JULY 2024

I have attended every TGC National Conference since 2009 (with maybe one exception), so let me offer a few brief observations. I might have made a big mistake during my breakout, and you can read about that below!

The first thing that felt different was the sheer number of women in attendance—nearly 9,000. It was bigger than any other conference I had attended for TGC.

The second thing I noticed was the same spirit of calmness and joy from our TGC23 National Conference. Third, I was encouraged by the ethnic and denominational diversity in the room. Finally, these women weren’t just serious about affection for Jesus. They were also serious about theology and serious about mission.

We had a number of events involving Keller Center fellows and staff at the TGCW24 conference, including:

• Vanessa Hawkins’s keynote, “I Am the Door,” and breakouts “Building Cross-Cultural Competence” and “Aging in a Culture Obsessed with Youth”
• Kori Porter’s breakout “Why Diversity Matters”
• Rebecca McLaughlin and Collin Hansen’s breakout “Hope and Help for the Doubting and Deconstructing”
• Michael Kruger’s breakouts on “Preparing Teens for Life in a Secular World” and “Why We Need Women in Ministry”

So, you are probably wondering about that big mistake . . . . Jim Davis and I gave a breakout session presentation on why people are leaving the church. I gave out my address at the end of the presentation and said I would email everyone our slide deck. By the time I landed back home in Orlando I had more than 100 emails!

Jim and I have now given more than 200 lectures, presentations, or interviews on our research on dechurching in America, and we debrief after every one of them what we learned from each conversation. The conference attendees were some of the brightest and sharpest we have encountered in terms of asking all the right questions, thinking about what this means in their context, and developing actual gameplans in their church and community. One of the biggest takeaways from our research has been how incredibly important the ages of 13 to 18 are both for preventing dechurching now and and in the decades to come. Most of the 40 million people who dechurched did so between the ages of 13 and 30.

Because of the strategic nature of the teenage years we wanted to build a new cohort to equip parents of teens and those who are involved in student ministry. Find out more below.

Michael Graham
Program Director
The Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics