Andy Frost on why people are losing their faith €“ and how the church can help them find it again

CT: In your book, you make the point that the church has got to start looking at why people are leaving the faith as much as it looks at why they would join it. Has that message resonated with the people you’ve met on your tour?

Andy: Yes, it’s really important to explore some of the moral issues the church is facing and we don’t always talk about doubt. During the evenings we’ve hosted on the tour, we’ve tried to explore what doubt is and why doubt isn’t all that bad. It’s important to talk about and wrestle with our doubt rather than pushing it to one side.


CT: What kind of people have been coming along?

Andy: We’ve had all kinds of people coming along. One person who came was in his seventies and had been a Methodist minister for 30 or 40 years but had lost his faith since retiring. We’ve also had people coming along who are still very committed to their faith. They are coming basically to ask difficult questions.


CT: We want to hear all the positive stories and the stories of people coming to faith and we don’t really want to hear about the other stories - of people losing faith. But you’ve spent a lot of time talking to people who have lost their faith. How was that for you?

Andy: We have all these great books with people’s testimonies and we hear of people coming to faith and people testifying and we have great Sunday services where people will come to the front and share their testimonies. But we never hear the other side of the story, where people are losing faith and leaving God behind.

I was just shocked by the depth of disillusionment and there were roughly four key areas people are struggling with. The first is that God isn’t always tangible. We often think we should always experience God and when we don’t, we don’t always talk about that in our churches. Then there are people who have left the church because they have been hurt or let down by the church. There are those who doubt the nature of God when it comes to suffering, and then there is the whole Dawkins issue and how our faith doesn’t always stand up to scrutiny.


CT: It’s a mixed bag of issues. Which one would you consider as the priority for the church to address?

Andy: I think we need to start on all four really. The church is on the back foot when we should be on the front foot. We should be challenging people’s faith in secularism, challenging people’s faith in science, and challenging faith in what the world says is truth. Often we are on the back foot trying to defend. I don’t believe science can make sense of who we are, why we are here, and what life is all about. The church should be more on the front foot when it comes to some of these issues.


CT: So we need to get to grips again with education in the church and apologetics and how to explain our faith?

Andy: Yes. We don’t address the key issues people are facing in their day to day lives or engage in the difficult questions when in actual fact the people who are losing their faith are engaging with these difficult questions that the church hasn’t been able to work through and make sense of. There is also the bigger question of how we should be church. We are called to demonstrate God’s love, grace and compassion and so often we fail to do so. So we’ve got to look again at how we disciple people.


CT: Your book is called Losing Faith but the tour is called Rediscovering Faith. You clearly have a lot of optimism that, with the right help, people can actually find back their faith or, for some, find the faith they’ve never had?

Andy: Yes. When I interviewed people for the book I just sat down and listened. I made a point of not responding at all but just listening to what they had to say. I didn’t want to give my side or my opinion, I just wanted to hear their side and listen. The church needs to win the right to be in people’s lives by listening to how they have been hurt or let down.


CT: Do you think the church needs to work on creating the environment where people with doubts can come forward and admit the things they are struggling with?

Andy: Yes. People who have these doubts don’t feel they’ve got the space to ask about them and so eventually they end up losing their faith because they haven’t actually confronted the issue they were struggling with. Often in church we don’t allow people to explore or investigate their doubts. Doubts can destroy faith but, on the other hand, they can actually make faith stronger because at the end of the day doubt is a desire for truth. So the church shouldn’t be afraid of doubts but we should be able to help people speak about their doubts and explore them. We can preach doubt from the front but we should also create avenues and spaces for people to explore them.


CT: Do you think the church has also got to look again at the relevancy of its preaching?

Andy: There are very big issues people are facing in the pews that we can sometimes miss. It’s important that preachers don’t just preach but also create space for people to share their doubts and struggles and then listen to the questions and engage with people’s needs.


CT: We all know that the church is losing people but, rather than looking at this as a crisis you seem to see this more as an opportunity?

Andy: Yes. As an evangelist I see a real disconnect between evangelism and discipleship. It’s important not to see people just as a number you reach at an evangelistic crusade or who come to your church, but as people on a whole journey of faith through the different stages of life. People need to grow and have a relationship with Jesus. My hope is to connect people coming to faith with them being discipled - the whole journey, their relationship with God, and their whole identity in Christ.


CT: On your tour, you’ve visited many churches around the country. What is your sense of the mood among Christians?

Andy: I think among Christians there is a sense that the world has changed so much and there are some things we need to work on more. There is a huge challenge facing the church but at the same time the church is realising it can help people with the struggles they are facing and through that help people come to faith, help them grow in their relationship with God, and work out how their faith makes a difference to the world. That’s also about teaching people how to have faith in the hard times as well as the good times. We’ve seen what’s happening in Japan right now. How do we come to terms with that? God is all powerful and God is love. How do we draw these two things together? There are huge things that we have to grapple with.


CT: There are a lot of good Christian resources out there. Do you think we need to get better at pointing people to the help that is already available for them?

Andy: Yes. There can sometimes be a sacred-secular divide and in church we can speak about spiritual things but often fail to relate them to how they impact the world and how the world influences our faith as well. It’s important to bring down that wall.


CT: Statistically, it is the young people who are leaving the church in the UK in the largest numbers. Is that where your greatest concern lies?

Andy: Yes. It is specifically the younger generations and people in their 20s and 30s who are missing from our churches. There are people I grew up with in church who have lost their Christian faith. There are things we need to learn from their stories, like how we can do church better and how we can wrestle with the big issues in a more engaging way.


CT: You’ve added two dates to your tour. What is your hope beyond the tour?

Andy: The book and tour are a call to rethink discipleship and how we can disciple people in our churches better. There is a lot of research going on right now to answer how we try and do that, and the book is just one part of the plethora of things going on to help the church address the big questions and make disciples even better in the future.