I’ve been up since before the rosy-fingered dawn lumbered over the horizon. I had to have my blood drawn, as one does when the medical establishment insists that whole year has gone by since the last time, and so this seems a good time to wrap up my inadvertent series on The Great Dechurching. A very nice person pointed out to me that it is the usual practice to name the authors when discussing a book at length, and that I have failed to observe this courtesy. This is true. I have failed, mainly because I’ve been flying along through my week, and secondarily because the authors of the book are not familiar to me. And, I think, in the back of my mind, I probably wanted to spare them being associated with their own work, but that’s not nice either. I am nothing if not nice, so, let us launch into our takes because it is, after all, Friday.
One
The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? is written by Jim Davis and Michael Graham along with Ryan Burge (his name is in smaller letters). The dust jacket says that Davis is a pastor of a church in Orlando and that Graham is the program director for the Keller Center. They do a podcast together called As in Heaven. Ryan Burge is a professor at Eastern Illinois University and is responsible for the academic portion of the work.
Two
Yesterday I made some sweeping and wild claims about how wrong the authors are about so many things. I should clarify that they are not wrong about the data, as far as I can tell. Millions of people have left their churches in the last twenty-five years. No church, they point out, has escaped this exodus, except, I think, the Assembly of God. Mainline, Evangelical, Catholic—everyone has had people walk out and just not come back, for all the reasons they explore in the book.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Demotivations With Anne to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.