Reverend Mark Yackel-Jullen is the director for small town and rural ministry at Wartburg Theological Seminary in Dubuque, Iowa. While he is not one to sound the death knell for Iowa churches just yet, he does admit that this decline is hurting rural churches the most.

Evelyn Birkby started having children a few decades ago, when prospective mothers had no recourse to supportive virtual communities on Facebook, Twitter, or Google. “Honey,” she tells me, “all I had was church. I knew nothing about babies when I first started being a mother. So, I depended a lot on the women at church. We didn’t go to coffee together or spend a lot of time on the phone, because we still had a party line then. Sunday mornings were my life line.”

For a young mother, church was more than religious education—it was Birkby’s community. “Some weeks, I only left the house to go to church,” she tells me. The women in the congregation shared cold remedies for babies, which, according to Birkby, involved “steam and some molasses.” They also shared sleep-training techniques. When I ask Birkby to elaborate, she laughs: “Oh you don’t want to know what we did in the old days.” The church was also where they shared recipes. “We were always swapping zucchini and squash,” she says. “Church was our community center.”

Birkby, an author and newspaper columnist, was born in 1919 and lives in Sydney, Iowa, a town of 1,138 according to the 2010 Census. Birkby was raised by a Methodist minister and recalls a time when traveling ministers dominated the culture of the rural church. “Those traveling ministers planted all these little churches like Johnny Appleseed planted apple trees,” she says. “Now those churches are closing and our community life isn’t what it used to be. We are different now.”

According to the Association of Religious Data Archives, between 1990 and 2010, Iowa lost over 500 congregations. Contributing to this statistic is the fact that, between 2000 and 2010, 10 percent fewer people identified within a community of faith. The Des Moines Register reported the results of a recent Pew Study that found, “on average, about 54 percent of Iowans in 2010 attended a religious service or believed in a religion’s ideas. That’s about the same as in 1952 but down 8 percentage points from 1971.”

And with this shift, the very nature of Iowa is changing.

With the exception of South Dakota, a red state, Iowa is more rural than any other adjacent state. But politically, Iowa does not meet traditional expectations of rural constituencies: Iowa is traditionally a swing state, while its more populous neighbors, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Illinois are solidly blue. Paul Lasley, a sociologist at Iowa State, says that Iowa defies conventional wisdom that says rural populations are conservative. “There is certainly a correlation between the two,” Lasley admits, “but Iowa oscillates, which you don’t often see in rural states.”

To explain Iowa’s swing state status, Lasley notes that Iowa has had a reputation as a conservative state with values that focus on farm, faith, and family. But in Iowa, those community values also tend to have what Lasley called a “progressive edge”: Iowa has never had segregated schools and in 1851 became the second state to legalize interracial marriage. In 2009, Iowa became the third state to legalize same-sex marriage. “It’s hard to hate someone when you have to live next to them and you depend on them for help and you sit elbow to elbow with them in the pew every Sunday morning,” Birkby says. “This is what has always made Iowa so great. We are great neighbors, because we have to be. Or we were anyway.”

Reverend Mark Yackel-Jullen is the director for small town and rural ministry at Wartburg Theological Seminary in Dubuque, Iowa. While he is not one to sound the death knell for Iowa churches just yet, he does admit that this decline is hurting rural churches the most. “When you already have a small congregation and you lose just a few people, that can push you to the margins. As a result, many churches are closing and consolidating,” he says.

Read More