Americans leaving churches in droves

“Quitting Church: Why the Faithful Are Fleeing and What to Do About It” (Baker Books) is the new book by Julia Duin, assistant national editor (religion) at The Washington Times. In this excerpt, she details her personal experience and survey numbers showing the difficulties evangelical churches have with keeping their members.

“You’re not going to church?” I asked him.

It was his birthday, so we had met for dinner at the Olive Garden, one of our favorite Italian restaurants. He shook his head. “Matt,” I will call him, was legally blind and unable to drive. That and a few other handicaps had not prevented him from having a decent-paying job with the U.S. government, from amassing a world-class library in his home, and from being the go-to guy with answers to all my questions about Reformed theology.

But here he was, disconsolate. A reporter by trade, I dragged his story out of him.

“I don’t mind taking the metro to church, but you know me,” he said. “I’m pretty Reformed, and the kind of church I like is always at least two miles from the nearest stop.”

I named a church in Alexandria, a posh suburb with its own historic district. He’d been going there the last time we talked.

“Oh, they promised they’d find me a family that could pick me up,” he said. “And they did, for a while. Then they started forgetting I was there. It was like Russian roulette. I would get dressed and wait for them, but I never knew which Sunday they’d actually show up at my front door.”

By the time he’d get this family on their cell phone, they’d already be in the church parking lot and in no mood to double back and get him. When he brought this up to the leaders at his church, they told him he was on his own. Finally, he just quit going for more than a year. No one from his church ever called to ask where he was. He contacted some other churches, but none would offer him any help in getting to their services.

Others leave

I was stunned. If anyone was in love with God, it was Matt. He was single and male, rare in church these days. But no one wanted him. In fact, no one wanted a bunch of my friends.

There was Gwen in Salem, Ore., whose pastor would never say more than a few words to her. Struggling to bring up three kids alone, she could have used his moral support. “But pastors don’t pal around with single moms,” she told me. “Too many needs and we’re not big enough givers.” She finally dropped out of her Pentecostal congregation.

Then there were Paul and Ed, two journalist friends in Richmond and Casper, Wyo. Both brilliant evangelical men, they told me they loved the Lord but couldn’t live with the paucity of spiritual maturity in every congregation they visited. Both were now church dropouts.

And there was Maeve, a married friend whose husband had talked back to the elders at their former congregation, a large Bible church also in northern Virginia. The elders kicked them both out. This couple found some refuge in a smaller, evangelical congregation, but, “I go only out of obedience,” she told me over lunch one day.

She was referring to the admonition in Hebrews 10:25 against “forsaking the assembling of ourselves together,” a verse commonly used to exhort one’s friends not to skip out on other Christians and, by extension, the Lord. The verse is framed with commands to “consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works” and that Christians should be “exhorting one another.”

Story Continues →