How Should the Church Respond to the “Great Dechurching?”

More adults do not attend church versus those who do for the first time in modern American history. We are living during the largest and fastest religious movement in American history—but instead of adding numbers to the church, people are leaving it. Over 40 million people have left the church in the last twenty-five years. If you are shocked by these numbers, you are not alone. They are from a recent book called The Great Dechurching: Who's Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? by Jim Davis and Michael Graham.

I started reading The Great Dechurching after a pastor and former seminarian friend recommended it. While he is Presbyterian and the book is written from an evangelical perspective, it shares statistics across denominations. People are walking away from basically every branch of Christianity.

There is more bad news. About 70% of the people who go to church attend only 10% of the churches. Most congregations in America are small. Because the average congregation has 100 or fewer attendees weekly, they are likely to continue closing their doors due to solvency if this trend continues. Frankly put, many churches are on life support. It's a slow, painful bleed trying to stay alive.

As a pastor, the decline makes me sad; as a mother, it makes me worried. The current generation of children being raised today is the first largely unchurched in American history. Parents likely know what they are walking away from when they dechurch; they were probably raised in church and have at least a vestige of a spiritual lifeline. Children do not have that same benefit. They are unchurched at a time of alarming anxiety, depression, bullying, and suicide rates. In other words, children are without a formal spiritual lifeline, and it shows.

Continue reading on Crosswalk.com. You'll discover the health benefits of regular worship attendance, multi-fold solutions to the dechurching problem, and real steps that you can take to safeguard the church's future!

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Stay tuned next week for another new article that highlights how to share your faith with kids! We've got this!