First, it doesn’t matter whether people self-identify as evangelical if they don’t go to church. Because if they don’t go to church, churches’ income and reason for existing vanish.

Here are titles of three recent books about evangelical Christianity:

“The Great Evangelical Recession: Six Factors that Will Crash the American Church … And How to Prepare.”

“The American Church in Crisis.”

“A Call to Resurgence: Will Christianity Have a Funeral or a Future?” (Spoiler alert! The cover illustration is of a hearse.)

None are anti-Christian screeds. All are written by evangelical pastors.

And they’re all part of an intense, active debate – in books, magazines, conferences and anxious church offices – about the future of evangelical Christianity.

Signs of the debate are everywhere. When Christianity Today magazine landed an interview earlier this year with Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, the second question was: Is “America becoming less Christian?” (I’ll get to Warren’s answer in a minute.)

Ed Stetzer, a prominent researcher and consultant affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention in Nashville, Tenn., weighed in last month with a statistics-rich essay, also in Christianity Today, that began reassuringly, “The church is not dying.”

But in the next, clarifying (if less reassuring) sentence, Stetzer wrote: “It’s in transition.”

Where that transition will lead in an increasingly diverse and secular America – to a future or a funeral – is the question. So far, no one has a definitive answer.

Last week, I wrote a column about the difficulty of providing such answers, since there’s no universal standard for measuring the size and health of religious movements in America.

The problem is particularly vexing for evangelicals, who can’t even agree among themselves who counts as evangelical.

Still, there’s a lot of information out there. And that information, properly sifted, tells a story.

For evangelicals, the story doesn’t have a happy ending.

Read More.