Will the Last Pastor in Babylon Please Turn Off the Lights?
TL;DR
In the last twenty years, church attendance in America has collapsed. Today only one in four Americans attend weekly services, while two‑thirds report seldom or never attending. Casual believers have disappeared, leaving churches to cater to the most devout. This decline is driven by multiple forces: mediocre leadership, lack of daily relevance, failure to create meaningful experiences, and disconnection from lived realities. For believers, this feels like cultural unraveling. For those leaving, it is an exodus toward an ill‑defined promised land, uncertain yet full of possibility.
The interplay of the personal and the institutional
Recently, I had an interesting conversation with a good friend. This friend is an ordained pastor in a mainline denomination.
She had recently been talking with mutual friends, and she said that I am still missed at church, and they would love it if I were to come back.
It took me a moment to realize that I do not miss church.
To speak in the plainest of languages, American Christianity is failing institutionally and individually. It does not meet the practical or spiritual needs of its people and the resulting decline in attendance is neither tragedy nor farce; it is quite simply transition.
Significant bodies of research tell the same story. Over the last few decades, the number of people attending church has continuously declined, while the number of people claiming no specific religious affiliation has continued to grow. Membership and attendance in all churches continues to decline across the United States.
Hiding in the numbers our countless stories of broken hearts and expectations not met. Individuals who hope the church will be a place in which they can find meaning and relationship. Individuals who believe that they can become ordained and make a positive difference in people's lives. There is both pain and liberation for those who leave the church behind.
Time to leave the sanctuary
After 20 years of active membership and involvement, one Sunday in 2018 I walked out of Sunday morning worship service, got in my car, and said to myself, “I will not set foot in that church again. It's not worth it to listen to that hypocrite preach.”
I'll save discussing whether that pastor was truly a hypocrite for another time. What I experienced was a leader who was, on a good day, mediocre; and he did not have many good days. He was neither spiritually nor emotionally mature enough to be a good pastor. On that day I had simply reached the point that I could no longer sit in the pew and listen to the bland prepackaged sermons he was delivering, sermons which to me were the spiritual equivalent of plain cold oatmeal.
Although I love the people in that community, and there are times I keenly miss them, I do not miss church. If I had known then that I would probably not return to church, I might have paused for a very long time, hugged many people and told them how much I care about them. Getting in my car that day I had no idea that in a little more than a year COVID would shut down the world, and that I would not return to the walls of the church.
In the hands of too many of its leaders, the church delivers little more than spiritual gruel. It fails at its mission and too often delivers pablum dressed up in vestments and choir robes. For members who yearn for meaning in their Sunday sermons, Too many sermons offer an easy, aphoristic wisdom, less challenging and meaningful than you would find from your average life coach. For pastors who want to transform lives there are too few opportunities in the midst of budget meetings and managing the building. The church experience is more frequently hollow than meaningful, more frequently performative than transformative.
I recently came across two informative and thought-provoking videos; the first by the Genetically Modified Skeptic pointing out that the public face of American Christianity is frequently and deliberately cruel. The second, at Professor Archive, discusses the collapse of the Mega Church Movement. For many years, mega churches were offered as a solution to the traditional church which, supposedly, no longer appealed to Americans. Both videos helped me start thinking for this particular post.
Slow (or not so slow) Motion Exodus
Recent polling that shows anywhere between one in four and one in three Americans identify as religious nones. In addition to the decline in religious identity, regular participation in church life has collapsed in the last 20 years, dropping from 40% to 20%. These changes are not occurring in a vacuum, nor are they occurring for random reasons. I believe there are 5 structural and cultural forces that are driving these changes.
- The decline of cultural Christianity
- The failure of churches to create sustainable meaningful experiences
- Disconnect between what is preached in church and the lived realities of Americans
- Mediocrity in leadership, not just failures and scandals but even long-term leaders are generally mediocre and uninspiring
- Failure of church communities to create dynamic spiritual life for their members.
The decline of cultural Christianity
According to surveys, approximately 1 in 4 Americans attends church on a weekly basis. 33% report attending at least once a month. 67% of Americans report attending only a few times a year or less, with approximately half reporting they seldom or never attending. If you add online participation, 40% of adults report engaging monthly in some form of service. Many churches have names on their membership rolls of people who have not set foot a church building in decades.
