> Many of our nation’s churches can no longer afford to maintain their structures—6,000 to 10,000 churches die each year in America—and that number will likely grow... Closure and adaptive reuse often seems like the simplest and most responsible path. Many houses of worship sit on prime real estate, often in the center of towns or cities, where inventory is low... A church building is more than just walls and windows; it is also a sacred vessel that stores generations of religious memories... “We wanted to transform the church into a place that would draw people who might not otherwise come, and in Asheville, we’ve seen it break down stereotypes of what the church is,” Duggins said... This relatively small organization can only do so much to turn the tide of congregational death in America. Missional Wisdom has shifted its focus from one-off projects to publishing books, conducting seminars, and consulting with struggling churches.
Sociologists Peter Berger and Grace Davie report that “most sociologists of religion now agree” that the secularization thesis—that religion declines as a society becomes more modern—“ has been empirically shown to be false.”
Most striking of all are the demographic studies that predict that it is not religious populations but secular ones that are in long-term decline. The April 2015 Pew study projects that the percentage of atheists, agnostics, and the religiously unaffiliated will slowly but steadily decline, from 16.4 percent of the world’s population today to 13.2 percent forty years from now. University of London professor Eric Kaufmann, in his book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, speaks of “the crisis of secularism” and argues that the shrinkage of secularism and liberal religion is inevitable.
That seems at odds to the decline of religion across Europe.
UK is now majority atheist, and Ireland once devoutly catholic is far more secular than it was. A majority voted to end the ban on abortion in Ireland only this year. So I am baffled at what "crisis of secularism" Kaufman is imagining.
At least in America, I wonder how studies like this account for people lying about their religion. Can't tell you how many people I've met that will tell you they are Christian, even though they never go to church or otherwise participate in religious activities. I think a lot of people just like to fit in, because to admit that you are an atheist is to immediately invite condemnation and ridicule.
I put forth that if the premise of that movie were true, why would we have technology advancement today? Why not continuous regression of knowledge. I will also note of the past, great men of both science and faith, like James Clerk Maxwell.
> Sociologists Peter Berger and Grace Davie report that “most sociologists of religion now agree” that the secularization thesis—that religion declines as a society becomes more modern—“ has been empirically shown to be false.”
This statement is directly copied from page 24 of 'Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World' by Timothy Keller [0]. I make no judgement of how true/false this is.
> Most striking of all are the demographic studies that predict that it is not religious populations but secular ones that are in long-term decline. The April 2015 Pew study projects that the percentage of atheists, agnostics, and the religiously unaffiliated will slowly but steadily decline, from 16.4 percent of the world’s population today to 13.2 percent forty years from now.
The citation for this study is [1]. tl;dr on it is that the global population is growing much faster than atheists are growing. But the number of atheists aren't shrinking.
I lived in a church converted to condos in South Boston for a few years. The Catholic Church sold the property to developers to pay for an $85 million sex abuse settlement. When Boston had that one winter where we got 2 feet of snow every other day for a month and a half the ice dams were so bad it basically rained inside every unit for the entire month of February. We all lost everything. It turns out a 100+ year old building with a steeply pitched slate roof is almost impossible to repair in the dead of winter on short notice.
Buildings like this seem interesting and like they have character but I would never live in a converted church again.
It's important to note that Americans are far more religious than adults in other wealthy nations [0] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/07/31/americans-ar.... Even with this decline, the US remains a Christian nation. The special flavor of Christianity in the US is quite adaptive, so I have little doubt that the faith itself will endure.
It probably says something about the state of things that from this statement I genuinely can't tell which school of thought you're coming from, since each one says this about the others.
I have a lot of doubt. Sure, in some parts of the country, but in most parts religion is playing a significantly smaller part in people's lives with every generation.
Yes, the US scores much higher in religiosity ... when you use self-reported numbers. But it turns out a lot of Americans lie about church attendance, at least. If you survey how many butts are in the pews on Sunday and compare that to the population of a city and weight it by how often people say they go to church, there is a nearly a 2:1 discrepancy.
This isn't where I first read that statistic, but it is the first Google search that seems credible.
But the self-reporting bias isn't unique to America. There are plenty of people in other parts of the world who say they belong to a religion but don't actually participate in religious activities with any regularity. It depends on the religion, of course, but at least with Christianity there's no fundamental contradiction in going to church only once or twice a year and still calling yourself a believer.
If there's a similar bias in other parts of the world, the statistics still leave the U.S. with a higher overall religiosity.
I think something a lot of people tend to look over is that a lot of latin americans are religious and they so happen to be the largest group of people coming into the country.
When you look at care for the poor, a great many Christians give to charities. The driving force behind many of the social programs was Christians. There are two issues, at least, today. First, there are many people who call themselves Christians that aren't. This isn't surprising. Jesus called it when he said, "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven." They probably won't actually due the will of the Father. Second, for many actual Christians, Caesar is a poor provider for the poor.
