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Why Nobody Wants to Go to Church Anymore

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unchurchedThat’s the title of a new book written by Joani Schultz and Thom Schultz. And it’s a question those leaving are more than ready to answer. The problem is, few insiders are listening.

And, of course, that IS the problem.

In a recent issue of Christianity Today, for example, Ed Stetzer wrote an article entitled,“The State of the Church in America: Hint: It’s Not Dying.” He states: “The church is not dying… yes… in a transition… but transitioning is not the same as dying.”

[Steve McSwain, The Huffington Post, Oct 14, 2013] Really? What cartoons have you been watching?

Clearly, the Church is dying. Do your research, Mr. Stetzer. According to the Hartford Institute of Religion Research, more than 40 percent of Americans “say” they go to church weekly. As it turns out, however, less than 20 percent are actually in church. In other words, more than 80 percent of Americans are finding more fulfilling things to do on weekends.

Furthermore, somewhere between 4,000 and 7,000 churches close their doors every year. Southern Baptist researcher, Thom Rainer, in a recent article entitled “13 Issues for Churches in 2013” puts the estimate higher. He says between 8,000 and 10,000 churches will likely close this year.

Between the years 2010 and 2012, more than half of all churches in America added not one new member. Each year, nearly 3 million more previous churchgoers enter the ranks of the “religiously unaffiliated.”

Churches aren’t dying?

No, of course not. Churches will always be here. But you can be sure, churches are going through more than a mere “transition.” I study these things carefully. I counsel church leaders within every denomination in America, having crisscrossed this country for nearly two decades counseling congregations as small as two hundred in attendance to churches averaging nearly 20,000 in weekly attendance. As I see it, there are “7” changing trends impacting church-going in America. In this first of two articles, I’ll address the “7” trends impacting church-going. In the second part, I’ll offer several best practices that, as I see it, might reverse the trends contributing to the decline.

Trends Impacting Church Decline:

1. The demographic remapping of America.

Whites are the majority today at 64 percent. In 30 to 40 years, they will be the minority. One in every three people you meet on the street in three to four decades will be of Hispanic origin. In other words, if you are not reaching Hispanics today, your church’s shelf life is already in question.

Furthermore, America is aging. Go into almost any traditional, mainline church in America, observe the attendees and you’ll quickly see a disproportionate number of gray-headed folks in comparison to all the others. According to Pew Research, every day for the next 16 years, 10,000 new baby boomers will enter retirement. If you cannot see where this is headed, my friend, there is not much you can see.

2. Technology.

Technology is changing everything we do, including how we “do” church. Yet, there are scores of churches that are still operating in the age of the Industrial Revolution. Instead of embracing the technology and adapting their worship experiences to include the technology, scores of traditional churches, mainline Protestant, and almost all Catholic churches do not utilize the very instruments that, without which, few Millennials would know how to communicate or interact.

However, when I suggest to pastors and priests, as I frequently do, that they should use social media and, even in worship, they should, for example, right smack in the middle of a sermon, ask the youth and young adults to text their questions about the sermon’s topic… that you’ll retrieve them on your smartphone… and, before dismissing, answer the three best questions about today’s sermon, most of the ministers look at me as if I’ve lost my mind. What they should be more concerned about is why the Millennials have little or no interest in what they have to say.

3. Leadership Crisis

Enough has been written about this in the past. But you can be sure, clergy abuse, the cover-up by the Church, and fundamentalist preachers and congregations have been driving people away from the Church, and continue to drive people away, faster than any other causes combined.

4. Competition

People have more choices on weekends than simply going to church. Further, the feelings of shame and guilt many people used to feel and church leaders used to promote for not attending church every week is gone.

There are still those, however, who want to categorize Christians as an explanation for the church’s decline in attendance in a futile effort to make things not look so bad. But this, too, is the illusion that many church leaders and denominational executives are perpetrating but nobody is paying attention. They are just too blind to see that.

For example, in the very same article I referenced above, Ed Stetzer has concocted three different categories of Christians he conveniently thinks explains the dire situation faced by the church.

He says there is a kind of “classification” system between those who “profess Christianity” as their faith choice.

  • First, he says there are cultural Christians or those who “believe” themselves to be Christians simply because their culture says they are. But, clearly, he implies they are not.
  • Second, he classifies a group of congregational Christians which he says are not much better off than the first misguided group, except that these are loosely connected to the church.
  • Third, he notes the third group, which no doubt he ranks as “his” group, that he calls the convictional Christians. These are the true Christians who are actually living their faith, according to Ed Stetzer.

I’ve got news for you, Mr. Stetzer, there are scores of people who have left the church, not because they possess some phony or inferior faith, as you would like to believe, but precisely because they do not want to be around judgmental people like you. They have left, not to abandon their faith, but precisely because they wish to preserve it. You would be much better off to leave the judgment-making to Someone infinitely more qualified to do so (Matt. 7:1).

