Everybody keeps telling me that the church is dying.
I keep wondering if we know what that means.
A few Sundays ago, we baptized a whole mess of folks in the church where I pastor. One of them was a teenage girl with whom our family has become close. We’re quite fond of her.
Her parents might identify as Christians, but they haven’t attended church or raised her with any faith practices. Then, one Sunday a couple of years back, the Spirit started stirring the waters. Out of the clear blue, she asked her parents if they could go to church together. Unwilling to give up their Sunday morning routine, they told her that there was a church that met at a school near their house and that if she liked she’d be more than welcome to ride her bike there on Sundays.
So she did.
And she loved it.
And kept coming back.
Week after week.
Before long, she became one of us and started to share life with us. Soon, she began to serve in our kids ministry, eventually becoming our junior volunteer of the year.
And so on and so forth. The interweaving of her life with ours was so seamless, so elegant, so, well, God. We all took pleasure in watching it unfold. A bona fide miracle, as far as I am concerned.
And so when we announced that we were going to baptize people on an upcoming Sunday, she turned to my daughter and asked if she should get baptized. When my daughter responded with an enthusiastic yes, she signed up.
I’ve never presided over a more emotional baptism. There was something about her story—the whole thing felt like a sovereign act of God. When she stepped into the tank, I took her hand and looked her in the eye and told her that I was very proud of her and that we all loved her and that the Spirit’s work in her life was just so evident and that it was my unspeakable privilege to baptize her in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
I said those words through tears. When she came up out of the water, I was sobbing my gratitude.
Oh, and do you know who was on the front row bearing witness to her baptism?
Her family.
We are told on good authority that the gates of hell shall not prevail against the church (Matt. 16:18). And we struggle to believe it—despite the fact that the one who uttered it is raised and revealed as Lord of all, despite the fact that all the promises are yes in him (2 Cor. 1:20), despite the fact that there are signs of life in our midst.
“Lord, I believe,” said the man whose child was in desperate need of deliverance, “Help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24 NKJV).
Those words could be ours.
It hasn’t been all roses for our church this year. Not by a long shot. We lost some key—and much beloved—staff members. Our congregation is small enough that those losses were and are felt across our community. The disruption has taken its toll on us. Some were jolted enough by the losses that they wandered away. Others remained but have become wary and guarded.
And it is hard, very hard, to pastor when people guard their hearts.
We have also watched families crumble. Families we love. Families we had come to rely on for leadership in our fledgling community. Marriages imploded. Kids ran away. Mental health deteriorated, unsteadying the ground underneath everyone’s feet. And we were often painfully helpless to do anything about it.
We have seen strife, too. Friends at odds for one reason or another—politics, theology, bad behavior, you name it—the dark winter winds of bitterness and estrangement blowing away the summer climes of love and joy. And yet again, despite our best efforts, we feel helpless.
God, the helplessness. It just kills me.
And there is more. The disruptions in the community combined with the slowdown in the national economy have meant a dip in our giving—not a huge dip, but enough that this too is a challenge. We have great hopes for the future of our church, but those hopes can seem tenuous when hardships stack up.
Add to all of that the great national trends that we’re all dealing with: widespread loss of public confidence in pastors and churches, the social and political polarizations that so easily tear through our communities, the individualism and consumerism that reduce people’s relationships with churches to mostly temporary arrangements of mutual convenience, not to mention the sheer lack of catechesis among even the most tenured believers among us, as I am routinely shocked at what people don’t know.
I could go on and on. So could you.
Everyone keeps telling me that the church is dying.
And maybe it is. Maybe it is.
But also, I wonder if we know what that means. Or if it means what we think it means. And I wonder just what whatever it means might mean for how we conduct our lives and our ministries.
Media vita in morte sumus—“In the midst of life, we are in death.” So begins the ancient Gregorian chant “De Morte,” the full text of which reads:
In the midst of life we are in death;
of whom may we seek for succor,
but of thee, O Lord,
who for our sins art justly displeased?
Yet, O Lord God, most holy, O Lord most mighty,
O holy and most merciful Savior,
deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death.[1]
The chant may strike us as morose. But I have to tell you, I find it consoling. Because it is true. Until the kingdom comes, life and death are coiled around one another, mutually coordinate as light and shadow.
Christian Wiman has captured this brilliantly in his poem “Every Riven Thing,” a profound meditation on the many ways in which the divine presence suffuses the whole of our created existence, “riven” as is it with so many fractures, so much falling apart. “God goes,” writes Wiman, “belonging to every riven thing he’s made.” This life we live, he reminds us, is split in pieces and ever falling, so it seems, into annihilation.
And yet—here is the gospel—for all that, it is not abandoned, at least not according to Wiman. Not according to “De Morte.” Not according to the New Testament. Although it may be part and parcel of our earthly pilgrimage, we have it on the authority of the Lord Jesus that we will not finally be delivered unto bitter death: “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:25–26 NIV).
