JIM DAVIS and MICHAEL GRAHAM with Ryan P. Burge. The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Reflective, 2023. Pp. 242. $29.99 (US)
Since the COVID-19 outbreak, people connected to American Christian congregations are keenly aware that church attendance in many places has not returned to pre-COVID numbers. While many of these observations are “unscientific” and anecdotal, studies have also documented this trend. A 2023 Pew Research Center study reported that in-person worship attendance has dropped by about three percent. That same year, Hannah McClellen published an essay in Christianity Today entitled, “Pastors Wonder About Church Members Who Never Came Back Post-Pandemic.” She concluded the reasons for the decrease in attendance are “complicated.”
In their detailed study of declining church attendance, Davis and Graham paint an extremely disturbing picture. COVID-19, in fact, was a mere blip on the radar screen. The book’s dust cover hits the reader with this stark claim: “40 million US adults used to go to church but no longer do.” If that is not shocking, surely this sentence is, “More people have left the church in the last twenty-five years than all the new people who became Christians from the First Great Awakening [1720-1740], Second Great Awakening [1795-1835], and Billy Graham crusades combined” (5). Clearly, churches are facing a bigger challenge than the COVID-19 shutdown and recovery.
As the book’s subtitle notes, the authors introduce the readers to these “dechurched” people, draw detailed profiles of these groups, and address ways in which they might be “engaged.” To accomplish this Davis and Graham relied on “an academic-review-board-approved, nationwide, quantitative study to answer our questions about the dechurching phenomenon” (xxi). This study was conducted by political scientists Ryan Burge (Eastern Illinois University) and Paul Djupe (Denison University). The book authors then arranged and interpreted the raw data into seven chapters which include thirty graphs and charts. These chapters consist of two phases. First, the size of the problem is detailed: “About 15 percent of American adults living today . . . have effectively stopped going to church” (xxii). Second, Davis and Graham identify who is leaving and why. They conclude, “. . . no theological tradition, age group, ethnicity, political affiliation, education level, geographic location, or income bracket escaped the dechurching in America” (xxiii). In other words, no church group can look at other church groups and believe this problem is “their problem.” It is a challenge facing all of us.
The final eight chapters focus on Davis and Graham’s suggestions for “Engaging the Dechurched” (Part 3 of the book). Here, the text zeroes in on evangelical churches and what they identify as four distinct groups of “dechurched evangelicals.” Those groups are “cultural Christians, dechurched mainstream evangelicals, exvangelicals (their terminology), and dechurched Black, indigenous, and people of color” (xxiv). While this study might strike some as full of foreboding, the authors write, “Our findings confirmed our grim assumptions about the state of churchgoing in the US today, yet they were also surprisingly hopeful in many ways” (xxiv).
I found this text to be very accessible. Even the “raw data” and statistics section was presented in such a way that non-professionals could grasp what the numbers were communicating, and the thirty charts were very beneficial as I read to understand their arguments. Davis and Graham really drew me in when they began drawing a picture of the four distinct groups who have left the church. They did this by interviewing and writing about the lives of people who had similar experiences resulting in giving up on participation in congregational life. As one might expect, these stories are painful, yet they describe what people have experienced. Often people have felt unseen, unheard, and uncared for, so they leave.
Given the dire depiction of the mass departure from our churches, one might conclude “the jig is up.” Davis and Graham resolutely refuse to go in that direction. In fact, for me, the strongest portion of the text is in chapters 8-11, where they pull together thoughts for “Engaging the Dechurched.” In these chapters they offer reasons to be hopeful, stress the importance of relationships, identify places we have fallen short of passing on faith, and provide us with messages to share with those who have left.
Where I began to part ways with the authors is when their Reformed understanding of our faith leads them to a conclusion that seems to undercut their excellent agenda and goals. For example, they write, “The reality is that some dechurched people can be won back, but others were never a part of the true church to begin with” (227). To me this creates an additional element of uncertainty to an already complex situation. How are we to determine who to reach out to if some were never a part of the church or ever meant to be part of the church?
Additionally, one can ask if attending worship and believing approved doctrine, which I see as central to a Reformed world view, is the core essence of being the church. Davis and Graham clearly know that is not the case, because they note that “When thinking about our interactions with the dechurched our need for a robust awareness of God cannot be understated” (135). And yet, in my opinion, they rely more heavily on correct thinking than is needed. It has been said that author Frederik Buechner, himself a Presbyterian minister, stopped attending church because the one person he wanted to be with (God) never seemed to be present in the services to which he went. Davis and Graham would have done well to find a better balance between doctrine and worship experience when exploring why people are leaving.
Despite these few reservations, Davis and Graham have given every Christian an extremely useful document that is desperately needed when wrestling with the dwindling interest in the church at this present time.