It is becoming a growing trend in Europe to leave the church. Hundreds of thousands of people are officially cutting ties with organized religion. The recent Huffington Post article titled, Europeans “De-Baptize” In Growing Numbers, Church Officials Worried, states that, “In Germany, a record 181,000 Catholics formally split from the Catholic Church in 2011.”

This is also the case in other parts of Europe: “The numbers of people reportedly leaving the Dutch church reportedly shot up 25 percent” and “In Britain, a de-baptism certificate offered as a joke by the National Secular Society has since turned serious after tens of thousands of people downloaded it.”

Ken Eastburn, Director of House2House Ministries comments…

“So, how should God feel about all of this? Is this hurting His bottom line, affecting His consumer base? Should God be panicking just a little?

I tend to believe that most of these churchgoers who seek to get de-baptized fall into one of two categories.

The first category being people who have no connection with God at all. Not to say that they are all atheists, though many might be. They might believe that there is a God, they just don’t have a relationship with Him in any real sense.

I would suspect that a second group consists of many people who have discovered that the “institution” of church has little to do with God at all. They are beginning to realize what most of you reading this already know.

Christian Weisner, German spokesman for the international lay reform movement stated, “I don’t think they want to get rid of their belief, their connection to Jesus, and the baptism, but they don’t want to be connected with the church hierarchy.” Sound familiar?

We have seen something of a mass-exodus happening here in the States as well. Not to the extent of what has happened in Europe, yet. But many experts believe that the trend will continue to see many more people experimenting with church in non-traditional settings.”