5. Religious Pluralism

Speaking of competition, there is a fifth trend impacting the decline of the church in America. People have more choices today. Credit this to the social changes in the ’60s, to the Internet, to the influx of immigrants and minorities, to whatever you’d like, but the fact is, people today meet other people today of entirely different faith traditions and, if they are discovering anything at all, it is that there are scores of people who live as much, if not more, like Christ than many of the Christians they used to sit beside in church.

The diversity of this nation is only going to expand. Which is why, you might debate some of Diana Eck’s conclusions, the Harvard scholar and researcher, but her basic premise in correctly stated in the title of her book, A New Religious America: How a ‘Christian Country’ Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation.

6. The “Contemporary” Worship Experience

This, too, has contributed to the decline of the church. It’s been the trend in the last couple of decades for traditional, mainline churches to pretend to be something they’re not. Many of them have experimented with praise bands, the installation of screens, praise music, leisure dress on the platform, and… well… you know how well that’s been received.

Frankly, it has largely proven to be a fatal mistake. Of course, there are exceptions to this everywhere and especially in those churches where there is an un-traditional look already, staging, an amphitheater-style seating, as well as the budget to hire the finest musicians to perform for worship. In traditional, mainline churches, however, trying to make a stained-glass atmosphere pass as the contemporary worship place has met with about as much success as a karaoke singer auditioning for The X Factor.

7. Phony Advertising

There’s one more trend I’ll mention I believe is having devastating impact on the Church and most certainly contributing to its decline. You cannot tell Millennials that your church welcomes everybody — that all can come to Jesus — and then, when they come, what they find are few mixed races or no mixed couples.

You cannot say, “Everybody is welcome here if, by that, you really mean, so long as you’re like the rest of us, straight and in a traditional family.”

In the words of Rachel Evans, a millennial herself and a blogger for CNN, “Having been advertised to our whole lives, we millennials have highly sensitive BS meters.”

In other words, cut the bull. If everyone is not really equally welcomed to the table at your church, stop advertising that you are open to anyone. That is not only a lie, but Millennials can see through the phony façade as clearly as an astronomer, looking through the Hubble telescope, can see the infinity of space.

There are other trends. These are just a few of them. In Part Two, I’ll offer some “best practices” I think the Church should seriously consider if it ever plans to get real and honest about its future and its influence on culture and society.

Just Because You Love Jesus Doesn’t Mean You Have to Disrespect the Buddha, Dishonor Muhammad or Disregard Moses

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On this 11th anniversary of 9/11, it’s a good day for us to look back and assess the damage.

[Brian McLaren, The Huffington Post, 9.11.2012] The damage to buildings long been accounted for, and much has been rebuilt. The damage to the economy has also been debated and estimated — and replaced by new, greater, primarily self-inflicted economic wounds.

The damage to families is, of course, impossible to assess or quantify. It can only be mourned.

But there’s another impact of those attacks that is still too seldom tallied: how our religious communities have turned from their deepest teachings and values of peace and reconciliation, and have too often become possessed, we might say, by spirits of fear, revenge, isolation and hostility. Continue lendo →

eResurrection? ~ by John Piderit

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In an age of video, TV, camcorders and iPhones, adept users can capture important events in a digital medium that can be transmitted quickly to people around the world. What would a resurrection appearance of Jesus have looked like if an alert apostle had an iPhone and, assuming the apostle was not immediately told by Jesus to “put that iPhone away,” the apostle captured a minute of Jesus’s appearance with the iPhone video running? Of course, this is a hypothetical and no answer could possibly be definitive. But the question raises interesting issues.

Before we get to the video of Jesus, let’s start with what we know. Although Jesus appeared in many different situations to the disciples, the appearances share some common characteristics, all of which have to be taken into consideration when addressing the issue of an electronic transmission of the appearance of the risen Lord. Hundreds of scholars have poured over the resurrection appearances and subjected them to critical analysis. The most important findings are summarized in the following observations, which are supported by a large majority of biblical scholars. Continue lendo →

How Should Churches and Leaders Be Preparing to Address These Big Issues Facing the Church? by Tim Keller

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1. The local church has to support culture-making. Most of the young evangelicals interested in integrating their faith with film-making, journalism, corporate finance, etc, are getting their support and mentoring from informal networks or para-church groups. Michael Lindsay’s book Faith in the Halls of Power shows that many Christians in places of influence in the culture are alienated from the church, because they get, at best, no church support for living their faith out in the public spheres, and, at worst, opposition.

At the theological level, the church needs to gain more consensus on how the church and Christian faith relate to culture. There is still a lot of conflict between those who want to disciple Christians for public life, and those who think all “engagement of culture” ultimately leads to compromise and distraction from the preaching of the gospel. What makes this debate difficult is that both sides make good points and have good arguments.

At the practical level, even the churches that give lip-service to the importance of integrating faith and work do very little to actually equip people to do so. Seminary only trained us ministers to disciple people by pulling them more out of the world and inside the walls and ministries of the church. So how does a church actually help its members in this area? Leaders who want to get started should look at Redeemer’s Center for Faith and Work.

