How things have changed in the local church (without really changing)
I spend most of my week as a congregational developer and strategist inside of a mainline denomination (the Louisiana Conference of the United Methodist Church to be exact). This means I help local churches, pastors, and their leadership understand what church health in our current moment looks like. As a Methodist, one of the things I have to come to terms with is our average congregation (in my AC) is fairly normal sized, and aging. Much of my work is also helping churches understand sustainability and stability of ministry.
I've found any church in the mainline (Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, or UCC) is having a vastly different conversation around growth and sustainability than churches in the free tradition (Baptist, Non-Denom, or Charismatic).
A bit of church size context.
The research behind the median sized congregation in the US is interesting. To some, they would say it is depressing, to around 65 Pre-Covid from a height of 137 in 2000. It is probably smaller now. I wouldn't be surprised if it's around 40.
For context, 70% of the United Methodist churches in Louisiana have less than 40 in average worship attendance. 90% of our churches are 125 or less on Sunday morning.
A small church is a normal sized church.
What I have been thinking about lately is the struggle many churches have to engage with younger people. And by younger, I mean most folks under 60 years old. But to give this idea a bit wider of a perspective, realize that the oldest person in Gen X are pushing 60. Among the churches I have spent the most research time in, they saw their highest attendance between 2006 - 2009.
I'm 43, the youngest birth year of Gen X.
That 2006 - 2009 date was when I was in my mid to late 20's. If my wife and I would have had children, that would put me in the middle of that valuable designator "young families" at the high attendance mark. Over the last few months, I have been thinking and having conversations with other pastors about this idea. It seems as though something began happening in the late 2000's where churches started struggling to adapt to a changing generational culture and began struggling to appeal to younger people.
It has only dropped more since then.
One of the ways I have been thinking through it, and communicating this with the churches I work at is to understand this in terms of congregational culture. People positively impacted by their local church are willing to step deeper into its leadership, activity, and mission. They aren't just attenders, but engaged in the life of discipleship through their congregation.
While I am not 100% sure on all of the facets of this, I think I have a broad idea of how to communicate this in a way that starts allowing us to answer questions when churches are faced with unsustainability.
What if one of the ways to think through decline and respond to it is by asking what culture we are creating that resonates with the different generations in the adult population of America?
Let's break this down into generations.
Boomers found positive culture through ownership.
Gen X found positive culture through activities.
Millenials find positive culture through relationships.
We can also break this down a bit further thinking through the last 70 years of the American church. The mid-twentieth century saw the West go into one of the highest levels of religious participation in our history. Significantly higher than any other time. Many people think that the colonial period in America was one of deep religious belief and participation, but the work of religious sociologist Rodney Stark shows the stark reality. In his book The Churching of America, Stark finds that in the year 1776, roughly 17% of America had religious adherence. In 1980, the tail end of the boomers age range of being classified as young adults, it was 62%. This percentage held till the year 2000.
In our cultural moment, around 30% of the population describes themselves as a "none" have no specific religious belief or practice.
The recent memory of a massive percentage of the population of the United States being active in a local congregation isn't a statistical norm for religious history.
I struggle to think most people would assume a massive statistical blip would either be permanent or the expectation for a norm.
It is with those broad assumptions I want to operate from as I talk briefly about how this can affect a local congregation trying to understand congregational sustainability.
The Boomers | Mid-Century America
This is a time period where adults found culture through ownership. The popularity of civic organizations, clubs, and sports leagues where highly organizational. People knew how to organize. They enjoyed the organizational dynamics of these activities. Serving in a leadership position with responsibility was an honor and something people accepted as part of the norm.
Even in the local church.
It was easy to create sustainability in the local church, even with this massive influx of church participation, because the organizational structures necessary to be stable where part of the cultural framework of society.
Many organizations built on the bedrock of an organizational culture are struggling. This linkedin article on why service organizations are dying can almost read like a church growth research project.
Gen-X | Late 20th Century
Gen X began hitting that young adult age around the mid-1990's. Usually most adults of that age aren't necessarily providing primary leadership, but their growing families provide the necessary energy to drive change in the local church. Riding high on the church boom of the mid-20th century, and looking for programs, this era is typified by just that...programs. Culture was found through activity. Youth sports hadn't become the massive industrial complex of our age, and other extra-curriculars more common now were seen as expensive and confined to larger cities (I pay the same amount a month for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu that people were paying the late 90's. Around $200 a month).
The church provided many of those things.
This is the era of the big youth groups. Focused age or activity focused ministries in churches were a popular draw. Churches built gyms and family life centers to accomodate this approach to ministry and reaching people. Expensive capitol projects were necessary to attract younger families who might have been nominally religious, but were interested in what the church had to offer.
Millienial and Gen Z | Post 2020 Church
The first millennials started coming of age in the late 2000's. For those heavily churched in their younger years, the same programmatic expectations of the previous era still worked. But for those outside of the church, they might not have. If you look at secular correlatives, this tracks as well. Outside programs popped up and became cheaper.
But what people seem to want more than anything is a relationship. Sure, the programs provide a place for relationships to form...but other things can do that.
While not necessarily a research project on this era, Mike Frost does talk about how local churches have struggled in the relational dynamic in his article The Lonely Crowd: Churches Dying Due to Friendlessness. One of the breakout books on church health from 2023, The Great De-Churching, talks about the relational dynamic of people stopping church participation.
So what does this all mean?
Hopefully, it is to do a few things.
The first is to help you realize that some of your church's struggles aren't isolated in your own context. This is a national phenomenon occurring across our culture, not just in the local church. We have an amazing amount of research asking questions about these very issues.
The second is to help you think through what it might mean to begin analyzing your current church as to where it stands in this model. Are you trying to solve a 1965 problem of church leadership expectations in 2023, or dealing with people wanting a building project or massive programmatic expansion to make things sustainable?
One of the key questions I have been asking is about the discovery of a church’s relational capacity. How well does your church help nurture deep friendships and connections? Are you doing those in a contemporary way, or expecting new people to fall into an existing framework and even group?
I have a quick chart I use in workshops to help churches think through this. I'll leave it here for you, but it is going to take another article to unpack it.
In short, a congregation’s ability to both enhance current relationships while creating spaces for new relationships to be created and thrive is paramount. One of the ways to think through this is how different generations find value. This means creating intentional leadership development pathways, rather than assuming new people want to find value through being part of an organization. Another is realizing relationships might need to be deeply built before any sort of leadership position is introduced. Going across all of the spectrums, people want to be part of churches making a difference. Relational capacity is something churches should be both diagnosing and focusing on.
So what has changed?
The way people find value in part of any organization, much less the local church.
What hasn’t changed?
People want to find high value in the things they are committed to. Relationships have always mattered, but are now shifting into a 1st or 2nd tier issue, rather than something to be assumed will be strong.
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