Everybody knows that church attendance, like many things, has declined over the last few decades. This has been especially true during the previous four years since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. But not many people know who is leaving and why. This is the focus of “The Great DeChurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will it Take to Bring Them Back?” written by Jim Davis and Michael Graham with Ryan P. Burge.
First, it should be noted that Davis and Graham are not social scientists with research training and experience. They are pastors, and pastors of a specific sort.
They are strongly connected with the white evangelical culture in the United States, associated with the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics, Grace Church in Orlando, Florida and The Gospel Coalition (TGC), a national group of reformed Christians.
To write the book, Davis and Graham contracted with Ryan Burge, author of The Nones, and Paul Djupe, author of The Full Armor of God, both world-class scholars. Burge and Djupe are professors and widely published authors.
They designed, administered and interpreted the research for the book, using standard sociological tools widely available to scholars, such as the General Social Survey and the Cooperative Election Study at Harvard University.
In addition, Davis and Graham created three surveys, approved by the Institutional Review Board at Denison University, where Djupe is a professor, which is standard professional protocol for such research.
During phase one, they interviewed 1,043 people; in phase two, 4,099 people; and in phase three, 2,043 people. All were “dechurched” people, meaning they were formerly active in church life but had ceased their involvement.
Dechurched people differ from unchurched people, a more familiar term, in that unchurched people have never been involved in church life. In general, they assert that their research supports the project thesis: “We are currently in the middle of the largest and fastest religious shift in the history of our country.”
Davis and Graham segregate these 40,000,000 dechurched people into five groups: Cultural Christians, Evangelicals, Exvangelicals, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color), and general Protestants and Catholics lumped together.
Even this categorization reveals their real interest: who is leaving their Evangelical tribe, and how can they get them back?
According to their research, expansively charted in this book, people across the denominational spectrum give similar reasons for leaving. After leaving, people describe their religious identities and convictions similarly, even in very “orthodox:” ways.
Furthermore, Davis and Graham report that dechurched people confess that a renewal of their church life will most likely come through friendships!
On page 48, the authors provide a chart identifying 13 reasons why these 40 million people have stopped attending church. It is worth listing in full:
Friends not attending 18%
Attending inconvenient 18%
Suffering shifted theology 17%
Gender issues 17%
Relocated 17%
Rules for sexual behavior 16%
Clerical scandals 16%
Moved to virtual worship 16%
Sermons not relevant 15%
Racial attitudes/episodes 15%
Other priorities/commitments 15%
Doubt the Christian message 15%
Doubt the existence of God 15%
We are not surprised at anything on this list, mainly because we all know people dear to us who have expressed one or more of these reservations. Whether these are the real reasons people are dropping out of church is another question.
We who have conducted exit interviews, however informal, with people moving on realize that people use traditional rationales to justify their decisions. They also often are not in touch with the real reasons they are changing course in life.
In part two of the book, Davis and Graham are less helpful. Their ministry in the Reformed and Evangelical community pushes them to emphasize the role of doctrine in identifying who is and who isn’t a Christian and in defining what needs to be done to lure these dechurched people back to public worship.
Sentences like this appear throughout the book: we church people “need to have a greater focus on spiritual formation and doctrine.” Why the ideas we believe (doctrines) are more important than the attitudes we hold, the practices we engage in and the behaviors we exhibit is never clear.
Square in the midst of this sustained call for more doctrine and deeper friendships, Davis and Graham assert that “what looks like defeat to many could really be the beginning of something special.”
Alas, what they mean, it appears, is that churches losing people by the millions need to keep doing what they are doing, but do it better. They believe this will motivate the dechurched to return to better versions of what turned them off.
Absent throughout this book is any sense that the church needs to change, perhaps to give up ideas, practices and behaviors on our way to becoming communities of faith, hope and love more faithful to the dispositions and behaviors of Jesus our Lord.