Every Easter season, many churches may view their holiday services as an opportunity for outreach or evangelism. Pastors are quick, for example, to encourage their congregants to invite their friends to church—something plenty of churchgoers appear willing to do. Barna’s recent report Reviving Evangelism, produced in partnership with Alpha USA, shows that half of practicing Christians (52%) are indeed completely comfortable extending such an invitation.

However, inviting friends to church is only one of many possible forms of faith-sharing. The data point to other ways in which people who are not practicing Christians would like to explore their faith, and the common approaches taken by Christians. This new research adds to Barna’s other data showing Millennials’ opposition toward evangelism, and the stark gap between who non-Christians want to talk to about faith and the Christians they actually know.

Lapsed and Non-Christians Favor Casual Faith Encounters In order to assess the perception and experience of those being evangelized, Barna looked closely at two key groups for this study: “Lapsed Christians” (those who identify as Christian but have not attended church within the past month) and “non-Christians” (those who identify with a faith other than Christianity or with no faith at all). Both groups were asked about the level of comfort they feel in a number of faith-sharing approaches taken by Christians. A plurality in each group prefers either a casual, one-on-one conversation or casual group conversation. But their level of spiritual inclination directly relates to how they feel about these contexts.

For instance, non-Christians and lapsed Christians who say spirituality plays a significant role in their life, and / or that they have unanswered spiritual questions (more “spiritually curious” types), tend to be more open to a variety of settings to explore questions of faith. On the other hand, those who say otherwise (less “spiritually curious” types) are less open. Looking at the data, among all non-Christians and lapsed Christians, three in 10 (30%) say they prefer a “casual, one-on-one conversation.” But the percentage is higher among those for whom spirituality is significant (40%) than among those for whom it is not (27%). Similarly, non-Christians and lapsed Christians who agree strongly that they have unanswered spiritual questions are more likely to say they prefer one-on-one conversation (45%) than those who don’t have such questions (20%).