Where Did All the Christians Go?
And what ICN is doing about it
The Church at Auvers by Vincent Van Gogh
Leaving Church
For the first time in American history, there are more people who do not attend church than do. Even among the forty percent of Americans who say they attend church weekly, research shows that only twenty percent actually attend. Imagine, us Christians trying to appear more religious than we really are!
In 2000, 45 percent of Americans qualified as “practicing” Christians. These are people who identify as Christian, agree strongly that faith is “very important” in their lives, and have attended church within the past month.
That share has consistently declined over the last 20 years. Now, just one in four Americans (25%) is a practicing Christian. In essence, the share of practicing Christians has nearly dropped in half since 2000. The United States now ranks 44th in the list of countries that consider religion important.
Europe is already considered post-Christian, with church attendance in most countries down to less than one in four and some less than one in ten.
Where did all the Christians go?
Globally, in 1900, one-third of the world was Christian. Over 80% of all these Christians lived in Europe and North America. By 2020 the number of Christians living in Europe and North American had dropped dramatically from over 80% to 33%! However, today, one-third of the world still remains Christian. So, where did all the Christians go?
They went South! To Africa, Latin America, and South America. There has been a tremendous shift of Christianity from the Global North to the Global South – and that shift is expected to continue.
Global Christianity is not dying – it is shifting. However, that does mean for those living in the global North, it is dying where they live. While in the Global South, it is flourishing.
Why is Christianity flowering in the Global South? The North has most of the money, but the South has most of the Christians. While many Christians in the Global South live on the edge of existence, most in the North live in relative affluence and security. Religious commitment is lower in countries with higher education and greater income. Christianity seems to flourish where education is scarce, and life is shortest. That resembles the cultures where the early church flourished.
Rapidly growing Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity in the Global South tends to look more like early church practice. This energizes many Christians in Africa, Latin America, and South America who pray more frequently, attend religious services more regularly, and consider religion more important in their lives than Christians elsewhere in the world.
What Happened to Christianity in the Global North?
The current generation of Christians in the Global North is wary of institutional forms of Christianity for many reasons. The largest church in the world, Roman Catholicism, excludes women and married men from its leadership. It considers same-sex orientation as “objectively disordered,” and homosexual acts are sinful. Then there are the worldwide sex scandals. In the United States, 4,392 Catholic priests and deacons in active ministry in the United States between 1950 and 2002 have been plausibly (neither withdrawn nor disproven) accused of underage sexual abuse by 10,667 individuals (2004 research study by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops). Many of these were ignored or simply had the priests moved around by their superiors in a massive coverup.
On the Protestant side is the mainstream extreme deconstruction of the mystical dimension of the New Testament, “demythologizing” away much of the spiritual substance. This effectively removes much of the transformational content of the New Testament which can’t be understood by the mind.
Then there is the Evangelical fascination with sin, usually associated with sex. How many of us have been abused and shamed about our sexuality and expressing it? Most evangelical interpretations of “hell” are the epitome of abusive religion and are not Jesus’ view (see my booklet Hell? No!).
The current drastic decline in the power of institutional Christianity is also occurring in the Global North because the traditional basis upon which this faith system has been erected can no longer be sustained. We must move from seeing the Bible as the words of God to seeing it as the story of the evolution of the words of God — and that evolution is still occurring. This opens us to the new wine! Jesus said, “I have much more to teach you, but you are not ready for it yet” (John 16:12). That means we will never get it enclosed in institutional concrete!
We have currently reached the limit of mental Christianity as consent to certain beliefs. The alternative is not to abandon theology or thinking about God. Far from it. But we must have an evolving theology that allows us to remain rational even as we go beyond the mind in integrating the treasures of previous structure stages. These include the spiritual experiences fostered by the beauty and reality of the deep meaning of the mythical and experienced reality of the magical.
And then there is the average, struggling church, trying to be faithful in caring for its members, led by lonely, overworked pastors in a minister-centered system. Pastors are a product of seminaries that often focus on the intellectual to the exclusion of spiritual development and the mystical heart of the Jesus path.
The CEO of LifeWay Christian Resources wrote, “Between 6,000 and 10,000 in the U.S. are dying each year. That means around 100-200 churches will close this week! The pace will accelerate unless our congregations make some dramatic changes.”
Of course, the goal of Christianity is not to forever support any particular form or institution of Christianity. The goal is to be faithful in following Jesus in creating the kind of collectives that began with him and flourished in the spiritual awakening at Pentecost. This has continued to an increasingly lesser extent down through the centuries.