The life that is God is too final, too near, too absolute for us to despair, even while we are seemingly in the grip of what John Donne calls “proud” death. “Even if I make my bed in hell,” said the psalmist, “you are there” (Ps. 139:8). Or as the Christian Holocaust survivor Cornelia ten Boom put it, “There is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still.” Although such claims may seem to be outlandish, we know they are true because of the sojourn of the Word from the heights to the very depths of our experience when, in the words of the Apostles’ Creed, “he descended into hell.”[2]
God goes belonging to every riven thing, says Christian Wiman. And our churches, too, are those riven things—riven things to whom God goes; to whom God has gone; to whom God will go. Yes, this side of the kingdom, life and death are mutually entwined, but life is final, and we can no more escape it than we can escape our existence.
Do we believe this?
The numbers, at any rate, are not encouraging. When Gallup first started measuring church membership in 1937, nearly three in four Americans were affiliated with a house of worship. That was a mark that held steady for several decades, until roughly the turn of the century, so that by 2021, for the first time, the number of Americans who identified themselves as members of any house of worship (i.e., a church, synagogue, or mosque) dropped to under 50 percent.[3]
It would be tempting and not altogether wrong to ascribe the drop in affiliation to the laissez-faire commitment habits of the emerging generations; after all, millennials and zoomers, ever eager to keep their options open, are more prone than others to mark “none” when asked to identify their religion. But the data suggest that Gen Xers, boomers, and traditionalists alike are experiencing similar trends.
Across the generations, folks are disaffiliating. And that is saying nothing of actual attendance at a house of worship, where the average weekly rate is under 30 percent.[4]
What gives?
Stephen Bullivant, for one, suggests that 9/11 and the rise of religious extremism are largely to blame.[5] When in the mid-twentieth century, the grave moral and existential threat to the planet (at least from a US point of view) was the rise of atheistic, militant communism, association with a worshiping body was seen as not just religiously but morally imperative. Bullivant argues that the tables have now turned. If religious extremism is to blame for much of the chaos of our age, then the choice for “none”—even when one was raised with strong religious faith—might be seen as morally prudent, a matter of fulfilling one’s duty to the global village.
I find the argument persuasive.
In my corner of the Christian world, which is predominantly traditional, conservative, and evangelical, the rise of Christian nationalism, so often a seedbed for religious extremism, presents several very serious threats to the ongoing vitality of our movement.
It is, to put it one way, a public relations problem for those of us who aren’t Christian nationalists. After all, what fair-minded secular person would risk joining a church if they believe doing so puts them on the wrong side of moral history? This means that a new part of the apologetic and evangelistic burden is making a distinction between this kind of evangelicalism and that kind of evangelicalism, showing that a yes for Jesus here does not mean an alliance with a grave threat to national and global security.
Alas, how rarely we get the opportunity to present that distinction to the seekers in our midst. Indeed, many of our own people are sorely tempted by the Christian nationalist cause. I am reminded of one seemingly wise sage who left our church because he needed to be somewhere that “preached the Kingdom and the Constitution.” I couldn’t believe my ears. The living God, and . . .? Surely this is the essence of idolatry, the recapitulation in our time of “the sin of Jeroboam” that led Israel into exile (see 1 Kings 12).
But there are many who, like him, are similarly persuaded. And they are leaving our churches. Sometimes in droves.
Everyone keeps telling me that the church is dying.
And maybe it is.
I’ve been reading some of Wendell Berry’s early works lately. In his landmark collection of essays, The Unsettling of America, which diagnoses our nation’s energy crisis, Berry, a longtime farmer, makes this observation:
The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. . . . It is alive itself. It is a grave, too, of course. Or a healthy soil is. It is full of dead animals and plants, bodies that have passed through other bodies. . . . Eventually this dead matter becomes soluble, available as food for plants, and life begins to rise up again, out of the soil into the light. Given only the health of the soil, nothing that dies is dead for very long. Within this powerful economy, it seems that death occurs only for the good of life.[6]
And then this, the insight we saw coming and could only hope he would make explicit:
And having followed the cycle around, we see that we have not only a description of the fundamental biological process, but also a metaphor of great beauty and power. It is impossible to contemplate the life of the soil for very long without seeing it as analogous to the life of the spirit. No less than the faithful of religion is the good farmer mindful of the persistence of life through death, the passage of energy through changing forms.[7]
How ever do we forget these things, I wonder? If death and resurrection are at the heart of our faith—the heart of the universe—there is simply no ground for despair, the brutal facts of our experience notwithstanding.
Like you, I read the headlines. Every week yields new reports of the church’s ineptitude, of ministers and ministries torpedoed by catastrophic moral failure, of entire denominations teetering on the brink of collapse, of pastors walking away from their ministries and churches closing their doors at an alarming rate.[8]
The signs of death are everywhere.
Everywhere.
But if the gospel is true, then surely we are compelled to believe that all this death is just so much peat and loam for the emergence of new life. Nothing that dies is dead for very long. The word of the cross and the resurrection of the Son of God hold forth amid the chorus of voices loudly proclaiming that this, at long last, is the end of the ekklesia.
Once again, Jesus says, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18). Either those words are true, or Jesus is not raised. Those are our options.
