Here Is the Church
and here is the steeple, open the doors, and, oops, I guess we have a problem
We have to go to Planet Fitness at 6 am on Tuesdays in order to be on time for Zoom Morning Prayer at 7, which means that my efforts at content consumption in the early dawn always feel harried. This morning, however, I am rewarded for my wild scrolling with two pieces that allow me to circle back to that amazing statistic—that 40 million people who did once attend church have stopped making the effort to stagger into the pew or arrange chairs in the school cafeteria in the last 25 years. I keep saying that number to anyone who will indulge me on the subject, trying it out to see if they will flinch, or shudder, or do some kind of exultant dance. “What do you think?” I ask. How will the character of America as a place change when so many people don’t go to church anymore?
Most of the people to whom I have announced the number—40 Million—as if I am some sort of Cassandra, unhinged and harried, have blinked and then fallen silent. It seems that a statistic like that resembles the sound of the ocean—the roaring of wind and crashing of wave too enormous to understand. You stare out at the horizon, buffeted and astonished, and then go back to the silence of your car and turn on a podcast or some music. The social and cultural implications, in other words, can’t be understood by anyone alive today—not in the visceral, experiential way that most of us value so highly. Our “lived experience” is the wave receding into the ocean. It will be our children and their children who have to cope with the next one crashing over them. They will be able to understand what it meant that 40 million people who once went to church stopped going, and I expect that a lot of them will look back and blame those of us who simply couldn’t make sense of what was happening.
Still, there are some glimpses of what we can expect. The first one is this—apparently the National Cathedral has been in the habit of threatening to charge for the privilege of attending their Christmas Eve services. Jeff Walton has the scoop:
Attendance at these worship services has customarily been exempt from fees, but the sixth-largest cathedral in the world has – for several years – charged tourists an admission of $15 per adult or $10 per child. These fees offset operating costs for the landmark facility that is still repairing $38 million in damages incurred in a 2011 earthquake. Cathedral performances including Handel’s Messiah are also ticketed, but without controversy.
Built in the shape of a cross, the gothic cathedral has room to seat about 4,000 worshippers, or about 57 percent of the average Sunday attendance for the entire Episcopal Diocese of Washington. The cathedral itself reported an average attendance of 423 persons in 2022, the most recent reporting year.
Attendance on major holidays, including Christmas Eve, is substantially higher than typical Sunday services and the cathedral website states that the reserved passes are due to capacity concerns. Christmas Day services remain free.
I’m still trying to figure out if this is intended to be real, or is a ‘New Coke‘ head-fake to increase attendance when the National Cathedral inevitably relents and makes Christmas Eve attendance free-of-charge.
Can anyone imagine, anymore, 4000 liturgically inclined people going to church all at once and on such a special feast, like the birth of Jesus? The only times I’ve ever been in a room with that many Anglicans all at once have been at the Gafcon meetings, and I had to go across the world to find them. Anyway, barely any self-identifying Episcopalans regularly attend church in the National Cathedral:
Average attendance at the cathedral calamitously dropped from 1,646 in 2011 to 423 (74 percent) in a decade. COVID-19 response at least partly contributed to that collapse in 2021, but the apparent failure to rebound in 2022 indicates attendance hasn’t returned quickly post-pandemic.
What is one to think? The people and the money drain away but the edifice still stands, the clergy shuffling around and muttering to each other. Drawing the analogy from a book called The Final Pagan Generation: Rome’s Unexpected Path to Christianity, Jeffrey Goodman believes we are careening toward the final Christian generation. He explains it this way:
As Christianity ascended and was then finally legalized under Emperor Constantine the final Pagan generation saw their sons eschew their once enviable positions in the Empire for positions in the Church. Men like Ambrose, Gregory Nazaianzen, Basil of Caesarea and John Chrysostom all abandoned their father’s occupations and patriarchy for Christianity and vocations in the church. As the church grew and Christianity spread the once grand Pagan temples emptied out to the dismay of the fathers and mothers of the new Christian bishops and priests. Watts makes clear that by using the term “The Final Pagan Generation” he does not mean that Paganism died with the Empire. In fact, Watts writes, Paganism lived on into the early Seventh Century outliving the Roman Empire by generations, but this Paganism shorned of the Empire’s glory slowly and precipitously diminished over the generations before it became extinct.
The parallels for Christians today are clear:
In the next decade, we will see massive changes to religious life in North America and Western Europe. Christianity is not dying, let me be clear about that. Christianity is being clarified as Bishop Selbo of the North American Lutheran Church said last spring. In the next decade of so we will see massive numbers of small churches close particularly as the Builders and Boomers exit the scene. There will not be enough pastors to fill these empty churches as the current age of pastors in North America is now 60+. One of the other things that will happen is wealth transfer. In the next decade or so we will see the largest wealth transfer from one generation to the next: from the Boomers to their Gen-X and Millennial children who do not largely attend church.
Some of that wealth will go to churches that will close for lack of people and pastors. That money will then be transferred in many cases to old and dying denominations. Those old mainline denominations will then begin to function more like the Ford Foundation and other non-profits funding left wing causes while managing property sales of their former churches. Mainline denominations will continue on, but not as church bodies but rather as liberal foundations and property management. The Final Christian Generation is upon us.
It’s always easier to let something crumble than to constantly be about the task of repairing it. Walking up my snow-dusted steps this morning, after beating my body at Planet Fitness, trying to overcome the frailty of my flesh with heavy weights, I was discouraged by the detritus all over my front porch. I put things away, and other people take them out, looking for some lost glove or pair of scissors or something, and then wander off, expecting someone else—me—to come along and repair the ruins.
It might be easy for those left in their churches, perversely getting up and going every single Sunday, to be fretful and bitter about such a beautiful heritage laying waste, untasted, unknown, unconsidered. But bitterness is a waste of time. There is plenty to do. The faith once delivered to all the saints might still be shared, by those who really possess it, with neighbors and children and enemies and friends. For the one who heard it, but never bit down and tasted its goodness, it is, of course, easy to forget its flavor and meaning. Maybe someone who still knows will happen by and offer to retell that old story—how the water parts and you walk over on dry land, how those who were far off were brought near by the blood of the lamb, how God came to live with his people and be with them no matter what kind of structure they built or how many other people were there to join them.
And now, if you will excuse me, I have to go winterize my front porch. The sound of the children will be like the ocean, roaring in my ears.
The grand rejection, the great turning away resounds yet again. And still He remains eager to seek and find the remnant. And to send us into the darkness with His light blazing so that the chosen may be warmed by His fire and comforted in His embrace. Hallelujah, Christ is risen! He is risen, indeed, Hallelujah!
I flinch and shutter. and strategize