Magic Statistics

Another post on demographic trends. That's the subject of the Sunday school class I mentioned recently, so it's on my mind right now. An increasing number of Germans of prime parenting age don't want to have children—ever. "Almost 15% of all women and 26% of men between 20 and 39 are against having kids – period. That’s a large increase from the early 1990s, when only about 10% of women and 12% of men in the same age group were opposed to the idea", says a 2003 survey.

That more and more Germans desire to be child-free has been evident for many years: the population of Germany is already dropping. Between now and 2050, the number of Germans looks set to decline from 82.5 million to 75.1 million. (See page 12 of this pdf document from the Population Reference Bureau.) And it's only going to get worse: it has been suggested that German will be a dead language in 200 years.

Why do young Germans not want children? The article mentions three possible reasons: "egotistical tendencies" (as the German Interior Minister put it), "concerns about the future", and "worries that having kids may lower [parents’] standards of living". One might wonder whether reason #3 and reason #1 amount to the same thing. But what comes to my mind is the story of the birth of Moses. Pharaoh ordered all Hebrew baby boys to be killed; if that does not cause "concerns for the future", I don't know what would. But Moses' parents had a child anyway.

Perhaps a more fundamental reason is loss of faith in God who has the future in his hands.

Drunks are advised not to operate heavy machinery; maybe they should also be told not to use the telephone, either. According to St Clare County, Illinois, police, this drunk made three mistakes:

Mistake No. 1 was calling 911 about a robbery while drunk. Mistake No. 2 was telling deputies the purloined property happened to be several marijuana plants. Mistake No. 3 was not checking to make sure the plants were really gone in the first place.

Sheriff's Lt. Steve Johnson and Deputy Al Hake were dispatched to Anthony R. Martin's home outside Belleville on Sept. 2, reports the Belleville News-Democrat.

Martin, who admitted having had a few drinks, told the officers the dastardly woman who lived next door had stolen his pot plants, and then led the lawmen to where he said they used to be.

Sadly for him, the plants were, as Johnson put it, "still there, growing in the pots."

via Clayton Cramer.

An ominous report out of the U.K. According to a study by Christian Research, if present trends continue, only two percent of Britons will be attending Sunday services by 2040. There will be "nearly twice as many Muslims at prayer in mosques on Friday as Christians worshipping on Sunday". The average age of church-going Christians will be 64, and over 18,000 churches will have closed.

The Bishop of Manchester, the Rt Rev Nigel McCulloch, recognises that the church faces an emergency. He calls for evangelism:

The truth is stark. What these statistics need to do is to galvanise the Church into realising that it must communicate the gospel where people are or we will not deserve to have a Church.

Virtually all Christian denominations–Catholic and Protestant–are in serious decline in Britain. The only exceptions are "the non-white ethnic Churches".