How Should the Church Respond to the “Great Dechurching?”
More adults do not attend church versus those who do for the first time in modern American history. We are living during the largest and fastest religious movement in American history—but instead of adding numbers to the church, people are leaving it. Over 40 million people have left the church in the last twenty-five years. If you are shocked by these numbers, you are not alone. They are from a recent book called The Great Dechurching : Who's Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? by Jim Davis and Michael Graham. I started reading The Great Dechurching after a pastor and former seminarian friend recommended it. While he is Presbyterian and the book is written from an evangelical perspective, it shares statistics across denominations. People are walking away from basically every branch of Christianity. There is more bad news. About 70% of the people who go to church attend only 10% of the churches. Most congregations in America are small. Becaus
