Crossroads Podcast: Why Do Churches Shrink And Die?

Right now, the greater Knoxville, Tennessee, area — prime Bible Belt territory — is growing like crazy. All kinds of people are moving in from all over the place.

We have growing evangelical megachurches. We have growing Baptist churches and shrinking Baptist churches. We have healthy mainline Protestant churches, stalled mainline churches, shrinking mainline churches and dead mainline churches. Many Catholic parishes are growing. Others are not.

Why do churches grow? Lots of reasons. Why do churches shrink and die? Lots of reasons. That’s the complex reality that we discussed during this week’s “Crossroads” podcast. As a startiong point, we focused on a Religion News Service feature that ran with this headline: “Thousands of churches will likely close down. What happens to all that real estate?” That feature was written by religion-beat veteran Bob Smietana, author of the book “Reorganized Religion: The Reshaping of the American Church and Why it Matters.” 

Here is some crucial material from that:

If experts were predicting that 100,000 libraries across the United States were likely to close in the next few decades, people would probably sit up and take notice. Certainly, if 100,000 school buildings were going to be empty in small and large communities, someone would be talking about it. …

Church closures are happening in every single corner of the country. North, south, east, west, rural, urban, doesn’t matter. 

Everyone knows many churches are closing. It’s also clear that many sanctuaries will live on as restaurants, condos, art galleries and offices for non-profits of all shapes and sizes. Oh, but some of them — if church officials allow — will be sold to people planting new churches or to growing congregations that need a new home.

But why are some churches growing, while others decline? My former GetReligion colleague Ryan Burge took on a related subject in a Substack post — “What Predicts Church Growth or Decline?” — that is must reading. Here is his bottom-line:

You can learn a whole lot about a church by looking at one simple thing: their location.

Such as: 

Nearly sixty percent of the fastest growing churches in the United States in 2021 were in the South. Just six percent were based in the northeast. That cannot be some type of coincidence. That data is overwhelmingly clear in this point — churches are growing faster in the South than other regions. Church growth is not random, it’s actually a function of geography. 

But what about the growing Sunbelt region in which I live? Why do some churches thrive, while others shrink? 

Consider these three questions, which an Anglican bishop from a growing diocese in Africa asked to bishops from fading churches in Europe and North America: “Where are your children? Where are your converts? Where are your priests?”

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