For a very long time in the US, people attended church because that was what was done. Pastors and your fellow congregants did not inquire too deeply into your beliefs. To put it in simple terms, casual believers and doubters could go to church on Sunday and be part of the community without passing some sort of litmus test about belief. Your church was your community, where you made and kept friends, found the folks with whom you went to dinner and held backyard barbecues. Casual believers and even non-believers would attend regularly out of a desire for social connection.
Today casual believers and non-believers have other options on Sunday morning, options which do not involve getting dressed up or sitting in the pews.
As a result of the departure of the less faithful, those who attend church are the truest of believers. Sermons, worship services, and other activities are tailored for the most devout, which makes them unwelcoming to folks whose belief is more casual or less committed.
Services at Christmas and Easter time might be adapted for less frequent visitors, but for the most part church becomes the realm of the most devout and speaks to their needs and their concerns. Even the so-called seeker sensitive movements in the mega churches was designed to appeal to a very specific religious demographic, and it was not the doubtful and the persuadable.
For casual believers, church life becomes a gauntlet to be run in order to get to community. And given that there are many lots of other opportunities to create community without the trial, casual believers are readily and regularly looking elsewhere.
The failure of churches to create sustainable, meaningful experiences
On a regular basis, I attended a weekly dinner at church. This dinner took place before evening activities (choir, youth group, adult book group, etc.), but you didn't have to be involved in any of the activities to come for dinner. Once a week, I sat with friends to share a meal, great conversation and enjoy myself. The weekly opportunity to connect with folks at a fully human level was immensely rewarding. On a regular basis, those conversations were probably more rewarding and more meaningful than many of the Sunday morning experiences. An acquaintance of mine can still recall an experience she had years ago when the church created an opportunity on Sundays for folks to come together around the table and simply share about their lives. What began as simple conversation, quickly transformed into profound, heartfelt conversations about love, loss, and the untidy journey of life. The conversations were conducted within the context of the church but weren't handled within the prescribed boundaries of safe or acceptable theology. Living with and encountering one another's profound humanity was transformative. These group discussions apparently went on for months, both inside and out of the church. And the friendships forged? Many continued today, several decades later. Experiences such as these show the church can be a place where people find meaning, without adopting any particular theology or belief.
Far too many churches have failed to find ways to create these sustainable, meaningful experiences.
The activities churches sponsor, small groups, dinner clubs, and classes, need to serve a dual purpose. Part of their purpose is helping members grow as spiritual and religious beings. Equally, if not more importantly, these activities need to provide people with social connection. They need to provide people with opportunities to know and be known by other people.
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to attend a Christmas concert sponsored by a church. Watching the choir, you could tell which members were singing because they loved singing and making music, and which members were singing because they loved Jesus. With the end of cultural Christianity, the people who are singing because they love Jesus become the majority and an element of social connection is lost. Rather than seeing Bible study as an avenue by which we get to know one another better, it becomes a process by which we get to know Jesus better.
With the loss of opportunities for transformative social connection, the experience of church becomes less accessible and less meaningful for a great many people.
Disconnect between what is preached in church and the lived realities of Americans
My own experience of reading the Bible, starting in religion class while I was in Catholic school. As an adult attending a Protestant church, I had the opportunity to again delve into the Bible in a serious and structured way.
I believe the Bible holds relevance for our lives today. That relevance does not emerge from centuries of received meaning and interpretation. Nor does it emerge from embracing the Bible as if it were a book dictated from God in the form we have it today. I believe finding meaning starts by recognizing that it is a collection of stories, originally folk tales shared over fires and around campsites thousands of years ago, as well as disparate written messages later on, which resonated with people over centuries. Once we recognize that it's simply a collection of stories and letters and poetry, we can begin removing the encrusted layers and finding meaning that is relevant today.
