The Myth of the Dying Church

CHAPTER 1

IS CHICKEN LITTLE RIGHT?

Poor Chicken Little.

She freaked out about nearly everything and cried constantly about the apocalyptic doom that was going to rain down upon everyone’s heads, literally.¹ But in reality, the sky wasn’t falling at all. It was just an acorn submitting to the everyday laws of gravity and landing on Chicken Little’s soft cranial palate that caused her hysteria. Of course, she doesn’t keep the freak-out to herself. And it spreads like a cold, as freak-outs are inclined to do.

On her way to warn the king about this terrible news, she bumps into all her rhyming-named woodland friends—Foxy Loxy, Turkey Lurkey, Henny Penny, Goosey Loosey, and the rest of the crew—and alerts them of the coming Armageddon. They take her pronouncement unquestionably as truth and all join in the hysterics, spreading the disconcerting news to the whole village.

This famous folktale has been told from generation to generations across many countries for well over a hundred and fifty years because it speaks to a global truth. Bad news, even when false, travels fast. Of course, this story has a very direct correlation to the reported steep decline and impending demise of the Christian church. On this topic there are far too many Chicken Littles today, and their tale of the falling-acorn-turned-Armageddon has unfortunately become unquestioned and indisputable fact as they claim the following for all to hear and fear:

Christianity is shrinking, and most are joining the ranks of the nones, especially the young people. Buses leaving hourly. Commence the hysteria.

Nearly everyone has played along, basing their opinions on a few news reports and claims from people who seem like authorities and make their statements with absolute confidence. Few take the time to dig further into the story and consult multiple sources in order to determine whether such news holds up. However, this is what detectives do—and what all good reporters once did—but most people today don’t have the time or resources to do such deep digging for themselves. That is precisely why I wrote this book. I wanted to do the digging and look at a vast array of deeply informed academic sources so I could explain the truth of the situation in clear and simple ways to help Christians, church staff, journalists, and thought leaders understand the important angles and nuances of the bigger picture.

As we will see, the facts don’t support the doom-and-gloom story the news media and many Christian leaders are reporting. There are, indeed, positive sides to the story if one reads beyond the headlines and summaries; many are very positive. An absolute wealth of information is available that tells a whole different story.

But before we address the important question of what’s true about Christianity today, we must look at what the Chicken Littles have been saying. Their tales of an impending demise of the church come in two forms: general and specific.

The general claim made is that Christianity has been declining dramatically over the last decade, with people simply losing interest in it and going elsewhere. This storyline is featured in endless publications with actual headlines such as these:

Sometime back in the late 2000s, while the US was experiencing a deep decline in new car sales, which initiated the massive federal bailout of the auto industry, a Christian leader² famously said that if current trends kept up, most churches would look exactly like these deserted, tumbleweed-strewn car lots that were gracing the front pages of nearly every newspaper. Rather than the choirs, worship teams, and raucous bustles of youth groups, we were told to expect the chirping of crickets and cobwebs within the wall of most churches. You can’t get any more “the sky is falling” than that, can you?

A book reviewer for the New York Times made this assertion with absolute confidence in 2000:

Visit a church at random next Sunday and you will probably encounter a few dozen people sprinkled thinly over a sanctuary that was built to accommodate hundreds or even thousands. The empty pews and white-haired congregants lend credence to those who argue that traditional religious worship is dying out.… But the traditional church… has failed to present religion in a style that the modern world could accept and understand—and has lost touch with the evangelistic impulse that built the great congregations in the first place. To put it in business terms, the traditional church has failed to protect its franchise and its market share.³

This is a very stark picture indeed, the church on its last leg, gasping out its final breath. Someone call for last rites.

Christian Smith, one of the world’s leading sociologists of religion, examines growth and belief trends in the Christian church, and he has been long concerned about this false hysteria. He told of one whopper he saw some years ago in an advertisement in a prominent Christian magazine. The ad was for a major evangelical leadership conference, and it proclaimed that Christianity in America wouldn’t survive another decade unless we did something now. Interestingly enough, attending that conference was exactly what the church needed to do now. How about that for motivation? “Attend this conference and save Christianity in our nation, or live with the guilt that you allowed it to shrivel up and die.” That was basically the message being communicated. Smith, in good fun, hoped that someone had let God know of this terrible future.⁴ Let us note that that supposed decade of doom has now past, and here we still are.

No one should take these kinds of claims seriously. My church is still around, and the pews are still crowded. My friends’ churches still exist. I pass churches on a daily basis that have loads of cars in their parking lots on Sunday mornings and weeknight evenings.

