For the past 15 years, Chris Kouba has served in various capacities within Prestonwood Baptist Church, one of the largest churches in the country. Most notably he served as the Lead Pastor of Prestonwood¹s Dallas campus and currently serves as the Lead Pastor of their thriving North Campus located in Prosper, Texas. Chris is a proud graduate of Baylor University, where he met his wife Hillary. He received his Master¹s degree from Dallas Theological Seminary and his doctorate from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. In addition to his educational achievements, Chris is most proud of his role as father to Katelyn, Mackenzie, Hudson and Griffin. Known for his research and insight into multi-site churches, Chris is often consulted by church planters or churches looking to add campuses. He is also a featured speaker and instructor for Newchurches.com, a division of Lifeway Resources, and can be seen leading several online modules. Additionally, Chris is a guest blogger for Lifeway; writing on such topics as communication, leadership and unity. Chris is passionate about building the local church, strengthening
family units and serving Christ.

Allie Beth Stuckey is from Dallas, Texas, and graduated from Furman University in Greenville, SC in 2014. She was chosen to deliver her university's commencement speech, and it was that experience that confirmed her gift of and passion for communicating. Since college, Allie Beth has worked as a publicist, social media strategist, blogger and an advocate of conservative values and voter education among Millennials. She just launched her new site, The Conservative Millennial Blog, where she keeps her readers up to date on millennial happenings and conservative ideas.

J. Nick Pitts serves as the director of cultural engagement at the Denison Forum on Truth and Culture.

He came to the Denison Forum in 2014 after a fateful conversation with its founder, Dr. Jim Denison. Pitts, a Ph.D. candidate at Dallas Baptist University (DBU), had spent the summer studying at Oxford with other students and faculty including Denison, a visiting professor.

He contributes to the Forum in the areas of geopolitics and popular culture, as well as serving as the editor of the Daily Briefing. He continues work on his doctorate and serves as an adjunct professor at DBU, teaching a master’s level course in the philosophy of leadership.

His Ph.D. research centers upon John F. Kennedy’s engagement of the religious community in the 1960 presidential campaign. He presented a paper on the topic at Calvin College’s 2015 symposium on religion and public life.

He is an editor at large for The Liberty Project, an online magazine, and his op-eds have been published by The Philadelphia Inquirer, Religion News Service and Townhall.com.

He received a bachelor’s degree in 2007 from Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, and a master’s degree in 2009 from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.

In an hour, I’ll be drinking coffee with a nineteen-year-old preacher’s kid who’s finding it hard to connect with his father’s church. Tomorrow I hope to call a good friend from my Christian college days to talk about his new teaching job. He’s drifted in and out of churches over the past five years, never quite finding a place that fits. This morning I read an email from a fellow recent seminary grad wondering whether he can stick with a church position in the midst of deep frustration and disappointment with the way his church embodies Jesus’s good news.

David Kinnaman’s You Lost Me has its roots in stories like these. Thousands of stories. Nearly five thousand interviews with and about eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds in the United States. The project conducted by Kinnaman’s Barna Group stretched from 2007 to 2011, launched eight new social scientific studies, and reanalyzed Barna’s twenty-seven years of interviews and polls for data regarding the youngest generation of Americans and their relationship to the church. You Lost Me reads as a capstone report to this research, distilling it, analyzing, suggesting next steps.

For years, surveys have indicated that members of the youngest generation of adults in the U.S. are far less likely than older Americans to identify with a religious group. But a major new Pew Research Center survey finds that, as time goes on, the already-large share of religiously unaffiliated Millennial adults is increasing significantly.

A high percentage of younger members of the Millennial generation – those who have entered adulthood in just the last several years – are religious “nones” (saying they are atheists or agnostics, or that their religion is “nothing in particular”). At the same time, an increasing share of older Millennials also identify as “nones,” with more members of that group rejecting religious labels in recent years.

Overall, 35% of adult Millennials (Americans born between 1981 and 1996) are religiously unaffiliated. Far more Millennials say they have no religious affiliation compared with those who identify as evangelical Protestants (21%), Catholics (16%) or mainline Protestants (11%).

One-fifth of Americans are religiously unaffiliated — higher than at any time in recent U.S. history — and those younger than 30 especially seem to be drifting from organized religion. A third of young Americans say they don't belong to any religion.

NPR's David Greene wanted to understand why, so he gathered a roundtable of young people at a synagogue in Washington, D.C. The 6th & I Historic Synagogue seemed like the right venue: It's both a holy and secular place that has everything from religious services to rock concerts. Greene speaks with six people — three young women and three young men — all struggling with the role of faith and religion in their lives.

The son of a steelworker and a hairdresser, both emigrants from Mexico, he grew up watching C-SPAN and became a union leader for the film industry in Los Angeles. Today he’s running for Congress in the suburbs north of Atlanta as a Christian, working-class Independent fed up with both parties.

Alexander Hernandez, 30, is a member of a label-averse generation alternately inspired and appalled by the 2016 election — and a growing number of them are throwing their hats in the ring to run for themselves. On Crowdpac, a millennial leaning crowdfunding site,