Many Christian churches still claim that they are essential, or at least critical to our experience of the Divine. However, fewer and fewer of us believe and experience that anymore.
So what’s a fatigued, frustrated, or former Christian to do?
This is the dilemma John the Baptist’s disciples were wrestling with as they were seeking in John something prophetically new that they had not found in their current religion. They came to ask Jesus. “How is it that we and the Pharisees fast often, but your disciples do not fast?”
Jesus replied, “People don’t pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst; the wine will run out, and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved” (Matthew 9:16–17). Fermented drinks like wine expand, and since an old wineskin would already be stretched to its limit, the new wine would tear the seams.
Jesus indicated both that he was bringing new wine and that it needed new wineskins to contain it. What is exciting in the wine department of humankind is that Jesus has been trying to bring new wine for two thousand years. However, only rarely have we tried it out. Many began drinking it for the first couple hundred years. Then we stored it in the institution of Greco-Roman wineskins which may have helped for a little while. However, all institutions eventually become brittle wineskins and inherently resistant to new wine because it keeps wanting to expand and change!
Once again, today, new visions of Christianity are emerging. The time is right for new and meaningful spiritual experiences and deeper understandings of the Bible, Jesus, God, and the Christian tradition. When we pour these into the new wineskins of evolving forms and practices of the Christian tradition, we have that which deeply satisfies our hearts and souls.
The Ever-Changing Church
Scholar and researcher, Peter Horsfield, in From Jesus to the Internet: A History of Christianity and Media, traces the evolution of Christianity to its current crisis of seeming decline and change. It’s been a long journey from an oral Jewish movement in the 1st century through epochs dominated by written, printed, electronic, and now digital media.
Speaking to the NPR’s “Here and Now” gathering, he stated, “In the long run, I think we’ll look back at this pandemic as a fundamental change to the way Americans attend church. I think the digital church is here to stay, and I think it’s going to really change the way people think about their donation relationship with the church.”
Will we catch the wind of spirit and keep going with it? Doing so may not be easy, because it will most likely require pain and loss.
We all need a little humor at times because we are talking about loss – profound and heartbreaking loss. The eventual passing of much of traditional institutionalized Christianity is a major transition. But spiritual reality tells us there may be no other way for the new wine and new wineskins to emerge. Jesus knew the Temple in Jerusalem had to be destroyed for God’s dwelling place to now be seen as released into the whole world.
Speaking to his friends about the coming destruction of the Temple, Jesus said, “All this is only the beginning of the birth pangs” (Matt 24:8). Pain is always a part of a new birthing.
We find the necessity of demolition as the prophets and deities of many traditions have warned us, from Kali to Jesus. The dying of the past is necessary for the emerging of the future. Jean Gebser sees this as a universal task. He writes:
“The restructuration of the entire reality has begun. If it occurs with our assistance, then we shall avoid a universal catastrophe; if it occurs without our aid, then the valid completion of the present mutation will cost greater pain and torment than we have suffered during the past . . .. All work, the genuine work which we must achieve, is that which is most difficult and painful: the work on ourselves. If we do not freely take upon ourselves this pre-acceptance of the pain and torment, they will be visited upon us in an otherwise necessary individual and universal collapse.
It is equally evident that in time the new structure must infuse the public consciousness with its strength. No one can escape the restructuration for too long. Imperceptibly the new structure will acquire validity for all as a matter of course. Those who do not accept it and persist in the old will be left aside in the course of the next generations. The final efforts toward survival by the various forms of syncretism were surpassed by the efficient mental consciousness-potency of Christianity. Owing to an increased technologization and a false application of time to technology, the deficient mental structure—rational consciousness—will dig its own grave. It will be surpassed by a more intensified Christianity, by the integral consciousness.” (italics mine)
I close by pointing out that Integral Christian Network is all about this “intensified Christianity.” And the time is now.
If your heart longs for any of this, join us in our part of the new thing God is doing.
Here are two ways: First, I invite you to become a part of one of our growing number of worldwide WeSpace groups.
I introduced the other way earlier in quoting Peter Horsfield’s prophetic words: “I think the digital church is here to stay, and I think it’s going to really change the way people think about their donation relationship with the church.” I invite you to do just that and reflect on your financial relationship with this emerging Christian community. And if your heart longs for this way forward, please consider a financial contribution that fosters the worldwide movement of the new wineskin that is the Integral Christian Network.
Integral Christian Network is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, EIN 83-3599025. All contributions are tax-deductible in the United States. No goods or services will be provided for in exchange for the contribution.