When Mark Chaves, in Congregations in America, looked at the most up-to-date data on the church, his focus was to map out what was happening in congregations. He defines a congregation as a social institution in which individuals who are not all religious specialists gather in physical proximity to one another, frequently and at regularly scheduled intervals, for activities and events with explicitly religious content and purpose, and in which there is continuity over time in the individuals who gather, the location of the gathering, and the nature of the activities and events at each gathering.[1] He also notes that the number of people in the U.S. who participate in a congregation has declined from 40% in the 1960s to 25% in the 1990s, and at the same time people declaring themselves to have no religion has risen from 3% in 1957 to 14% in 2000.[2] What he found that congregations do is mainly to traffic in ritual, knowledge, and beauty through the cultural activities of worship, education, and the arts. What they don’t do is a significant amount of charity or justice through social services or politics.[3]
Chaves also looks at Wuthnow’s lens of the liberal and conservative civic religious divide and argues that it is present in every denomination but not cleanly as both groups exist to some degree or another in each denomination. I believe this adds to the negation within our culture. But at a denominational level, it means that denominations are becoming less relevant because they themselves cannot point a clear path beyond the liberal versus conservative divide. What Chaves does find that is interesting is that when asked, 59% of congregations (containing 53% of the regular attendees) view themselves theologically as “more on the conservative side,” 11% (containing 10% of the people) as “more on the liberal side,” and 29% (containing 38% of the people) as “right in the middle.”[4]
Chaves then explains that even though the conservative side of the church appears to be growing while the liberal side is in decline, the growth does not outweigh the overall cultural change, which is that people in the U.S. are down on religious participation, stable on religious belief, and up on thinking about the meaning and purpose of life.[5] That means that the preaching being done in the Church today is, for the most part, only helping to maintain a declining, aging institutional church.
In his 2008 book, The American Church in Crisis, David Olson looks at the most recent data possible on the church in an effort to map out for all Christians in the U.S. a truthful picture of what is happening so that Christianity as a whole can begin to move in a better direction.[6] Olson’s numbers are disturbing as he compares 1990 data with 2006 data. In 1990, roughly 52 million Americans participated in church regularly. In 2006, roughly 52 million Americans participated in church regularly. From 1990 to 2006, the U.S. grew in population by a little over 91 million people, 70 million of whom are under age 17. There were a little over 39 million deaths for a net growth in population of about 52 million people. This means that as the nation grows, the church is not keeping up with the population growth or in essence is declining in percentage of the population participating.[7] This also means that the church is, for the most part, functioning outside of where our nation is primarily growing.
Olson also deals with the reality that twice as many people claim to go to church in polls, than actually do go to church weekly, based on worship attendance records from churches.[8] Olson divides the church into three groups — Catholics, Mainlines, and Evangelicals — and shows that from 1990 to 2006 all three parts of the church showed decline in worship attendance. The Catholics have seen the greatest decline, followed by the Mainline churches, with the smallest decline coming from the Evangelicals.[9] Olson contends that if Christianity in the U.S. is just to keep up with the population growth, all denominations combined need to be planting 2900 more churches a year than we do now as a religion.[10] This also means that not only is the population growth outpacing the growth in the church, but also church attendance is declining, which implies that preaching in the church is not doing what it is intended to do along with other aspects of what churches are supposed to do and be.[11]
Anthony Robinson talks in Transforming Congregational Culture about five changes that the church needs to deal with in order to move forward. Most of these changes occurred in the U.S. during the 1960s. The first change was away from believing that attending church was an obligation. Church, public society, and government once supported going to church as the right thing to do for any good law-abiding citizen. What changed was a shift to motivation over obligation. People want to see the value or meaning in church first or they won’t come.[12]
The second change was a shattering of the trust society placed in the church. In the 1960s, people’s problems suddenly seemed deeper and darker than a simple set of rights and wrongs could express or control. Key social events shattered our confidence, such as the Vietnam conflict, the assassinations of Kennedy and King, and the civil rights and equal rights struggles. People started coming to church for healing, hope, and salvation for themselves and their families.[13]
The third change was from Christianity being pretty much the only religion acknowledged in the nation to a new influx of religions from all over the world. The key change was the shift in immigration laws that happened in the late 1960s, so that U.S. immigration moved away from European and Scandinavian countries to Asian, Middle-Eastern, and South American countries.[14]
The fourth change was that in the nineteenth century, mainline churches had wed themselves to the liberalism of modernity as seen in these values: reason, individual and human self-sufficiency, optimism, and a strong belief in progress, all of which came into doubt with the rise of post-modern critics of those values and the disillusionment in the country over the failure of many of the attempted cultural revolutions of the 1960s.[15]
Finally, churches assumed that they would always be relevant, important, and prominent in place. As a result, they came to believe that they could ignore the world changing around them and keep doing things the way they were taught to do them in the past. Unfortunately, society moved at an exponentially increasing rate of change in every aspect of people’s lives, leaving the church in the past looking very dated and irrelevant.[16] These five challenges combine to illustrate that the church’s preaching has, for the most part, been irrelevant, unable to keep up with the changes in our society in a meaningful way, and now we are at a place of crisis.
[1] Mark Chaves, Congregations in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 1–2.
[2] Ibid., 3.
[3] Ibid., 14.
[4] Ibid., 28.
[5] Ibid., 35.
[6] David T. Olson, The American Church in Crisis (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2008), 17.
[7] Ibid., 35–36.
[8] Ibid., 28.
[9] Ibid., 36.
[10] Ibid., 120.
[11] Olson points out some other interesting things as well. First, churches of 1–49 members are growing as well as churches of 1000 plus members. Every other sized church is shrinking. Second, the higher the percentage of females to males, the faster the church is likely to decline. Churches with over 50% males are growing. Third, rural, small and large town churches are shrinking, suburban churches are showing zero growth or decline, and urban churches showing a slight growth based on zip code location. Finally, based on 1999 census data, churches in neighborhoods with household incomes over $50,000 a year are growing, and churches in neighborhoods with a yearly household income of less than $50,000 are shrinking. (Ibid., 82–89).
[12] Anthony B. Robinson, Transforming Congregational Structure (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 2003), 4.
[13] Ibid., 5.
[14] Ibid., 6.
[15] Ibid., 8.
[16] Ibid., 10.
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