Changing the Narrative: From Decline to Expectation
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Talk of church decline is commonplace. In some circles, decline is almost taken as a given. After all, in the West we have seen this trend for over half a century. Is the church’s fate simply to fade into irrelevance or even extinction? Have the cultured despisers of Christianity been right all along? There are numerous reasons to think not. Theologically, the narrative of inexorable decline is unscriptural and unfaithful. From a statistical standpoint, moreover, we may have reason to adjust our narrative.
In 2019, the Pew Research Center published a piece called “In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace.” Telephone surveys indicated that around 65% of American adults identified as Christian, a decline of 12% over a decade. Over the same period, the percentage of people who identified as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular” had risen from 17% to 26%. As one would expect, religious attendance declined alongside Christian affiliation. “In 2009, regular worship attenders (those who attend religious services at least once or twice a month) outnumbered those who attend services only occasionally or not at all by a 52%-to-47% margin. Today those figures are reversed; more Americans now say they attend religious services a few times a year or less (54%) than say they attend at least monthly (45%).” The decline applied to both Protestants and Roman Catholics. (The article did not mention other traditions.)
Jim Davis and Michael Graham (with Ryan P. Burge) documented these trends in their book The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? (Zondervan 2023, reviewed here).” More people,” they wrote, “have left the church in the last twenty-five years than all the new people who became Christians from the First Great Awakening, Second Great Awakening, and Billy Graham crusades combined. Adding to the alarm is the fact that this phenomenon has rapidly increased since the mid-1990s.” Is it curtains, then, for the American church?
I first became aware of the narrative of decline during seminary in the mid-1990s. We knew things were headed in the wrong direction, but the rapid decline was just beginning. Since then the concern has only intensified. By the time I began full-time teaching in 2006, a chorus of voices was championing the importance of reaching the Young People, by which they meant millennials. It was often unclear whether this preoccupation with the Young People was motivated by a concern for the salvation of their souls or the salvation of collapsing denominations. The millennial generation is huge…. If only they would come to church we could get back to our post-war glory days. We were told repeatedly that we must liberalize, particularly on human sexuality, if we were to reach the Young People. Yet while all the mainline denominations have moved in increasingly progressive directions, none has reversed its decline. The downward spiral has long appeared inexorable.
A more thorough reading of the data suggests that the narrative of universal decline is a bit too simplistic. While the Southern Baptist Convention has suffered losses likely due to a few public scandals, evangelicalism as a whole seems to be holding its own. In his book 20 Myths About Religion and Politics in America (Fortress 2022), Ryan Burge writes,
Yet when I read those stories and look at the data, I just can’t help but think that for many critics of evangelicalism, the decline of the movement is nothing more than wishful thinking. No matter which dataset I use or how I define “evangelical,” I am unable to find strong and consistent evidence that evangelicals are a less significant part of the population today than they were forty years ago.
This doesn’t mean, however, that every evangelical group is growing. The growth is mainly among non-denominational churches. Burge reports that in 1972, about 3% of the U.S. population was non-denominational. That number is now 13%, up from 7.5% in 2004. He writes, “[N]on-denominational Protestants are gaining new members hand over fist, while other denominations are losing folks by the tens of thousands.” Evangelical, non-denominational churches are ascendent, at least in our current cultural moment.
Again, however, that assessment is a bit too simplistic. While the total number of Roman Catholics across the country is not growing, the number of Hispanic Catholics is. Burge reports that both the Anglican Church in North America and the Presbyterian Church in America have experienced marginal growth. From the late 1970s to 2019, the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination, experienced steady growth. It is unclear why numbers began to drop in 2019, but like other denominations it has suffered losses since the pandemic. An exception to pandemic losses has been the Orthodox Church. According to the National Catholic Register, only about half of Orthodox Churches in the U.S. provided remote options during the pandemic, while the number among other churches was 75%. This did hurt participation in Orthodox services during the pandemic, but by 2023, Orthodox churches had returned to pre-COVID numbers, while the national average was still down by 8%. Decline and growth in American Christianity, then, is complex, but the overall trend has been one of decline.
Now the Pew headline tells a different story than it did a few years ago: “Decline of Christianity in the U.S. Has Slowed, May Have Leveled Off.” In 2023-24, about 62% of U.S. adults identified as Christian, a decline of 16% since 2007. “But for the last five years, between 2019 and 2024, the Christian share of the adult population has been relatively stable, hovering between 60% and 64%. The 62% figure in the new Religious Landscape Study is smack in the middle of that recent range.” A five-year trend is no glitch. It doesn’t mean we’re experiencing revival, but we’re holding our own.
The recent shift in the trajectory of American Christianity indicates that trends can be unpredictable. The wave of the present is not always the wave of the future. Lately I have developed an ever-deeper conviction that Christians should not simply shrug at the narrative of decline, as if there is nothing we can do. We can do a great deal. I’ll offer a few suggestions here:
Pray. Specifically, pray for the salvation of the lost, the faithfulness of the church, and her renewal. Pray that God will turn hearts of stone to hearts of flesh. Identify two or three people whom you will bring before God each day and pray for their salvation.
Repent. The U.S. church has a mixed track record. We’ve done some great things. We’ve done some not-so-great things. We’ve done some terrible things. Among our sins are self-reliance, pride, heresy, and complacency. Repentance carries great spiritual power. “My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise” (Ps 51:17).
Evangelize. We can sow the gospel first in our families, then to friends, coworkers, and social-media contacts. There are people who are waiting for us to invite them to accept Christ. My pastors have begun to ask at the end of each worship service if anyone wishes to accept Christ. Sometimes there is no one, but more often than one might think, someone comes forward. Just last week a young woman gave her life to Christ. Then, emboldened by her witness, a young man did as well. The invitation makes a difference.
Create cultures of expectation. I cribbed this idea from my friend Randy Clark. What do we expect of God in our churches? Do we expect him to move with power? Do we expect lives to change? Do we expect to be transformed? In some churches, it seems there is no expectation of God at all. But a God who does nothing, who leaves us just as we are, is not the God revealed to us in Scripture.
The church will not die. It cannot die because it is established by Christ and animated by the work of the Holy Spirit. As Paul writes,
Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit (Eph 2:19-22).
If we really believe this, we need to change the narrative from decline to expectation. Yes, the numbers in the church will ebb and flow, but Christ is eternal, and therefore no power can ultimately prevail against his body. He has not given up on us. Let’s not give up on him.
David F. Watson is Lead Editor of Firebrand. He serves as Academic Dean and Professor of New Testament at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio.