So, after three years, I’m leaving my evangelical church. It’s a painful decision that my wife and I made with tons of grief. We knew many wonderful people who did good things, but I can’t support some of the things I’ve seen and heard any longer. I am lost, sad, and tired.

I grew up an atheist and became a Christian “late” in life. I went to the evangelical church an outsider, both spiritually and racially. I was excited by grace, by community. But reading the Bible and seeing the church were worlds apart. Two years ago, the dissonance became unbearable.

I’m not done with the evangelical church (yet). But I have no idea where to go. My wife and I haven’t gone to church in a few months. I don’t know of any church nearby who both loves Jesus and is socially generous, who sees me fully, both a child of Christ and a son to immigrants.

One of the reasons I left is that I am pained by the way the evangelical church has blindly compromised on political, social, and racial justice. Your vote is your vote: but to completely follow party lines without asking questions and holding accountability is painful to watch.

I felt complicit in my silence. There were random moments in the pulpit and in small groups where issues and people were blasted, a kind of coded insider’s language that “we evangelicals are a dying breed and true wisdom perishes with us.” It was gross.

The last straw for me was the evangelical take on the child immigrant crisis. The silence, the apathy, the lack of compassion, the downright cruelty … I’m from a family of immigrants. My country has been torn apart for generations. My stomach was sick on Sundays.

I know for some, this is all obvious and I wish I had spoken up sooner. I felt like I wasted three years with evangelicals. But I did try and I did love them. I’m in a lot of pain about all of it: the church, our nation, my people. I am in limbo. If you have wisdom, please help… — J.S. Park (Facebook).

300,000 in Finland quit Facebook this year, expert tells paper.

A social media expert told Helsingin Sanomat he noticed there were about 300,000 fewer users from Finland on the social network than there were last year.

File photo. Image: Dinendra Haria / AOP.

Entrepreneur, social media educator and blogger Harto Pönkä told the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat that after the scandal surrounding Facebook’s dealings with Cambridge Analytica last spring, he expected some people in Finland would quit the nearly-ubiquitous social media platform.

After examining Facebook advertisement data recently he found that quite a few users in Finland actually had left the platform - a total of some 300,000 people.

He said largest demographic that ended their relationship with the US firm were aged between 30-40, with nearly 100,000 users in that age bracket having quit Facebook.

Around 55,000 people in Finland aged 13-29 and 40-49 have also apparently left the service, he said.

However, fewer people over the age of 50 had abandoned than other age groups, Pönkä pointed out.

Notably, he said that there was not an increase in new Facebook users from Finland, regardless of their age.

Facebook's stock value plunged in the aftermath, but the loss of a few hundred thousand users is a mere drop in the firm's vast bucket, as the site still boasts around two billion regular users around the world.

According to a survey carried out by Finnish mobile operator DNA earlier this year, most people who closed their Facebook accounts said they did it because of security issues. Some seven percent of the former Facebook user said they quit the social media platform due to the company’s widely-reported leak of users’ data.

Another 11 percent said at the time that they were still considering whether to quit Facebook in the aftermath of the data leak.

More commonly however, people said they quit the social media giant to give themselves more personal time, saying that the service consumes a surprising amount of their day and that the experience was become increasingly antisocial.

"FOMO" factor.

Assistant professor in new media at the University of Toronto, Tero Karppi - who’s studied social media for the past decade - also spoke with Helsingin Sanomat.

The Finnish academic said people often find it difficult to quit Facebook and other social media platforms due to a fear of missing out.

“It’s not a question of addiction, but cultural and social pressure [to stay]," said Karppi. "How can someone quit a platform that plays such a big role in our daily lives?”

According to 2017 data from the Federation of Finnish Enterprises, there were some 2.5 million Facebook users in Finland, a country with a population of roughly 5.5 million. That figure, by far, exceeded the number of users on other social media platforms, making it the most popular in the country.

However, it is currently unclear whether Facebook is still at the top of the highly-competitive social media industry, at least in Finland.

WhatsApp, the smartphone-based chatting and small-scale social media app (which is also a Facebook property) had some two million users in Finland last year, and some experts think that number has risen since then.

The third and fourth most popular social media platforms in Finland in 2017 were YouTube (owned by Alphabet, the firm that owns Google) with 1.1 million users and Instagram (yet another Facebook property) with one million users.

Snapchat had half a million users in Finland while Twitter had some 400,000 last year.

https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/300000_in_finland_quit_facebook_this_year_expert_tells_paper/10375826