I, for one, have pushed all my chips to the middle of the table, betting on the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and the renewing power of the Holy Spirit. I’m hanging all my hope on God, doing what Benedict of Nursia implored: “Finally, never lose hope in God’s mercy.”[9]
And it helps me. Helps me in the middle of a year like the one my congregation has had, in the midst of a moment in American religious history like the one we’re in now. It helps me remember that, to paraphrase words attributed to Frederick Buechner, the worst day is not the last day, that death is never final, that in the economy of God nothing—not even death—is wasted, and that, as John Wesley is reported to have said, laying on his deathbed: Best of all is God is with us.
So yeah, everyone keeps telling me that the church is dying.
And maybe it is.
And maybe that doesn’t mean what we think it means.
Maybe it means that a great renewal is fomenting.
Maybe it means that resurrection is on the way.
It seems to me that our faith obliges us to believe these things—take the Nicene Creed, for example, which states that “we believe in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come”—even when all evidence is to the contrary. We live, after all, by faith and not by sight (2 Cor. 5:7), until such time as our faith is manifest as sight. Then we will no longer believe but see.
Augustine suggested in City of God that faith would finally give way to sight at the eschaton.[10] I believe that. But I also think we don’t need to wait that long. If we pay attention, we’ll see the signs of new life bursting forth right underneath our noses.
My congregation is part of a family of eight congregations here in Colorado Springs. Seventeen years ago, our founding senior pastor was removed for a very public moral failure. At the time of his dismissal, unbeknownst to most folks in our church, we were nearly $30 million in debt. A new senior pastor was called. One hundred days into his tenure, there was a shooting on our main campus on a Sunday morning that left two girls dead.
In debt up to our eyeballs, still reeling from the shock and embarrassment of a public scandal, and shaken to the core by an unprovoked and vicious act of violence, we were a church that was as good as dead.
And we baptized over six hundred people this year.
I’ve been part of this family of churches now for seven years or so. And I have heard this story told and retold too many times to count. I love it more each time. And what I love the most about it is this:
How undramatic the turnaround has been. It’s so undramatic that you can’t really tell where it began.
There were no clever initiatives. No new “strategies.” No growth campaigns.
Just steady faithfulness.
About ten years ago we made the decision to ground ourselves in a deeper way in the Great Tradition. We made the Nicene Creed our statement of faith, and started taking communion every week. We ditched topical preaching and embraced a lectio continua form of preaching, working our way slowly through books of the Bible over the course of each year, noticing the twists and turns of how God has been shaping an impossible salvation over the course of history. We gather on Sundays for worship and connect in homes and do our level best to care for the poor and vulnerable in our city.
This is Church 101, really.
And God is moving on it. In it. Through it. The best part of this is that no one can claim the turnaround. No one owns it. It’s God’s, not ours. We’re just grateful participants in this astonishing life that came out of death.
Everybody keeps telling me the church is dying.
And you know what?
It is.
It always is.
But the paschal mystery tells us that the living and the dying are wrapped around one another, that life comes through death and that death is just so much fodder for life, so that even when the church is dying—really dying—it is actually and right at that moment also beginning to live.
Because nothing that dies is dead for very long.
Because in the economy of God, death occurs only for the good of life.
I’m choosing to believe that.
[1] Episcopal Church, “The Commital,” in The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church: Together with the Psalter or Psalms of David according to the Use of the Episcopal Church (New York, NY: Church Hymnal Corporation, 1979), 484.
[2] Donne, “Death Be Not Proud,” in John Donne: The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith(New York, NY: Penguin Classics, 1996); Ten Boom in Kaylena Radcliff, “A War Story: ‘There Is No Pit So Deep God’s Love Is not Deeper Still,’” Christianity History 121 (2017): https://christianhistoryinstitute.org/magazine/article/there-is-no-pit-so-deep; and the Apostles’ Creed.
[3] See Jeffrey M. Jones, “US Church Membership Falls below Majority for First Time,” Gallup, March 29, 2021, https://news.gallup.com/poll/341963/church-membership-falls-below-majority-first-time.aspx.
[4] See Jones, “U.S. Church Attendance Still Lower than Pre-Pandemic,” Gallup, June 26, 2023, https://news.gallup.com/poll/507692/church-attendance-lower-pre-pandemic.aspx#:~:text=In%20the%20four%20years%20before,a%20May%201%2D24%20survey.
[5] See Bullivant, Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2022).
[6] Berry, “The Use of Energy,” in The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, 3rd ed. (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1996), 86.
[7] Berry, “Energy,” 86.
[8] Yonat Shimron, “Study: More Churches Closing than Opening,” Religion News Service, May 26, 2021, https://religionnews.com/2021/05/26/study-more-churches-closing-than-opening/.
[9] Benedict, The Rule of St. Benedict, 4:74.
[10] This is Augustine’s central point in chapter 29 of book 22. For example, he writes that “this vision is reserved for us as the reward of faith . . . in the future life, wherever we turn the spiritual eyes of our bodies we shall discern . . . the incorporeal God directing the whole universe” (Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson [New York, NY: Penguin, 2003], 1082 and 1086–87).