The Great De-Churching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back? by Jim Davis and Michael Graham. Zondervan, 2023, xxiv, 242 pages, $29.99.

Jim Davis is a pastor and Michael Graham a member of a Reformed Baptist congregation outside Orlando. Together they offer their analysis of the profound “dechurching of America” that has taken place over the past 25 years. The number is staggering (40 million by their reckoning). Their extensive research indicates that this is happening in all denominations, but the reasons are quite varied. This book is their effort to help churches reverse this trend, with evangelicals as their primary readership.

They divide the dechurched into five groups, and the first half of the book profiles each of them. Among the first four groups are “cultural Christians,” the least theologically orthodox, who account for 52 percent of the total dechurched. Cultural Christians leave for reasons that include inconvenience and not finding their friends attending. Then there are the dechurched mainstream evangelicals, whose orthodoxy often exceeds the still-churched mainstream evangelicals, but they have relocated or fallen into bad habits (perhaps COVID-induced), or otherwise “casually” dechurched. Thirdly, “evangelicals” include growing numbers whom the church has disappointed, offended, hurt, or even abused. The fourth group is BIPOC (black, indigenous, and people of color), many of whom struggle to fit in or belong to their congregation.

The fifth category are outliers: the dechurched among the mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics. Ought we to be surprised or even disappointed that corrupt churches are in decline? And if they were never in a true church, ought we really to consider them “dechurched”? A similar question can be raised with the exodus of cultural Christians. The low orthodoxy scores of this group raise the question of whether they were ever meaningfully churched. When the numbers of these two categories are combined, the crisis of a “great dechurching” may be less than the alarms of this book warrant.

An additional cause for skepticism is the low baseline for defining “churched.” “For the purposes of our study,” they write, “we defined a dechurched person as someone who used to go at least once per month” (xxii). It stretches credulity to imagine that a monthly church attender is “churched” or a “religious adherent” in any meaningful way. The better way to describe anyone who answers the call to worship less than 25 percent of the time (except the providentially hindered) is unchurched.

Still, the book has its value, and the last section on “Lessons for the Church” is worth reading. Just as the wise preacher applies the word in different ways for different kinds of hearers in the congregation, so ministers and elders should study the different reasons for leaving the church. Particularly helpful are the “key awarenesses” that comprise relational wisdom and maturity (133–45). The authors rightly challenge the church today to be both confessional and missional (chapter 13), in the proper senses of those frequently misunderstood terms.

This reviewer wonders whether dechurching might apply also to matters the authors do not address. Over the course of the last half century, the nearly universal practice of Sunday evening service has done an astonishing disappearing act in almost all quarters of American Protestantism. Might reducing the preached Word in half, itself constitute functional dechurching? Are departing souls already in a state of spiritual malnourishment? Do we create an offramp for the dechurched when we turn the Lord’s Day into an hour?

The authors lament the missed generational “handoff” in churches (the focus of chapter 10). However, more should be said about the pastoral care for the children and youth in the church. Consider the rise of “children’s church” in evangelical circles, where covenant children are excused from at least part (and sometimes all) of the worship service generally until third grade and increasingly as late as middle school. Are we guilty of dechurching our children? After all, are not parents to nurture children by their example of singing, praying, and attentively hearing the Word of God?

While teens may be attending worship, often their main church social network is the youth program, often outsourced to a youth “specialist.” James K. A. Smith has rightly described the ensuing youth detachment from the life of the church as “excarnational”[1]: they have been figuratively disembodied or dechurched. It is a great indictment of the practice of youth ministry when the authors note that both the mainstream evangelical and mainline Protestant dechurched had high rates of youth group involvement in their church past (pages 60 and 105). The result has been what sociologist Christian Smith called moralistic therapeutic deism: an astonishing inarticulateness of the faith in which they were raised. To be fair, the authors issue a call for more systematic discipleship, and they even commend catechesis. But greater thought must be given to the environment where this can effectively take place.

Chapter 14 encourages readers to “embrace exile.” Here there are helpful observations on the character of post-Christian America. However, there is also a misunderstanding of the biblical teaching on exile. One of the authors trivializes matters when he describes his exile as leaving a pastorate in the deep south where he enjoyed the benefits of “free golf and discounted luxury items” to take a call to a church in the “largely dechurched context of Orlando” (216). Whatever the toll to his golf game, he is not describing the biblical call to exile. The authors further assert that American Christians have not “lived in exile for the past few hundred years,” because they enjoyed “comfort and power in society as Christians” (218). Biblically, exile does not refer to being marginalized in an unfamiliar culture or even a negative world. Exile describes the redemptive-historical location of the church seeking a better country and living by faith in the promises yet unseen. This is the state of the church in all times and places, and it will continue until the return of our Lord. It calls for patient endurance through suffering, which is Paul’s constant prayer for the churches he was shepherding. In this book, the language of suffering yields to the frequent call for “human flourishing.” While we are called to seek the welfare of the city to which we are called in exile, talk of flourishing presents a peculiarly upper middle class western picture of the Christian life.

A little over fifty years ago—at the start of the dechurching trends this book analyzes—sociologist Dean M. Kelley wrote Why Conservative Churches are Growing. Commissioned by the National Council of Churches to study the decline of mainline churches (already in freefall), Kelley presented a counterintuitive thesis: Conservative churches’ strict demands for the belief and the behavior of its members were precisely their keys for growth. By minimizing the duties of discipleship, liberal churches began their rapid decline, as their messaging became indistinct from the wisdom of the world. Kelley’s thesis generated howls of protest and plenty of ridicule, but it has yet to be refuted. However, the high expectations for church membership that Kelley described are absent from this book. Perhaps the great dechurching today owes itself to evangelicals’ embracing of the mainline recipe for failure.

Endnote

[1] James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Brazos, 2016), 146.

John R. Muether serves as a ruling elder at Reformation Orthodox Presbyterian Church, Oviedo, Florida, and as Dean of Libraries at Reformed Theological Seminary. He is a former historian of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Ordained Servant Online, March, 2025.