Why Are Churches Declining in the West?

Question 09079

Church decline in Britain and across much of the West is not a matter of opinion. The buildings that once held four hundred now hold forty, chapels have become carpet showrooms and flats, and every denomination publishes figures it would rather not. The question is not whether it is happening but why, and the answers we give ourselves tend to be the comfortable ones.

The comfortable answer is that the culture turned against us. There is truth in that and I will come to it. But it is not the whole story, and I have come to believe it is not even the largest part of it.

The External Story: Secularisation

Begin with what is genuinely outside our control. Britain has undergone a long shift in which Christian belief moved from being the assumed background of public life to being one option among many, and then to being an eccentric option. Sunday trading, organised sport on Sunday mornings, the collapse of social expectation around churchgoing, and the steady presentation of Christianity in the media as either quaint or sinister have all done their work.

Add material comfort. It is difficult to feel your need of God when the fridge is full, the boiler works, and medicine has removed the terror that once attended a childhood fever. Jesus said something about riches and the kingdom that we in the West have generally decided applies to somebody else (Mark 10:23-25). Prosperity is not the friend of religion that people assume it to be.

The Internal Story We Prefer Not to Tell

Now the harder part. A great deal of church decline in the West began in our own pulpits, and it began early. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the higher critical approach to Scripture worked its way through the theological colleges and out into the ministry, and congregations were told, sometimes gently and sometimes not, that the Bible was a human book containing valuable insights rather than the word of God.

The result was entirely predictable. If the resurrection is a symbol and the miracles are legends and the text is an anthology of religious experience, there is no obvious reason to give up a Sunday morning for it. People did not leave because they were told too much. They left because they were told too little, and what they were told did not require anything of them.

The churches that declined fastest across the twentieth century were, on the whole, the ones that adjusted their message most enthusiastically to the assumptions of the surrounding culture. That is not a comfortable observation for anybody, and it is very hard to argue with the numbers.

Entertainment as a Strategy

A second internal cause runs in the opposite direction and produces the same result. Where liberal theology emptied the message, a good deal of evangelicalism kept the message and emptied the manner, replacing careful teaching with production values on the theory that people would come for the experience and stay for the truth.

The trouble is that whatever you win people with, you must keep them with. A congregation gathered by music and atmosphere will move when better music and atmosphere appear a mile down the road, and there is always somewhere with a better sound desk. Meanwhile the members have not been taught enough to withstand a genuine crisis of faith, and church decline follows a few years behind the initial success.

Church Decline and the Loss of Discipline

Third, and least discussed, is the collapse of meaningful membership and discipline. When a congregation asks nothing of its members, membership means nothing, and a body that means nothing is easy to leave. The New Testament churches were defined communities with real commitments and a real process for addressing serious sin.

We abandoned that largely out of kindness, or what felt like kindness, and the effect has been the opposite. Nobody values what costs nothing. A church that expects attendance, giving, service and holiness will lose some people, and the people who remain will be a church rather than an audience.

The Failure to Pass Faith to Children

Statistically, the single largest driver of church decline in Britain is not conversion loss to atheism but the failure of Christian families to raise children who continue in the faith. Denominations have shrunk by demography as much as by argument. Where two generations ago a Christian home almost automatically produced churchgoing adults, that transmission has broken down.

Some of that is cultural pressure on the young, which is real and severe. But some of it is that Christianity became a Sunday activity rather than a household reality. Deuteronomy 6:6-7 puts the responsibility in the home, talking of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way. Outsourcing that to a children’s programme was never going to work.

Counting Honestly

Before drawing conclusions it is worth being careful with the numbers, because church decline is frequently discussed with more confidence than the statistics warrant. Attendance figures, membership rolls and self reported belief measure three different things, and the gap between them has widened. A great many people who tell a census taker they are Christian have not been inside a church in twenty years.

There is also the question of what is being counted. Denominational totals have fallen sharply, but independent evangelical congregations, immigrant led churches and newer plants are frequently outside those returns altogether. In several British cities the fastest growing congregations are African and Caribbean led, and they rarely appear in the figures that generate the gloomiest headlines.

That does not overturn the general picture, and I am not trying to explain church decline away. It does mean the situation is more textured than the usual account allows. What has collapsed most severely is inherited, nominal, institutional Christianity, which is not the same thing as the body of Christ in this country.

Jesus said He would build His church and that the gates of hell would not prevail against it (Matthew 16:18). Paul told the Philippians that God who began a good work would bring it to completion (Philippians 1:6). Neither promise was given on condition that the statistics in one region should always rise, and neither is cancelled when they fall.

What Has Not Caused It

Let me clear away two explanations I do not accept. The first is that the message itself is the problem, that people would return if only we softened what Scripture says about sin, sexuality or judgement. Every church that has tried that route has continued to shrink, and usually faster. There is no market for a Christianity that agrees with everything you already believe.

The second is fatalism. Some of my brethren treat church decline as simply the prophesied apostasy of the last days, and settle down to be faithful in a shrinking room. Scripture does anticipate a falling away, and I hold that we are in the closing period of this age. But nothing in that expectation licenses us to stop evangelising, and the same century that emptied Britain’s chapels filled Africa’s and China’s.

Grounds for Hope

Which brings me to the encouragement. The global church is not declining; it is growing faster than at any point in history. Whatever is happening here is regional rather than universal, and that alone should stop us concluding that the gospel has lost its power.

There are also real signs at home. Churches that preach the Bible plainly, take membership seriously, and love their neighbourhoods are frequently growing, quietly and without publicity, in the same towns where older congregations are closing. The pattern is consistent enough to be instructive. God has not changed His methods.

So, now what?

If you lead a congregation, resist the temptation to respond to church decline with a technique. Ask instead whether the word is being preached plainly, whether members are being made rather than simply gathered, and whether your people are actually speaking to their neighbours about Jesus in the ordinary course of the week.

If you are a member, the most useful thing you can do this year is probably not a strategy meeting. It is to invite somebody, to teach your own children, and to stay. Faithfulness in a small congregation is not a lesser calling. On the related questions I have written about signs of an unhealthy church and what revival actually is, and both are worth reading alongside this.

One last word to anybody tempted to despair over the figures. Church decline is a fact about a period and a region, not a verdict on the gospel, and the God who has raised congregations from far worse than this has not retired.

If the Lord were to visit your congregation in power this year, what would He find that needed dealing with first?

And take heart from the wider view. The gospel that emptied nothing in the first century has not weakened since, and the God who raised Jesus from the dead is not troubled by British attendance figures (Ephesians 1:19-20).

And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

Matthew 16:18 (ESV)