Here’s an incredible statistic. Church membership in the United States remained consistently near 70% from 1937 to 2000.
Then in the 21st century that percentage began to decline and continues to drop precipitously with no end in sight. In 2022, it’s now about 47%.
The pandemic accelerated the trend. National worship attendance is 2/3rds of pre-pandemic levels and has plateaued there. This is the new normal.
Overall church membership dropped from 61% to 47% just in the last decade. My own denomination, the ELCA, shrunk from a membership of 3.26 million in 2010 to 2.54 million in 2019, a 22% decrease.
Even denominations that had been growing at the beginning of the 21st century are now in decline, most notably the Southern Baptists.
There’s only one exception to this trend. Assemblies of God (and presumably some other Pentecostal/Charismatic traditions) are growing. From 1990 to 2020 AoG has seen about 50% growth, from 2.1 million to 3.3 million. Much of this growth has been from immigration, which is also what has held Roman Catholic membership more steady than some other denominations (there’s an entire other and important story about the growth of religion and Christianity globally, but for now I’m staying closer to home).
I’ve asking myself recently what this means for those of us committed to the church. I mean, I’m not going anywhere. And then I thought, why not try to remember that church, the one that for so many years remained at 70% of the population. What was it like? Well, here’s one story from the Heartland.
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I was raised in a church that today would have been called (I guess) a mega church. But we didn't have that language in the 1970s and 80s.
St. Paul Lutheran was a very large church in Davenport, Iowa. Because I was a kid I didn't know it was big. I just thought it was church. We had five pastors. We averaged around 1000 people on a Sunday morning between three services. All services were resoundingly accompanied by organ and choir. We chanted the Lutheran liturgy from the hymnbook (rotating between three set liturgies). The only music I can remember (in the sanctuary, anyway) that wasn’t organ and choir was a Sunday each summer, the jazz liturgy for the Bix Beiderbecke festival the Quad Cities hosted in honor of that great Dixieland and hot jazz trumpeter.
I grew up singing in the choirs. There were multiple kids choirs and we even had a very serious high school choir directed by our youth pastor. We went on tours!
When I think back to what that was like, attending church for two or more services on a Sunday (often I’d acolyte a service, sing in choir in a second, and stick around to count money with my dad during the third), plus the return for youth group Sunday night, then again Wednesday for choir practice, I honestly had this deep and abiding sense of it being my second home. I knew every nook and cranny, including the secret compartment you could open in the banquet room of the old mansion that was the office space.
Church was the main thing. Sports, extracurriculars, these were fun but secondary.
I guess you could say I started making church my life rather early. Church trained me to be a church professional.
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Even now 35 years later, I remember certain things with real poignancy.
I remember sitting in the bass section of the high school choir right in front of the pipes of the organ. During worship my entire auditory space was enveloped by organ blasts. Also because no one could see us we goofed around a LOT.
I remember attending church camp, sometimes for multiple weeks each summer, one week as a camper, the next as a counselor in training with younger youth. I later became the camp director.
The vibe was much like Stranger Things. We often were left to our own devices running wild through the woods, even leaving the camp property striking out onto neighboring farms hoping not to get gored by a bull or bitten by a rattlesnake or fall off a cliff or killed by that Crazy Sally axe murderer the counselors told us about after campfire.
A few events of this period run like a film script when I call them to mind.
There was this ice cream social the church put on at the launch of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (1988). I was a sophomore in high school. We were celebrating the merger of three denominations, the Lutheran Church in America (LCA) and the American Lutheran Church (ALC), and the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches (AELC).
These denominations were themselves the result of previous mergers. Basically all Lutheran denominations in the US were founded as ethnic communities. So in the 17th and 18th and 19th centuries, successive waves of Lutheran immigrants arrived on our shores. They typically founded denominations called the “German” Lutheran church or the “Norwegian” Lutheran Church in America or the “Latvian” or Lithuanian or Slovak Lutheran Church. The ethnicity was a feature in the name of the denomination primarily because of the language spoken and sung in worship.
Over time, as this large influx of immigrants waned and shifted, immigrant groups adopted English as their primary language. It only took a couple of generations before the Danes and the Swedes and the Norwegians were all talking about bringing the Lutheran churches under one tent because by then they all spoke English.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America was the culmination of these many mergers, a merger of the two largest Lutheran denominations. So here we were, a big Lutheran Church celebrating the historic moment of a multi-denominational merger.
There was a long table out on the church grounds overflowing with tubs of melting ice cream and maybe pies and such. I think my friend Dave and I sang a song up on the church portico.
We filled helium balloons and inserted little hand-written messages and launched them into the sky. Nobody was thinking about the birds. If I'm not mistaken, at least one of those balloons made it to Ohio from Iowa.
