They Say the Church is Dying: What Does That Mean?

Opportunities abound for earnest faith in the wake of the Christian Consensus

This was something I heard frequently in Seminary, that the Church, at least in America and Europe, was dying. This was a challenging thing to hear going into that Church, but it was based on solid data. The Pew Forum shows that younger generations are increasingly uninterested in the Church, and the research that was most often cited for us was that increasingly, unlike previous generations, it did not appear that Gen X or Millennials were finding religion later in life or returning to the church after having kids. Most adults in Europe were secular, and America was trending more that way all the time.

But what does that mean? What’s the whole story here? Is there time to reverse course? I want to use this space to talk about four main things: what they mean when they say the church is dying, what they don’t mean (or include), some concrete reasons for the decline of the church, and what new shapes the church might take. The reality is that the shape of faith changes all the time, and in moments where things can feel the most intense, it makes sense that it would undergo significant changes. I should also clarify that the ominous “they” here is most a group of academic church folks, analysts and Seminary…