As a leader, the health of your marriage directly affects the impact of your leadership. I have witnessed this time and time again. Being effective at work or in ministry begins by being effective at home.

Early in our marriage, Gail and I attended a church led by a dynamic, thirty-something pastor. He was an extraordinary communicator. He was a wise and empathetic counselor. As a result, the church grew rapidly.

But as we got better acquainted with him and his wife, we started noticing a disturbing trend in the way they related to one another. They would often make disparaging remarks about the other in public.

At first, it seemed cute. Their comments seemed playful and humorous. Everyone laughed. But over time, they became more and more pointed, thinly masking their frustration with one another.

There’s little for us mainliners to celebrate in this new Pew study. We’re losing people, and fast. I appreciate Heidi Haverkamp’s realistic-yet-hopeful words here and Rob Rynders’ there. But, like them, I’m not interested in spinning an argument that the numbers are somehow lying.

The numbers are clearer, however, than the reasons for them—despite the predictable comments that the only mainline churches that are thriving are those “resisting the denominational tide toward liberalization and conformity with the world.” A few things to keep in mind:

• Our top story: People who used to feel cultural pressure to identify as Christian don’t anymore. Ed Stetzer’s all over this: the nominals are becoming nones. He refers to this in passing as a “purifying bloodletting”; Russell Moore hits the point a good bit harder (“Mayberry leads to hell just as surely as Gomorrah does”). I see this as a more complicated point, and a mixed blessing. Conflating the church with the culture was never really an asset to either. But if we believe the church is a good thing in people’s lives, don’t we want more people to be engaged with it, at whatever level? Showing up out of obligation on Christmas and Easter might not make you a disciple, but it’s hardly a net negative.

Earlier this year, the Evangelical Immigration Table commissioned LifeWay Research to do a survey of evangelical attitudes toward immigrants and immigration policies.

From my perspective, many of the findings were encouraging. For example, we asked the sample of 1,000 American evangelicals what they thought about the Evangelical Statement of Principles for Immigration Reform, and we found that each of our six principles was supported by the majority of evangelical Christians.

But the survey also identified some bad news: only about half of evangelical Christians say they’re very familiar with what the Bible says about how to treat immigrants, and a paltry 12% said that the Scriptures are the biggest influence on their views on this topic, significantly less than cited the media.

Tomorrow (Tuesday, May 19) at 2:00 PM Eastern Time/1:00 PM Central Time, we’ll have the unique opportunity to have Dr. Ed Stetzer, Executive Director of LifeWay Research, explain, analyze, and respond to your questions about this study. We’ll also be unveiling some new discipleship resources designed to help pastors and church leaders to address the topic of immigration from a distinctly biblical perspective.

If you’re not yet among the hundreds who have registered already, you can register now here.