Christianity is being reshaped through an intense global interest in spiritual experience and personal faith. As old structures of religious life erode, new patterns of faith are forming.

Study after study tells us that Americans are leaving religion in droves, with the number of spiritual but not religious increasing dramatically. Though some of these predictions may be an over-dramatization, significant changes in organized religion are inevitable and necessary.

I was raised outside of organized religion, in a spiritual-but-not-religious home. I obviously did not stay a "none." I'm a pastor in the United Church of Christ and I try, for better or worse, to live my life according to the teachings of Jesus Christ.

It's time for those of us in the Christian Church to exercise our imagination and boldly step off of the sidewalk to a place of imagination and limitless possibilities, a place outside the well defined boxes we expect to find -- beyond the solid footing of the known and into the sometimes shifting sands of the unknown.

Churches with massive overhead invested in things like church buildings, denominational infrastructures, functional church organizational models are awakening to the fact that the generations that are supposed to be taking the institutional baton are showing very little interest.

I realize that when I use the word God, there's a good chance I'm stepping on all kinds of land mines. Is there a more volatile word loaded down with more history, assumptions and expectations than that tired, old, relevant, electrically charged, provocative, fresh, antiquated yet ubiquitous as ever word God?

Bell doesn't have to call himself a liberal or anything else, short of lover of Jesus. But it might be wise to reach out in a new way to people who have been his partners even before he preached his first sermon.

What if part of the reason the "Nones" are so underwhelmed by organized religion isn't because they don't find Jesus interesting, but because it appears to them that Christians don't find him sufficiently interesting enough to take seriously?

If you want your students to know Jesus, you might start by looking for things that Jesus said he cared about, like learning to love your neighbor. Because that's what happened in philosophy classes when I was at Cedarville.

Common folks within the church now read the Bible for themselves to decipher what is truth. The church was pushed out of the business of having the trademark of truth. The biggest challenge for the church now is postmodernism.

Christians today who want to share the Gospel with any credibility in postmodern culture must learn how to talk like Tina Fey, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, et al. Otherwise our evangelism is about as effective as a black and white "Reefer Madness" video in a junior high health class.

At the end of this sabbatical journey, I realize the journey has just started. Experiencing, seeing and understanding some of the things I did on my sabbatical away from Church is not enough. Now is the time to act.

Sabbatical is about rest and recuperation. It is about communing with God in a restorative way. For a lot of church-going people that is not the way they would describe Sunday mornings.

I do not want to go back to Church because life outside of Church is better. It just is.

I decided from the very beginning that during the three months I'm on sabbatical, I will not go to church. I've never done that for more than a couple of Sundays in my whole life. Ever. And it worried me.

There is still a significant interest in, and pursuit of, a life following the path lived out and described by Jesus. We younger adults are starving for the very community we're wary of.

No degree of social savvy makes someone immune to insecurity, doubt, emotional struggle or even an occasional case of the "nerds." Our faith communities should be the place where each of us is most comfortable exploring that inner nerd.

Although fundamentalist and dogmatic approaches to religion may be more vocal in their reaction to the emerging church, this does not necessarily mean that they are gaining popular momentum.

The expression and experience of God, of Love-in-Action, exists in plurality and multiplicity. Instead of affirming a definition of God, a postmodern Trinitarian construction can allow us to affirm an experience of God.