The Great Dechurching
In a wide ranging conversation, founding friend David French takes over the reins for Curtis Chang and discusses the new book, The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? by Jim Davis, Michael Graham, and Ryan Burge. David and coauthor Graham discuss all the reasons for “the great dechurching” with a particular emphasis on the more surprising results, as well as the difficulty reversing the decline in church attendance.
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The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? by Jim Davis, Michael Graham, and Ryan Burge
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Cue the eye roll. Once again we hear the “church” laying the entire blame for leaving on those who have left.
Every study I’ve seen concerning “de-churching” all come to the same tired, trite conclusions: it’s all the leavers’ fault. They’re idolatrous in their priorities, they make bad choices, their priorities are all screwed up, they have fallen into the wrong “habits”.
How very convenient for the churched to self-righteously excuse themselves from any responsibility for the self-destruction of American Churchianity.
Even the “habit” or “scandal” reasons given by respondents for leaving I feel are nothing but window dressing covering the true reason for the disintegration of formal churches in the US.
What de-churched people are really saying, and it what is just below the surface of the survey results, is they are suffering from the disappearance of any sense of community that the church used to represent.
You think not going to church is a simple act of bad habits? When did we ever fall for the lie that church is supposed to be a habit? When have we fallen victim to the notion that we judge spiritual health because we go to a meeting? The formal church was never meant by our Lord to be a social group that provides the same benefits as belonging to a bowling club.
The real reason a parent would rather go to a child’s’ sporting event than a church meeting? They find a better, more identifiable, and more supportive group of people gathering for a soccer game that they ever find sitting in a pew and listening to a lecture once a week.
The real reason someone would choose spiritual abuse and scandal as a reason to separate? Everyone they know in that organization perpetuates the harm by closing ranks against them and letting them know that objectors and questioners are not welcome in that environment.
Maybe the next study you commission could start by studying the log sticking out of the church’s eye and stop focusing so much on the spec in the leaver’s eye.
But, what do I know? I read the Atlantic…
Speaking as an Episocpalian, firmly in the mainline Protestant tradition, I would love to hear about the different dynamics in dechurching between Evangelical and mainline churches, and what the traditions should learn from each other when trying to grow.
In my more progressive mainline circles, I often hear that the church needs to be more engaged with the world and in relevant issues (i.e. social justice) and to be accepting of LGBT people. I can see some cases where that’s true: thanks in large part to a fantastic campus ministry program, four college students were baptized at our church last Easter (a huge number considering we’re a small church with <100 attendees each Sunday), and three out of four of them are LGBT. LGBT acceptance was a make-or-break point at getting them into the church and keeping a variety of other students at the campus ministry who would otherwise have de-churched.
But talking to older members of the congregation, our church was dramatically larger twenty years ago, and the pastor then was very careful not to give any indication of his politics. It's not like our numbers have surged as our pastors have decided to directly talk about issues of social justice from the pulpit, quite the opposite. Older members of the congregation seem to say it's more of a classic "de-churching" story of people getting out of the churchgoing habit that the podcast episode describes. It seems like our church more than anything just needs more outreach and community engagement, and I've been very happy to hear our priest talk in Vestry (church board) meetings about how we need to get out of our Episcopalian comfort zone and get better at evangelizing.
Taking it as a given that evangelicals and mainline Protestants are just going to disagree about some doctrinal issues, such as gay marriage, I would love to hear a conversation about what the different traditions can learn from each other as they try to grow. I definitely see things in my church where I hope we learn from the evangelicals, and I would like to hear that fleshed out.