Why does the story of Tamar and Judah matter? What does the story of Ethiopian eunuch have to teach me today? Why does it matter that most of Saint Paul's letters are really just organizational development memos? Any honest reading of the psalms will tell us that we have a lot in common with the people who compose them. We laugh we cry we get angry at the world sometimes we get drunk and sometimes we just fuck. I mean let's be serious, we're talking about a book in which there's a story with a talking donkey, in which another story has a cranky prophet of God complaining about teenagers and so God sends bears to eat them, and another story in which a man is swallowed by a fish and lives inside the fish's stomach for days. It has poetry in which people scream at God about how angry they are about their lives. And any honest reading would remind us that it also has some pretty sexy bits. It's a mishmash of traditions and counter traditions and arguments we only know a part of, and in that it is immensely and sometimes confusingly human.
Within the Bible there are stories of fractured families, people dealing with grief, people learning how to reconcile with one another in difficult situations. The Bible is not something to be memorized and recited, it is a living document with which to be interacted. We read it to see what resonates with us in our lives as we are living them, not to be told by somebody in clerical drag what they were taught it means.
Read it when you're in the right mood and parts of the Bible will make you howl with laughter while other parts make you weep. Other parts are downright baffling; if you don't believe me, read the story of Jephthah's daughter.
In the 1960s and 70s, as large numbers of people began leaving the more progressive mainline denominations and moving to the more conservative churches, conservative commentators argued that it was because conservative churches were speaking to people's needs. But those trends have long since ended.
The growing number of people who are deconstructing their fundamentalist and evangelical beliefs and speaking publicly about that experience refutes the claims about those churches and their eternal relevance. Many younger members, even the most devout younger members, are finding themselves drawn away from evangelical and conservative churches because they cannot reconcile the contradictions between the public cruelty of their theology and Jesus’ command to extend compassion and kindness.
The decline in attendance at mega churches points towards a yearning for a more authentic spiritual experience, rather than the neatly packaged consumer experience those churches created and delivered. The very public collapse of more than a few mega churches have left behind in their wreckage believers who no longer believe in church, and who rather than leaving for another church are simply leaving the church.
Mediocrity in leadership, not just failures and scandals but many long-term leaders are generally mediocre and uninspiring
There is no shortage of examples of church leaders who are spectacularly and egregiously unfit. Financial shenanigans, abuse of power, every variety of sexual misconduct, and a host of misdeeds have ended the careers of more than a few church leaders. Within the mega church movement, misdeeds by a senior pastor can result in closing a church that had previously hosted thousands upon thousands of worshippers every Sunday. Within various denominations, patterns of secrecy have protected pastors against the consequences of their misconduct. All of these scandals have been damaging to the church and have led to people leaving. They are not the only component.
Perhaps just as damaging to the life of the church is the reality that far too many church leaders are at best mediocre.
In my years as an active churchgoer, I had the opportunity to meet and work with pastors not just within my denomination but within other denominations. Almost all of these individuals were people whose company I genuinely enjoyed.
As I reflect on my experiences, many behaviors that at the time I simply wrote off as quirky or “Oh he or she is just like that,” I now recognized as signs that these individuals have been badly prepared for the role of pastor and in many cases lacked both the emotional and spiritual maturity to fill the role well. Many of them demonstrated a surprising lack of self-awareness, despite having a job where self-awareness is required for success.
Leading Sunday prayers and delivering sermons are crucial but a very smart part of leading a community; religious leaders must be trusted guides and coaches. They must navigate difficult situations with grace and compassion. They must lead with self-awareness, humility, and deep thoughtfulness. The best pastors I have known have a wonderful sense of humor and proportion. These excellent pastors have a gift for knowing what they know and even more important for knowing what they don't know. Far more often than not their sermons are not about what you should believe but rather an invitation to enter into life more fully and deeply. Far too many religious leaders ostentatiously lacked these traits.
Even in denominational churches which have defined processes to support people seeking ordination, candidates are rarely assessed for their emotional and spiritual maturity. Instead, the ordination process focuses narrowly on formal credentials and academic records, and fails to delve into or help candidates develop their self-awareness and emotional intelligence.
Candidates for ordination are frequently unprepared for the complexities of pastoral leadership. And although many of these individuals are excellent human beings, they are inadequate leaders. They end up serving as placeholders, mostly inoffensive but also ineffective.