It appears the large denominational churches are closing while nondenominational churches are growing quickly. You can't put new wine in old wine-skins.
I'm not sure the trend will hold. This is all anecdotal, but new non-denominational churches in my area seem to start more frequently and then die more frequently than mainline establishments, it seems that since many of them rent instead of own their churches, and leadership isn't necessarily restricted to those with training and education in running a ministry, they're more likely to flounder long-term. Considering that the numbers are for total number congregations, I don't think that the discrepancy between worshippers is actually as harsh as its made out to be, and if it is, I think we'll actually see a trend back towards more community-oriented mainline or even catholicism as worshippers get disillusioned by the drama / lack of structure that a larger portion of non-denoms undeniably struggle with.
But this is based on just infrequent personal experiences with like 4 different non-denoms in the suburban South, ranging from "conference room at 2 star airport hotel" to "megachurch stadium so full we watched the service in an overflow room in the same venue". In all cases the people who invited me did not stay very long as attendees. I may be dramatically underestimating their popularity/longevity in more rural spots though.
The church I attend these days is doing this sort of "invite the community in during the week" approach, and being fairly successful at it, from what I can tell. There are a lot of dynamics going on there; I don't think it'd work everywhere. But definitely there's something to the idea, and worth bringing up in your congregational context if collapse is in the offing.
There's something poignant about the notion that a church, faced with "death", may find new life by welcoming the local community... which seems to me to be the raison d'etre for a church in the first place.
a) People are becoming less religious
b) People are leaving smaller churches for much larger churches that are non-denominational.
Smaller churches are more conservative and more political, people seem to be burned out on politics and don't really want it as something in their face on Sunday. You couple that with natural shifts in demographics and that essentially explains a lot of what is happening. I suspect once the millennial generation has more kids, church going will tick back up.
According to recent studies, neither of those are really happening. "Secularization theory" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secularization#Current_issues_...) is the current sociological term for (a) and it is pretty well established that while there may be regional fluctuation in the numbers of religious people, at a global level, religiosity is not in decline.
As for (b), at least in the US, it is the large mainline denominations that are in steep decline and the smaller, more theologically conservative denominations that are growing most rapidly. Mega-churches are a phenomenon, but not one that falls easily into either of the above categories because they can range all the way from progressive to prosperity gospel to theologically conservative and nearly anything in between.
It's hardly conclusive, but I did an analysis using data from the General Social Survey[1] last year for a stats class, and found a downward trend in "religiosity"[2] in America between 1974 (or so) and 2014 (or so).
Granted, that's only looking at America, not world-wide, but at least here in the US there seems to be some support for a general decline in the importance of religion.
[2]: a synthetic metric based on multiple questions on the survey which related to religion - some like "how frequently do you attend a religious service", "how important do you consider religion to be in your life", etc., etc.
c) "yoloculture" (as I like to call it) greatly emphasis the self as the key virtue, hence the millennial and younger can't be bothered sacrificing "Sunday Funday" to attend an inconvenient service at 9 in the morning.
Simultaneously, The rock concert megachurches with cult of personality pastors and have Starbucks inside them with much later start times and emphasize a message of self empowerment with gospel-y sounding words, however, seem to be thriving.
The only thing more constant than the darned kids is people complaining about the darned kids.
"The world is passing through troublous times. The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they knew everything, and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for the girls, they are forward, immodest and unladylike in speech, behavior and dress."
Ironically, this is exactly the opposite path my family (my wife and three kids) have taken. We left a large evangelical church for a small progressive (UCC) church.
I think you're an outlier. Obviously I don't have a dataset, just my observation, but I've seen the "my father went to this church, so I'm going to go there too" die off. Now people will go to a larger church, especially younger people, because they can meet people their age. If you go to a small community church, you'll quickly find there might be one person your age, if at all, if you're in your 20s-30s.
Now bigger churches do singles groups, etc. Zapping youth away from smaller churches effectively makes them unable to grow in the future, and their demographic target begins to die off or drop out. Church is very social, so the less people that go to the church that you know, the less likely you are to stick to it. It's very easy for a larger church to begin killing off smaller ones. It takes time, I believe this non-denominational /big church trend started 10 or so years ago...and is probably just now having a very noticeable statistical impact.
Obviously, this could be regional as well, and we can't dismiss that people have become less religious in the traditional sense.
Same; the church we are at now is an ecumenical affiliate of a Baptist group and a Presbyterian group. Very progressive. Growing fairly rapidly too right now, mostly people without grey hair; lots of toddlers and preschoolers.
> Smaller churches are more conservative and more political,
You sure that generalization holds well enough to be useful?
Personally speaking, I've attended services at small churches of both political alignments. (Ranging from strongly liberal/socialist all the way to the exact opposite. I can think of at least one of each in easy walking distance.)
> People are leaving smaller churches
I think this is undoubtedly true, at least in my neck of the woods. Most of the original development around here was prior to cars being commonplace, when there was a strong motivation to having a church in easy walking distance. (Especially true given that people used to be at church far more often than now.)