2. We need a renewal of apologetics. There is a lot of resistance right now among younger evangelical leaders toward apologetics. We are told we don’t need arguments any more because people aren’t rational. We need loving community instead. But I think this is short-sighted for two reasons.

First, Christians in the West will finally be facing what missionaries around the world have faced for years–how to communicate the gospel to Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, and adherents of various folk religions. All young church leaders should take courses in and read the texts of the other major world religions. They should also study the gospel presentations written by missionaries engaging those religions. Loving community will be extremely important, as it always is, to reach out to neighbors of other faiths, but if they are going to come into the church, they will have many questions that church leaders today need to be able to answer.

Second, there a real vacuum in western secular thought. When Derrida died I was surprised how many of his former students admitted that High Theory (what evangelicals call ‘post-modernism’) is seen as a dead end, mainly because it is so relativistic that it provides no basis for political action. And a leading British intellectual like Terry Eagleton in recent lectures at Yale (published as Religion, Faith, and Revolution by Yale Press) savaged the older scientific atheism of Dawkins and Hitchens as equally bankrupt. Eagleton points out that the Enlightenment’s optimism about science and human progress is dead. Serious western thought is not going back to that, no matter how popular Dawkins’ books get. But postmodernism cannot produce a basis for human rights or justice either.

This is a real opening, apologetically, in reaching out to thoughtful non-Christians, especially the younger, socially conscious ones. We need to think of new ways to engage, asking people how they can justify their concerns for human rights and social justice. (For a great recent form of this approach, see Chris Smith’s “Does Naturalism Warrant a Moral Belief in Universal Benevolence and Human Rights?” in The Believing Primate: Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Reflections on the Origin of Religion (Oxford, 2009.)

Over the last twenty years my preaching and teaching has profited a great deal from doing the hard work of reading philosophy, especially the work of older Christian philosophers and scholars (Plantinga, Wolterstorff, Mavrodes, Alston) and the younger ones. Ministers need to be able to glean and put their arguments into easy to understand form, both in speaking and in evangelism.

I agree with the critics that say the old, rationalistic, ‘evidence that demands a verdict’ makes people’s eyes glaze over today. But that doesn’t mean that people don’t still use reason and still make arguments. There is a big chink in the armor of western thought right now. People don’t want to go back to religion, which still scares them, but they are not so sanguine about the implications and effects of non-belief.

3. We need a great variety of church-models. Avery Dulles’ book Models of the Church does a good job of outlining the very different models of churches in the west over the centuries. After qualifying his analysis by saying these are seldom pure forms, he lays out five models. Each one stresses or emphasizes: a) Doctrine, teaching, and authority, or b) deep community and life together, or c) worship, sacraments, music and the arts, or d) evangelism, proclamation, and dynamic preaching, or e) social justice, service, and compassion.

Many evangelicals today have bought in to one or two of these models as the way to minister now in the post-Christendom west. So for example, those who believe in the ‘incarnational’ (vs. ‘attractional’ approach) emphasize being and serving out in the neighborhood, smaller house churches and intimate community (a combination of Dulles’ b and e models.) Meanwhile, many evangelicals who are afraid of the ‘liberal creep’ of the emerging church, stress the traditional combination of a and d emphases. Each side is fairly moralistic about the rightness of its model and seeks to use it everywhere.

I feel that our cultural situation is too complex for such a sweeping way to look at things. There are too many kinds of ‘never-churched-non-Christians’. There are Arabs in Detroit, Hmongs in Chicago, Chinese and Jews in New York City, Anglos in the Northwest and Northeast that were raised by secular parents–some are artists and creative types, some work in business. All of these are growing groups of never-churched, but they are very different from one another. No model can connect to them all–every model can connect to some.

4. We must develop a far better theology of suffering. Members of churches in the west are caught absolutely flat-footed by suffering and difficulty. This is a major problem, especially if we are facing greater ‘liminality’–social marginalization–and maybe more economic and social instability. There are a great number of books on ‘why does God allow evil?’ but they mainly are aimed at getting God off the hook with impatient western people who believe God’s job is to give them a safe life. The church in the west must mount a great new project–of producing a people who are prepared to endure in the face of suffering and persecution.

Here, too, is one of the ways we in the west can connect to the new, growing world Christianity. We tend to think about ‘what we can do for them.’ But here’s how we let them do something for us. Many or most of the church in the rest of the world is used to suffering and persecution. They have a kind of faith that does not wilt, but rather grows stronger under threat. We need to become students of theirs in this area.

5. We need a critical mass of churches in the biggest cities of the world.

I know I’m always expected to say this! But this is not a mere tack-on to the other measures for addressing the Big Issues. In some ways, this is the ‘Big Idea’ that will help us move forward on all fronts.

If there were vital, fast-growing movements of churches–orthodox in theology, wholistic in ministry, and committed to culture-making–in the great global cities, so that 5-10% of the residents of the 50 most influential cities were gospel-believers, a) it would have a great impact on culture-making, b) it would help the church learn new ways of reaching the never-churched (since they concentrate in cities), c) it would connect western churches more readily to the new churches in the non-western world, d) it would unite churches across traditions and models.

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