Some of the most effective pastors I experienced were second career folks. These leaders brought with them a wealth of experience and maturity that allowed them to lead with grace and sense of proportion. To the best of my knowledge, all but one of them has since left the church for other careers. The institution is simply not designed to support its best leaders; it wears them out and ultimately it displaces them. Too often the systems reward mediocre leaders precisely because they are neither controversial nor inspiring. They don't rock the boat.
(I want to just pause here for a moment and acknowledge that in far too many churches congregants often mistreat and even abuse their pastoral leadership. It's not uncommon for some members to treat pastors as if they are servants whose job is to do what they are told, rather than professionals who've spent years preparing for the role. I do not believe there is any justification for the mistreatment of ordained leaders.)
Failure of church communities to create dynamic spiritual life for their members
Although I am a non-believer, and I find the arguments of the new atheists incredibly persuasive, I believe there is such a thing as a spiritual life.
For me spirituality is mystical, ecstatic, and experiential. There are practices and techniques all around us which can deepen our spiritual life.
I've attended meditation services at the Krishna temple. I've participated in worship built around practices from the Iona Abbey or the Taize community. I have attended services at the Sikh temple, as well as prayer services at the local mosque. I have been guided through spiritual experiences by shamans.
At one point, I practiced a daily reading of the psalter, which involves reading a Psalm and reflecting on its meaning. Two very wise women introduced me to a way of reading the psalms that was incredibly meaningful. You read the Psalm three times, asking a different question each time.
- What line stands out to me most?
- What is the meaning of this Psalm?
- What is the invitation to me in this Psalm?
It's incredibly simple. Even the children can handle it with success. It is a way of creating a spiritual life which does not require any specific belief or dogma. As with guided meditation or other experiences, such techniques can be easily taught and shared so that people are able to grow and guide their own spiritual lives.
In my experience very few spiritual communities spend time teaching people how to have a spiritual life. Far too often, activities such as Bible studies are reduced to mere interpretation of the text rather than an invitation to grow personally in relation to it. Each of us can lead a meaningful spiritual life in relation to other lay persons without any need or pastoral or priestly guidance. Some of the most powerful spiritual experiences I had were led by thoughtful and caring pastors. Equally, some were created by the interaction with other laypersons bringing care and intention to the experience.
Far too few churches seem to trust their laypeople within their own spiritual lives. Instead they seem to want to spoon feed them meaning rather than let them discover it on their own.
Flocks with no shepherds
If you pay much attention to it, the general commentary on the decline of religious practice in the United States tends to bemoan and bewail it.
For myself, I cannot help but believe that, perhaps, the decline of religion is a good thing. Any honest reading of history will reveal that people commit atrocities in God's name with surprising and depressing regularity. And while I do not deny that many people do good deeds in God's name, I can't help but believe if we were to stack them on the scales that the bad might very well outweigh the good, by a significant portion.
Richard Dawkins, in his book the God delusion, argues that, even at its most benign, religion is nevertheless a toxic influence in society because it teaches us to accept without evidence and to make decisions without facts.
Although I have no proof of it, I believe that most people have a desire for some sort of meaningful spiritual life and membership in a vital community. At one point Americans found that in the church. Today we do not.
The lived experience of the church is one of an institution increasingly disconnected from the people it claims to serve.
There is no indication that these trends will change direction in the foreseeable future.
But I am not without hope.
I suspect that less church is good for society. And it is good for individuals. I believe it creates opportunities for us to create more authentic community, greater vibrancy in our spiritual practices, and more attention to the inherent worth and dignity of each human being. Spirituality does not require a belief in or a worship of God. Nor is it, as some believers assert, the worship of the human. Freed from dogmatism and the strictures of narrow belief, I believe we can become more authentically spiritual and develop more meaningful lives.
I'm not prepared to follow the model of Henry the Eighth and legally dissolve and then physically destroy the churches of America.
For the faithful who remain in the pews, I have no doubt that it feels like an unraveling. For those who are walking away, it is an exodus towards a promised land they cannot yet see. We have data about what is happening, and millions of stories about why it is happening. I do not believe that we are living through tragedy, I believe we are living through transition. Are we patient enough to see what emerges from our complex and sometimes contradictory selves?
As more and more Americans walk away from church, the question is “What comes next?”