Yes, some churches are struggling, and even declining. Others are aging and unable to connect with younger generations, and still others have faced crises with church staff and church splits. But these are not due to a “Christian recession” but simply because of issues within those particular churches, which is an important distinction. I’ll bet a week’s worth of lunch money that your church is chugging along well. The odds are totally in my favor. We all need to be more informed to know the truth in this area. Christians are born again, but we shouldn’t act like we were born yesterday.

The other Chicken Little narrative is more specific, concerning our own children and their friends. It claims some of them—if not most of them—are highly unlikely to hang on to their faith as they get older. Try as you might, good and faithful Christian parents, but your efforts to pass on your faith to your children are going to fail. Countless blog articles and books published by Christian leaders espouse this, often based on their own research. Here are examples:

Seriously? A black hole? A sucking, gaping hole of nothingness that pulls everything around it into utter darkness? Please! Chicken Little would be green with envy at such dramatics. To make it all worse, statements regarding a supposed decline of Christianity are usually preceded with the confident admission, “As we all know, Christianity in our nation is…” Surely you can easily name similar examples that have gotten your attention and caused you no small amount of angst. Unfortunately they are not hard to find.

At the risk of sounding irreverent, God must be totally freaking out over this news. For the first time since Pentecost, His gospel—not to mention the unquenchable Holy Spirit—seems to be failing to penetrate an entire generation. Christ’s church is like a 2008 pre-bailout car lot! Empty pews, with only a smattering of white-haired congregants! The youth, a black hole!

As we will see in chapter 11, we must realize that buying this terribly bad news has huge implications for our understanding of and confidence in how God actually works through the history of His church. Believing that the church is dying impacts how we comprehend the beauty of His irresistible grace and the power of His hand to reach into our communities, not to mention His sovereignty. That hand is unspeakably more powerful than these headlines and the supposed statistics behind them allow for. The Holy Spirit is not walking with a limp or asleep at the wheel.

Professor Bradley R. E. Wright, a noted sociologist at the University of Connecticut—and an evangelical Christian—has studied faith trends among old and young adults over the generations and categorically rejects the Chicken Little scenario. He says it’s easy to refute these dire predictions and put the entire situation into perspective by simply looking at recent spiritual giants and their impact on recent generations.

Like Professor Wright, I’m a child of the 1970s, and our generation early on was not a group of thriving Christian stalwarts, by any measure. The generation before us? The hippies. There were all turning on, tuning in, and dropping out, as Timothy Leary famously put it. They didn’t inspire any confidence in the future from their own parents or nearly any other adults. If these kids paid any attention to Jesus at all, He was a “groovy cat” who drifted from place to place, with His robe, long hair, and leather sandals, begging for food and talking about peace, love, and understanding. The original hippie. There was every reason to be concerned about the future of the church, if not society as whole, in the hands of this generation.

But as this generation entered early adulthood, thousands of them began to lead one of the largest periods of growth in evangelical history and one of the most powerful moves of God in the past one hundred years: the Jesus movement, of which I’m a very grateful beneficiary. Many of these shaggy-haired, torn jeans–wearing, sandal-shod, rock ’n’ roll–playing young people grew to be extremely influential pastors who have preached God’s Word with great clarity and truthfulness. They ended up calling people to an obedient discipleship, teaching evangelism, and leading explosively growing churches. Greg Laurie, Rick Warren, and Franklin Graham are but three representative examples. There are hundreds more. This was the generation that initiated the phenomenon of the megachurch, which we will examine later. They ushered in the remarkably influential contemporary Christian music scene through artists such as Larry Norman, Love Song, Phil Keaggy, Keith Green, Randy Stonehill, 2nd Chapter of Acts, Resurrection Band, Petra, and Mustard Seed Faith, just to name a few.

More extremely effectual leaders continued to come along after them, and the church continues to grow in important sectors today. The church establishment of the early 1960s never would have put a plug nickel on that shaggy bunch of youngsters, and they were proven wrong. Dramatically so! God is in the business of doing remarkable things in confounding ways with very unlikely people.

It is a sociological truism that what one generation is today in its youth is often not what it grows up to be. As an interesting aside, do the math on the BMW-driving yuppies, 1980s DINKs, and the Reagan generation who came to dominate the American scene. Hint: They were in their teens during the late 1960s and early ’70s. In the history of mankind, it is the rare generation of adults who thought the next generation of youth was set to usher in a brighter future of faith, fidelity, and fortune. Today is no different. “Kids these days” is an ancient and ever-present phrase representing the uneasiness and anxiety of the “get off my lawn” adults.

Over the coming chapters, we will explore what the best and larger body of serious research says about the state of the church today. It’s a remarkable story, and one that is actually much more exciting and hopeful than I expected to find when I started the research for this book.