Date: January 1, 2019
Host: Jim Schneider
Guest: Randy Melchert
Listen: MP3 | Order
Randy Melchert is a school administrator, a researcher and a consultant. He’s a member of the board of directors of VCY America. He has also administered the Bible reading challenge for 2018 and is administering the 2019 Prayer Encouragement Project.
A year ago, Randy was on Crosstalk introducing the Bible Reading Challenge for 2018. The reason for this is because Randy discovered that America is in a Bible reading crisis. Only 1 out of 11 Americans are reading the Bible daily. Less than one out of five church goers reads the Bible daily.
About 1,000 orders for the One Year Bible were shipped out. Then there was the One Year Bible Reading Plan. Over 1,200 people downloaded that plan just from the 2018bible.org site alone. 139 people joined the mobile app with over 403 on the daily Bible reading e-mail list. 194 were on the Facebook page. There were over 6,000 unique visitors to 2018bible.org.
To sign up for the daily Bible reading e-mail go to www.2018bible.org.
Regarding the issue of prayer, Randy noted some statistics from LifeWay Research. They’ve found that 48% of Americans say they pray daily. Pew Research Center had a slightly higher number at about 55%.
According to Pew, 79% of evangelicals say they pray daily. So about 4 out of 5 Christians who claim to be born-again pray daily. The big issue is the amount of time that people take for prayer. According to a Census Bureau Time Use Study, in the miscellaneous category was combined prayer and Bible reading. What did it show? Those two activities combined only accounted for 2 minutes and 24 seconds spent per day.
Here are some other statistics worth noting:
- 79% of evangelicals pray each day but 85% of Mormons do so while 90% of Jehovah’s Witnesses pray each day.
- 41% of millennials pray compared to 65% of senior citizens.
- Ph.D educated individuals are at about 49% daily prayer compared to 57% for Those making six figure incomes are far less likely to pray than those making less than $30,000 per year.
In response, Randy described the 2019 Prayer Encouragement Project (sign up at www.2019prayer.org). There’s a pop-up at the website asking for an e-mail. This is a bit of daily encouragement to help you pray deeper and longer. You can also learn how to use your smart phone to set a daily reminder.
Randy also touched upon prayer length. It’s not so much the prayer length, but that throughout the day we continue turn to God in prayer. As Jim noted, the person in the Bible who did just that was Nehemiah.
So if you’re looking for an encouraging way to improve your prayer life, you’ll want to review this edition of Crosstalk.
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