Recently, former megachurch pastor Rob Bell said this about the Bible in relation to the ongoing gay marriage discussion:

“I think culture is already there [with gay marriage] and the church will continue to be even more irrelevant when it quotes letters from 2,000 years ago as their best defense . . . ”

Really? The church is least relevant when it quotes scripture? Quoting the Bible is our worst defense?

But this post isn’t about gay marriage. Instead, it’s about this idea:

Christians are most relevant when they quote the Bible because its words are God’s words — and those words have the power to rescue people from sin and death and put this broken, busted world back together again.

This year we are exploring what it would look like to rediscover and retrieve vintage Christianity. Vintage Christians begins with the assumption that God has revealed himself to us. The wordreveal stems from the Latin one revelare, meaning “unveil, uncover, to lay bare.”

More Utahns go to church every week — 51 percent — than any other state, according to a new Gallup poll.

That statistic is “a direct result of (Utah)’s 59 percent Mormon population,” Gallup’s Frank Newport writes, “as Mormons have the highest religious service attendance of any major religious group in the U.S.”

The next most-frequent church attendees are in the South — Mississippi (47 percent), Alabama (46 percent), Louisiana (46 percent) and Arkansas (45 percent). In fact, 10 of the top 12 churchgoing states are in the South.

At the bottom of the list is Vermont, Gallup reports, “where 17 percent of residents say they attend religious services every week,” Newport writes. Just ahead of the Green Mountain State are New Hampshire (20 percent), Maine (20 percent), Massachusetts (22 percent), Washington (24 percent) and Oregon (24 percent). Half the bottom 10 are in New England.

To determine these rankings, Gallup Daily drew on “tracking interviews throughout 2014 with 177,030 U.S. adults,” the pollster reported. Statewide margins of error range from 3 percent to 6 percent.

Tennessee can now back its moniker as the "buckle of the Bible Belt" with solid numbers.

In a new visualization from Vox, Tennessee is revealed to be one of eight states that has more than 50 megachurches within its borders, as well as the state with the most megachurches per capita. Tennessee's 67 megachurches is second to only four other states: California (219), Texas (207), Florida (120) and Georgia (91).

A megachurch is a large Protestant congregation with an average weekly attendance of 2,000-plus at its worship services. Affiliations such as nondenominational, Southern Baptist, Baptist, Assemblies of God, Christian, Calvary Chapel and United Methodist are included in this data.

"Megachurches are disproportional evangelical," said Ed Stetzer, the executive director of LifeWay Research. "So where there is a concentration of evangelicals there will be more megachurches. ... I expect to see this in Tennessee, in Texas, in places that you think of as evangelical."