But here’s the thing: these many years later, I wonder what that church thought of its own neighborhood…
The neighborhood where that ice cream social took place sits at the top of Brady Street just across from Vandeveer Park in Davenport, a Mississippi River town.
Vandeveer is an old and remarkable park, situated in an old and established neighborhood. It always contained an arboretum and a little pond used for skating, and across the street from the church was an old (mostly non-functioning) water fountain.
I don't know if city codes had changed or the repairs weren’t in the budget. But it was this long open fountain and pool that was really just a big cement slab which had once been a fountain. I remember there was frequently an older gentleman practicing tai-chi out on that fountain’s edge each Sunday morning. I found that enticing, foreign, exotic.
The neighborhood around the church was changing significantly. It had become considerably more urban and diverse. It had also aged. And although Davenport, Iowa has never been a Chicago, there was the impact of outmigration from Chicago as well as the draw of big employers (including many with excellent unions).
I remember Central High School, slightly down the hill from us, as a rather diverse school compared to my rural small town high school. We drove into town and church from our farm. I mostly didn’t get to know the neighborhood. I just went to church there.
One thing I know for sure, I didn't know very many people who lived right next to the church.
It makes me wonder. Did the church consider how its neighbors might interpret the ice cream social? Were they invited? Would they care about the denominational mergers? Well, in the 20th century, I guess there’s a real chance they did. Remember, 70% of everyone was a church member. Denominations mattered, they had clout. Such a celebration didn’t demand a lot of interpretation for the unchurched because honestly there just weren’t that many of them.
When I think back on that period in my life, I remember church life as being incredibly important, and I also think church life was very detached from the rest of life. I can’t remember a single sermon that connected to, for example, worker justice. The Quad Cities was full of important unions and I’m sure working class and organizing considerations were crucial. Reagan came along and decimated the capability of union organizing and I don’t think the church said a thing.
Instead, there was a kind of real pride in those churches of not taking sides, of being spiritually above the fray. I think that was core doctrine.
Which means my church, the one so central to my formation, had little to say about many of the things I now consider crucial to my life as a Christian. I don’t think we ever talked about equality for LGBTQIA, even though that was on the radar in our denomination. I don’t think the church did much on racial equity, or the environment. And although the ELCA was involved in a boycott of South Africa because of apartheid, the only real way it came up in our church was in a debate on whether or not to switch from a Pepsi to a Coke machine down in the Fellowship Hall.
The church, if I remember correctly, was a microcosm of itself. It was its own contained thing, and caught those of us who found it compelling in a vision of its own life together that was mostly cut off from its immediate surroundings. We practiced choir pieces for church worship, not neighborhood events. We went on youth mission trips far away, not down the hill in our own community. For better or worse, church cultivated itself as itself, and because it had status and size it could inculcate values and a vision of itself that was mostly self-referential.
It was beautiful. I loved it. It’s dying off. And I would never want to go back to church life that functions that way.
Notable here among other massive changes: I really only knew what the pastors were up to when a) they were preaching, or b) they wrote a newsletter column, or c) they came to our house. This is one of the biggest shifts. If you are reading this blog post, you are likely among the community of people who know far more what their religious leaders are up to on the daily than ever before. You see our posts on social media, you may read our blog, our lives are simply woven together (ersatz perhaps, but nevertheless).
The clergy of that period were known only when you went to church. This was also true of anything at church. I only got to see my church friends by going to church.
Today my parishioners know so much about one another’s lives without ever having to meet up in the church house. And they know a lot (perhaps too much) about me (including especially my political views). Because we all now live a lot of our lives in these shared socially mediated spaces.
I’ve only scratched the surface on how much the church of the 20th century is simply gone, never to return. We can think back on it with fondness and nostalgia (free giant boxes of donuts every Sunday!), or with a certain level of disgust (that time we had to listen to tapes about how there were secret Satanic lyrics backwards in Led Zeppelin songs).
But it does leave me wondering. When we say the church is in this significant moment of “decline”, do we really mean it? Do we want that church back? Or is the church that is emerging moving toward the Spirit of Christ even if (or perhaps because) it is smaller and less influential?
I think many of the ways we do church today would be unrecognizable to 20th century church-goers. The immensity of the change cannot be over-stated. And yet here we are. So whatever is going to be next will be after the requiem. I wonder if we’ve allowed ourselves to play the full requiem, to truly grieve until we are free.
My experience! I think the title is misdescriptive. The world you describes no longer exists. The “curvy” exists in that new changed world, but is evolving. Perhaps that evolution will be different in very large measure from the male ordered, dominated and conceived that social order demanded, but new models are vibrantly showing up in many places. So, I suggest you not call it a requiem, but rather a change in response to a evolved and evolving society.
Wow! And take that narrative back to the 60’s and you have my story.