I am having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that I get asked all the time, by pastors, denominational leaders and interested observers, about ways to grow a church. I guess people assume that since I spend my days digging through religion data, that I should have been able to uncover the secret to getting people back into religion. It takes everything in my power to not say to them, “My church went from 50 people to less than 10 under my watch. If I knew anything about how to grow a church I would have done it by now.” But I know where they are coming from because many of them are in the same boat that I was in. 

How do you get rid of a pulpit? Or a communion table?

Does anyone want 30-year-old choir robes?

What do you do with the baptismal records of a church that dates back to the 1860s?

I never thought I would be asking myself these questions, but here I am, like many other pastors across the country as the number of Americans who belong to a faith community shrinks and churches that once housed vibrant congregations close.

What’s happened at my own church is especially poignant since in my day job I research trends in American religion. And when I first became a pastor, right out of college, there were ominous signs, but I did not foresee how quickly the end would come, hastened by a pandemic.

I first took the pulpit of First Baptist Church of Mount Vernon, Illinois, in the fall of 2006. The church was a part of the American Baptist denomination, a mainline tradition that welcomed women into leadership and tended to take a more moderate stance on theological and social issues. I was 24 years old, pursuing a master’s degree in political science, and I needed a job that would give me the flexibility to focus on my studies. It seemed like a good fit at the time, both theologically and logistically, although it was inconceivable to me then that I would still hold the same position into my early 40s.

I preached in a sanctuary that could easily accommodate 300 people. That first year or two, I could count about 50 people scattered around the pews. It felt sparse, but not empty — a relief, since I wasn’t the most credentialed pastor in the history of the church. As an undergraduate, I took a couple of classes that focused on theology and ministry, but that was it. I did my best to not say something heretical during my Sunday sermon. What I lacked in education and experience, I was sure I could make up with enthusiasm. There’s an apocryphal quote from John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, that I thought about often in those first couple of years: “Light yourself on fire with passion, and people will come from miles to watch you burn.”

I tried to light that match every Sunday morning. People didn’t show up.

I don’t know if the members of my congregation thought I was going to be the one who turned around the fortunes of the church, but there was lots of talk of growth in those first few hopeful years. Many faithful members had been sitting in those pews for decades. They had seen the church in its heyday, when there were so many people in Sunday School that they had to install movable dividers in the fellowship hall so they could add more classrooms in the 14,000-square-foot building.

But the church’s membership began to dwindle in the 1970s and 1980s. If you talked to five members of my church about this period of time, you would get five different reasons for the decline: An ill-advised sermon drove off a few key families. Lots of kids who grew up in the church went off to college and didn’t return to rural Illinois because of the lack of employment opportunities. Other churches in town seemed more attractive with their drums, guitars and high-energy worship. Regardless of the cause, the membership of First Baptist dipped below 100 by the late 1990s.

After a couple of years, the discussion about revitalizing the church began to grow quiet. A sense of resignation started to creep in. I came to a disheartening conclusion: I wasn’t going to be able to turn things around. I think at that point most members knew in their hearts that the end was coming for the church. We were just all afraid to speak that truth into existence. It was better to keep our heads down and focus on the next worship service and not worry about what would happen in three or five years.

The Rise of ‘The Nones’

On one of my first Sundays as pastor, the older adults had invited me to their Sunday School class. We sat around a table with Styrofoam cups of coffee and tried to find common ground across a five-decade generational divide. They were glad to have me, and I was honored that they trusted me enough to be their pastor. About a year ago, I was looking at an old church directory and realized that every person in that classroom back in 2006 had met their eternal reward over the previous 15 years, and I had presided at many of their funerals.

But as my church was dying, my academic career was starting to accelerate. I began to plunge headlong into data about American religion. I had earned a Ph.D. in political science with a dissertation that focused on religion and politics while I held the pulpit at First Baptist, and I had landed a job at a university that was within driving distance of my home base. I could be a professor during the week and pastor on the weekends.

I wrote a couple of academic articles about American religion in an effort to secure my employment in academia, but I didn’t want to produce scholarship that only a dozen or so people in my subfield would read.

So I decided to take the things I was seeing in the data and help the average person understand the changing American religious landscape. I began posting graphs on my Twitter account. Most of them got little attention until I created a simple line graph that traced American religion between 1972 and 2018.

The point was simple: The share of Americans who were nonreligious was now the same size as evangelicals. The post went viral, and the trajectory of my life changed. That graph appeared in nearly every major media outlet in the United States, and it led to me writing a book about the rise of nonreligious Americans, a book entitled “The Nones.”

What I was seeing in the data was unmistakable and mapped perfectly onto what I was seeing every Sunday — mainline Protestant Christianity was in near free fall, and the numbers of nonreligious were rising every single year. Members of the media found my career combination of pastor and social scientist fascinating.

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