These days, easier access to transport (energy) means there's much less need for geographical proximity. And this, in turn, means much less need and ability to support smaller churches. (So we've also seen a number of churches converted to condos, etc.)
I think it would be more accurate to say that small churches are free to express more extreme political alignments, both conservative and liberal.
Large churches have a lot of diversity within the congregation, making it difficult for the senior pastor to steer the whole community in a single direction. This would make them more moderate on average. They also have to worry about legalities such as maintaining a tax-exempt status, so they can't endorse a particular party or candidate too strongly.
Readit News
UK is now majority atheist, and Ireland once devoutly catholic is far more secular than it was. A majority voted to end the ban on abortion in Ireland only this year. So I am baffled at what "crisis of secularism" Kaufman is imagining.
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This statement is directly copied from page 24 of 'Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World' by Timothy Keller [0]. I make no judgement of how true/false this is.
> Most striking of all are the demographic studies that predict that it is not religious populations but secular ones that are in long-term decline. The April 2015 Pew study projects that the percentage of atheists, agnostics, and the religiously unaffiliated will slowly but steadily decline, from 16.4 percent of the world’s population today to 13.2 percent forty years from now.
The citation for this study is [1]. tl;dr on it is that the global population is growing much faster than atheists are growing. But the number of atheists aren't shrinking.
[0]: https://books.google.com/books?id=kzNODwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA24&pg=P... [1]: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/07/why-people-w...
In fact, a great part of it runs counter to the actual teachings of Christ.
Dead Comment
This isn't where I first read that statistic, but it is the first Google search that seems credible.
https://churchleaders.com/pastors/pastor-articles/139575-7-s...
If there's a similar bias in other parts of the world, the statistics still leave the U.S. with a higher overall religiosity.
https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2017/september/how-ma...
But this is based on just infrequent personal experiences with like 4 different non-denoms in the suburban South, ranging from "conference room at 2 star airport hotel" to "megachurch stadium so full we watched the service in an overflow room in the same venue". In all cases the people who invited me did not stay very long as attendees. I may be dramatically underestimating their popularity/longevity in more rural spots though.
Deleted Comment
a) People are becoming less religious b) People are leaving smaller churches for much larger churches that are non-denominational.
Smaller churches are more conservative and more political, people seem to be burned out on politics and don't really want it as something in their face on Sunday. You couple that with natural shifts in demographics and that essentially explains a lot of what is happening. I suspect once the millennial generation has more kids, church going will tick back up.
As for (b), at least in the US, it is the large mainline denominations that are in steep decline and the smaller, more theologically conservative denominations that are growing most rapidly. Mega-churches are a phenomenon, but not one that falls easily into either of the above categories because they can range all the way from progressive to prosperity gospel to theologically conservative and nearly anything in between.
Granted, that's only looking at America, not world-wide, but at least here in the US there seems to be some support for a general decline in the importance of religion.
[1]: http://gss.norc.org/
[2]: a synthetic metric based on multiple questions on the survey which related to religion - some like "how frequently do you attend a religious service", "how important do you consider religion to be in your life", etc., etc.
Simultaneously, The rock concert megachurches with cult of personality pastors and have Starbucks inside them with much later start times and emphasize a message of self empowerment with gospel-y sounding words, however, seem to be thriving.
"The world is passing through troublous times. The young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint. They talk as if they knew everything, and what passes for wisdom with us is foolishness with them. As for the girls, they are forward, immodest and unladylike in speech, behavior and dress."
Peter the Hermit.
Dead Comment
Now bigger churches do singles groups, etc. Zapping youth away from smaller churches effectively makes them unable to grow in the future, and their demographic target begins to die off or drop out. Church is very social, so the less people that go to the church that you know, the less likely you are to stick to it. It's very easy for a larger church to begin killing off smaller ones. It takes time, I believe this non-denominational /big church trend started 10 or so years ago...and is probably just now having a very noticeable statistical impact.
Obviously, this could be regional as well, and we can't dismiss that people have become less religious in the traditional sense.
You sure that generalization holds well enough to be useful?
Personally speaking, I've attended services at small churches of both political alignments. (Ranging from strongly liberal/socialist all the way to the exact opposite. I can think of at least one of each in easy walking distance.)
> People are leaving smaller churches
I think this is undoubtedly true, at least in my neck of the woods. Most of the original development around here was prior to cars being commonplace, when there was a strong motivation to having a church in easy walking distance. (Especially true given that people used to be at church far more often than now.)
These days, easier access to transport (energy) means there's much less need for geographical proximity. And this, in turn, means much less need and ability to support smaller churches. (So we've also seen a number of churches converted to condos, etc.)
Large churches have a lot of diversity within the congregation, making it difficult for the senior pastor to steer the whole community in a single direction. This would make them more moderate on average. They also have to worry about legalities such as maintaining a tax-exempt status, so they can't endorse a particular party or candidate too strongly.