A Church on its Deathbed

Recently I read a copy of the alumni magazine from a mainline Protestant seminary.  It was very well done and showcased a number of people, both faculty and students, all fervent in their faith and zealous to serve the Lord. It presented the seminary, as it intended to do, as a place of thriving faith, burgeoning mission, and robust spiritual health, which I’m sure it is.  Reading it you would never know that the seminary was part of a denomination (which I will not identify) that is on its deathbed.

       The point of this blog post is not to focus upon any particular denomination. The alumni magazine was part of a denomination which contains many men and women of true faith and piety, well-intentioned believers who are doing their best to serve the Lord. The point of this blog post rather is to delve into missiology to determine what is conducive to the health and growth of a church and what is harmful to it.  A survey of the statistics and situations of other mainline Protestant churches tells the same story of decline and approaching institutional death.

       First, some documentation of the decline, with figures drawn from the central governing body of the denomination itself.  In 1967 the total Sunday attendance of this denomination throughout the country of Canada was 272,400.  In 2001 it was 162,000.  In 2022 it was 65,000.  (One area, that of the Yukon— admittedly not overly populated province/ territory— had a total of 191 people attending Sunday services in 2019 throughout the entire province and that figure is probably lower now.)

The number of baptisms tells the same story: in 1961 there were 44,416 baptisms throughout the country and in 2022 there were 3583 baptisms throughout the country.  A journal for the denomination observed in an article of August 2024, “This is not a church ‘in decline’ or ‘close to collapse.’ This is what collapse looks like.”  Indeed, a number cruncher of the denomination crunched the numbers in 2019 and noted in his official report, “Projections from our data indicate that there will be no members, attenders or givers by approximately 2040.”

       Obviously, thoughtful and pious people in the denomination are distressed by all this and have given consideration of how to reverse this trend so that the denomination can survive. Formerly it was thought that openness to societal trends would do the trick so that if the church could be seen to be embracing secular views on things like abortion, women’s ordination, homosexuality, global warming, transgender, and other liberal activist causes people would return to the church.  (In the 60s this openness included liturgical innovation. It was believed that including guitars and rock music in the church would help; thus the eventual advent of the “U2-charist”— i.e. a Eucharist consisting of the music of the band “U2”. And no, I am not making this up.) 

The narrative was that churches must “move with the times” and that (to quote them) “adapting faith was the only way to connect with younger generations”.  The current numbers show beyond dispute that this approach was unwise and proved in fact to be suicidal.

       Nonetheless, the denomination seems committed to this approach. A recent official document said that their leaders must “embrace our current context and the hope-filled mission to walk on the road with Jesus alongside us as the Gospel is proclaimed.” That is, as guiding principles, the leaders pledged to “champion the dignity of every human being,” to “dismantle racism and colonialism” to “embrace mutual interdependence with the Indigenous church” and to “steward and renew God’s creation” to “protect and sustain the earth.”  Thus, the “guiding principles of diversity, equity and inclusion— transparency, accountability, empathy, accessibility and intersectionality— should be considered in all future transformations, adaptations and processes” of the denomination.  In fewer and plainer words, the denomination is committed to doubling down and continuing along the path of liberalism and its embrace of leftist causes that arguably got it into its present jam in the first place.

       My heart goes out to the good clergy working hard to serve the Lord there and reverse the numerical plummet.  Some shared that they attended church growth conferences throughout their ministry and returned to their parishes optimistic and energized only to suffer disappointment as numbers continued to shrink.  The question that seems to perplex them is:  Why is this happening?  Why is their denomination experiencing such a devastating loss of attendees?

       One might begin by first asking the question why people attended the denomination in the first place.  For in the decades preceding the tumultuous 1960s (when everyone was questioning authority and trying to “stick it to The Man”) most people did attend church.  Or, if they did not attend, they felt somewhat compelled to offer a reason why they didn’t.  To be respectable in the first half of the twentieth century included some church attendance on Sundays— maybe not every Sunday, but at least regularly.  Canada had a nominally Christian culture back then.  Stores were required to close on Sundays (the law was called “the Lord’s Day Act”) and some kind of denominational allegiance, however loose, was expected.   

Note:  this allegiance and church attendance didn’t necessarily involve true, fervent, and saving faith.  I suspect many people filled the church pews not because they had given themselves, their souls and bodies to the risen Lord so that they lived entirely for Him but simply because that was what most respectable people did.  In every culture and in every epoch most people simply follow the crowd and prior to the 1960s the crowd went to church on Sunday morning.

       That was why the churches of the mainline denominations were full and why after the Second World War “baby boom” there was a period when many new churches were being built in many new subdivisions.  The church leadership took it for granted that all the attendees filling the pews were faithful, fervent, and devout.  They certainly seemed to be and if they weren’t they were in no hurry to let the Minister know that they weren’t.   

That is why it was so easy not to proclaim the Gospel to the attendees, to reach out to the lost, and to press the claims of Christ upon those sitting before them in church.  The Evangelicals with their altar-calls and their (so-called) “crude salvationism” might do all that, but not us.  We were too sophisticated, too proper, too dignified, and— let’s admit it— too upper class for that.  Pentecostals might “preach a salvation message” in season and out and talk about being “washed in the Blood of the Lamb” but not us.  We obviously didn’t need to: look at how full our churches were. 

       Until, of course, they weren’t.  Up until then the people came to church because respectability required it of them, not because they were all genuinely converted.  In fact, some were converted and some weren’t.  Anyway, when that respectability no longer required church attendance, most people simply began to stop attending.   

The Evangelicals and Pentecostals who did not assume the conversion of their membership did not experience a similar decline.  That should have provided the first clue as to why mainline membership was declining.  But the mainline churches had always bowed to societal norms and continued to bow to societal norms.  But now the norms were all about “social justice”, and women’s ordination, and gay rights, and inclusion, and “women’s reproductive rights” (a misnomer if ever there was one), and transgenderism.  Secular people (i.e. the majority of society) applauded the mainline churches for their secular stands but they saw no reason to go to church on Sunday and part with their time and their money.  As one mainline church’s own reports observed, “In Canada, most people are not interested in Christianity at all... More and more people are simply saying, ‘Political activism? That’s great. Why do I need to go to church to do that?’”

       Why indeed.  So a denomination whose missiological approach does not place the challenging and counter-cultural Gospel— that is, the apostolic Tradition— front and center and demand that its converts conform to Christ and not to the World will not prosper.   

       Ultimately it is not about numbers or even survival but about faithfulness to Christ and obedience to what He calls us to do.  Contemporary experience reveals that infidelity to the traditional Gospel brings decline and death and that fidelity to the faith once for all delivered to the saints brings growth.  What God once said to Israel through Moses He now says to denominations seeking a way forward: “Behold, I set before you life and death.  Therefore choose life.” Churches that are flirting with embracing secular values should take note.