Heaven, hell and USAmerican beliefs

When I was in the USA recently I was struck by how many churches there were [and that was just the buildings] and so the figures in this report from Barna were no surprise. However, these figures would be no indicator of things in Britain. Sometimes we need to be reminded how different our societies are and the issue of spiritual beliefs is one area where that becomes quite different. IT is making me increasoingly skeptical of the value of using methodologies for, eg, church growth, that work in the USA in the UK. What would be interesting is to see whether the are indications that the UK is the USA's future in this respect or whether we are just very different societies in this respect. I know that Len Sweet in a personal conversation said at one time that he felt that the UK is the USA's spiritual future and this based on his reading of the trends. But seeing these figures I'm less sure. However when you look at the figures related to busters [20-30 year olds] and younger and also hispanic-background people [the gowingest section of the USA population, I believe] then perhaps there is something in what Len said.

All of which has implications for the growing interaction between emerging church folk in USA and UKGBNI...

The other interesting thing is how the labels people adopt is not necessarily a good guide to what they may beleive -there is a lot of evidence to suggest that not insignificant proposrtions of 'Bible Christians' hold some pretty unorthodox views in the USA -including reincarnation, afterlife-pluralism etc. So perhaps it's the religious affiliation element that is the biggest difference between us -much the same mix of beliefs, I suspect, would be found in England but without there being a more formal religious label applied to the person themself. The actual beliefs may be much more similar, it's the church attendance that makes the difference. Maybe.