitive in places, possibly due to its organization. Some chapters deal with common reasons people are leaving church, such as their perception of it as irrelevant, the lack of community, shallow teaching, and the inadequacy of the pastor, while other chapters focus on demographic groups such as singles, women, and Charismatics. Some of the groups have similar motivations for leaving the church that include its irrelevancy, lack of community, shallow teaching, and pastoral control, which the author had already addressed.

There is certainly value in the book. The author is a skilled reporter and knows how to research social trends. In addition to recounting personal interviews with acquaintances and well-known evangelical writers and researchers, she summarizes recent research reports and evangelical literature (both periodical and book-length) that support her argument. Church leaders and educators can benefit from her literature review and source list as well as the anecdotal evidence she presents.

What the book lacks is a discussion of ecclesiology -- a theology of the church. I believe that any discussion of what the church ought to be or do should be rooted in Scripture. While the author does make a few allusions to biblical themes, the first of the rare Scriptural references in the 180 pages of text is found on page 50. Readers will need to look to other sources for this discussion -- either to the works of theologians, or, even better, Scripture itself. ( )

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