What's changed inside churches?
On declining attendance, fitness trackers, and the tough questions churches have to answer in a changing world
The Catholic Archdiocese of Dubuque, Iowa, has announced a plan to consolidate pastoral services across its region. The archbishop himself cited a striking statistic: Mass attendance has fallen by 46% in the last 20 years.
■ It’s not uncommon to hear about declining attendance at conventional religious institutions in America (like Catholic and mainline Protestant churches). Some of the change may reflect changing theological commitment, to be sure. But that doesn’t account for the entire decline.
■ Church leaders who are serious about the viability of their ministries need to ask themselves a pointed question: What about the experience has improved meaningfully since the turn of the century? Not on a superficial level, but on a real and human one -- what’s gotten better?
■ Except for cloistered or monastic communities, most churches exist within an extensive surrounding world. In that world, people have experienced some overwhelming changes, from handheld supercomputers to self-driving cars. Many of the changes start with technologies, but they go on to affect behavior -- consider the near-ubiquity of fitness trackers, and how a phrase like “Closing my rings” is full of behavioral meaning.
■ What has gotten better inside the churches? Has the preaching improved? The outreach? The anticipation of needs? The individualized pastoral care? The skillful delivery of charitable community services? The attention to new and difficult ontological questions uncovered by developments like artificial intelligence?
■ If the answer to all of those questions is nothing but a shrug, then that’s the difference between manageable contraction and terminal decline. Most people don’t expect perfection, but they do reasonably expect improvement. It can be incremental, it can be cautious, and it can be mild. But it needs to be something.