The Great DeChurching:
Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back?
By Jim Davis and Michael Graham with Ryan P. Burge
A review by Dwight A. Moody
Everybody knows that church attendance (like lots of things) has declined over the last few decades (and especially over the last four years—post-COVID). But not many people know who is leaving and why. This is the focus of this book.
First, it must be explained that the two authors (Davis and Graham) are not social scientists with research training and experience; they are pastors, and pastors of a specific sort. They are strongly connected with the white evangelical culture in the United States, associated with the Keller Center for Cultural Apologetics, Grace Church in Orlando, Florida, and the national organization The Gospel Coalition (TGC).
Davis and Graham had the good sense to contract with two world-class scholars Ryan Burge, author of The Nones, and Paul Djupe author of The Full Armor of God. Both are professors and widely published authors, and both have been guests of mine in TheMeetingHouse. Burge and Djupe designed, administered, and interpreted the research, using standard sociological tools widely available to scholars, such as the General Social Survey and the Cooperative Election Study at Harvard University. In addition, Davis and Graham created three surveys, approved by the institutional Review Board at Denison University (where Djupe is a professor) which is standard professional protocol for such research.
Phase one interviewed 1,043 people, phase two 4,099 people, and phase three 2,043 people. All were dechurched people, by which they mean people who were formerly active in church attendance and activity but had ceased that activity. Dechurched people differ from unchurched people, a more familiar term, in that unchurched people have never been involved in church life. In general, their research supports the project thesis: “We are currently in the middle of the largest and fastest religious shift in the history of our country” (xxii).
Davis and Graham segregate these 40,000,000 dechurched people into five groups: cultural Christians, Evangelicals, Exvangelicals, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color), and (lumped together, Protestants and Catholics). Even this categorization reveals their real interest: who is leaving our Evangelical tribe and how can we get them back?
The remarkable thing about their research, expansively charted in this book, is how similar are the reasons people give for leaving and even now similar are the religious identities and convections of those who have left. Furthermore, they report (and explore extensively in the second part of this book) that the dechurched people confess that a renewal of their church life is most likely to come through friendships!
On page 48, the authors provide a chart identifying 13 reasons why these 40 million people have stopped attending church. It is worth listing in full:
Friends not attending 18%
Attending inconvenient 18%
Suffering shifted theology 17%
Gender issues 17%
Relocated 17%
Rules for sexual behavior 16%
Clerical scandals 16%
Moved to virtual worship 16%
Sermons not relevant 15%
Racial attitudes/episodes 15%
Other priorities/commitments 15%
Doubt the Christian message 15%
Doubt the existence of God 15%
None of us are surprised at anything on this list, largely because we all know people dear to us who have expressed one or more of these reservations. Throughout the book, the authors acknowledge that many communities and families have been ruptured by the departure of friends, neighbors, and children from religious services. It is, as we all know, a reality that has infected almost every family in the United States.
In part two of the book, Davis and Graham are less helpful. Their ministry in the Reformed and Evangelical community pushes them to emphasize the role of doctrine in identifying who is and who isn’t a Christian and also in defining what needs to be done to lure these dechurched people back to public worship. Sentences like this appear throughout the book: we church people “need to have a greater focus on spiritual formation and doctrine” (97). Why the ideas we believe are more important than the attitude we hold, the practices we engage, and the behaviors we exhibit is never clear.
Square in the midst of this sustained call for more doctrine and deeper friendships, Davis and Graham assert this: “what looks like defeat to many could really be the beginning of something special” (120). Alas, what they mean, it appears, is churches losing people by the millions need to keep doing what they are doing only do it better; this, they think, will motivate the dechurched to return to better versions of what turned them off. Absent throughout this book is any sense that it is the church that needs to change, that needs to give up ideas, practices, and behaviors on our way to being communities of faith, hope, and love more faithful to the dispositions and behaviors of Jesus our Lord. Jesus, in fact, plays a secondary role in their whole vision of Christian community!
Finally, one element of their “bring them back to church” strategy that struck me as positive is the trinity of attitudes: quiet, calm, and curious (145). I like especially the last. Curiosity is a key to many things, and it may go a long way to help church folk reconnect with former church folk. We need to know what they have experienced, what they desire, and how we can be a channel of blessing to them. Listening is one great gift the church needs today!
