Voting with their feet

Churchgoing in Britain is in freefall in the "mainline" denominations.
Membership of the Church of England declined 27% between 1980 and 2000. This
realization led to a survey in 2003/2004 to find out why. In all, 14,000
people in Britain and Ireland responded to the widely-advertised invitation
to say why they were giving up on church. People wrote responses, rather
than answering multiple-choice questions.

Astonishingly, 91% gave very similar reasons for disenchantment with church,
which can be summarized in the words of one person: "The church needs to
give a more robust defense of the reasons for believing." People pleaded for
the churches to answer the skeptics and defend the faith.
Many respondents had joined house churches to get teaching that built their
faith. Several websites were frequently listed as providing the sort of
teaching that people wanted; one was the Answers in Genesis website.
Respondents wanted evidence for their faith and teaching that upheld the
authority of the Bible.

The second reason for disillusionment was frustration with church leaders
not teaching the holiness of God and moral standards. A huge number of
respondents grieved over the ordination of homosexuals by the Anglican
Church. But then if you discard the Genesis account of creation, with its
straightforward history of the first marriage of a man and a woman ordained
by God, why not have a man and a man? And why stop at denying Genesis? So
they reject the Bible's clear condemnations of homosexual acts (such as
Genesis 19; Leviticus 18:22; Romans 1:26­27; 1 Corinthians 6:9; 1 Timothy
1:10).

Research in Australia also shows that issues of truth and moral standards
are very important in people seeing church as irrelevant. Even a secular
commentator, Andrew Bolt, pleaded for church leaders to stand up and be
counted on moral issues, particularly the sanctity of life in regard to the
high rate of abortion.

One liberal archbishop in Australia, commenting on the hemorrhage of members
from his denomination, blamed "fundamentalist" (i.e., Bible-centred)
churches for "sheep stealing"! He can't see that starving sheep will look
for pasture elsewhere (sadly, many just starve to death).

If church leaders do not uphold the authority of the Bible from the very
first verse and do not emphasize teaching that shows the truthfulness of
Scripture, people will increasingly see the churches as irrelevant . . . and
vote with their feet
http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v28/i1/voting.asp