That’s the number of young people who were raised in Christian households who will walk away from the Christian faith by 2050. So reports Vincent Burens, President and CEO of the Coalition for Christian Outreach. The US is “currently experiencing the fastest decline in religious affiliation in the history of this country.” The majority didn’t have a crisis of faith or reject church teachings. “They left because they just weren’t interested in the Christian life they saw.”

And remember, Burens is talking about young people who were raised in the Christian faith. The 35 million does not include those who have no Christian experience or reference point.

Burens calls this, “The largest mission opportunity in the history of America.”

This really isn’t new. It was documented in the 1970s by the Rev. Lesslie Newbigin, a Presbyterian minister from England who served for 27 years in the mission field in India. Returning to England in 1974, he discovered that the churches of Europe were mostly empty. Europe, once the source of missionaries, had become the mission field.

Another study, published in 1982 in the Christian Encyclopedia, estimated that 29,000 Christians in Europe and North America were leaving the faith every week.

It’s possible for individual churches to experience this decline (85 percent are either declining or stagnant; only 15 percent are growing.) and miss the mission opportunity this paradigm shift represents. The reason is that declining churches become more intimate, more comfortable, more homogeneous.

Our ancestors at First Presbyterian Church crossed an ocean and a wilderness to plant this church on the frontier.

When paradigms shifted, and needs changed downtown, they dug up the cemetery where their own saints were buried to build new church buildings.

If any church in America can meet the great mission opportunity of our day, it’s us.