Are People Ditching The Church But Keeping The Faith?

I was way too early. The roads were quiet, parking was a joy. But I quite like those moments of anticipatory anxiety, nervous energy, the voice in my head that asks me if I am up to it. I don’t think it’s God. When I walk through the revolving door and am handed a lanyard with my name on it, I usually take a photo, share it on Instagram, act a bit mysterious, It’s all a bit of a novelty. I almost enjoy the adrenaline of live radio. I’d like to do it more often to get better at it¹.

We chatted in the lift as he took me up to the greenroom. “I couldn’t believe how many runners there are out,” I said. “Like me?” he replied. I looked at him. I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to recognise BBC employees on the streets at 8am on a Sunday morning. “No like joggers,” I said as I added some explanatory movements with my arms and legs. I was impressed. He had transposed people exercising on the Sabbath into his world of guests and studios and bringing water and whatever else production assistants do. I was struck yet again by how easy it is to limit our perspectives to our own personal experiences, to our own cultural bubbles. I said it again about the runners to the man who arrived with a large notepad of scribbles, that we maybe need to get out of our pews, go into the parks, on to the greenways, to the beaches, the coffee shops, the gym, all the places people spend their day of rest. He had no idea who I was but then it helps that I’m not actually anybody so nobody really cares what I’m up to. I knew who he was. I had read up on his back story. I was glad he still attended online. In some ways, the church had ditched him. It was a relief he hadn’t lost his faith. I had two A4 pages of beautifully typed notes. I was prepared to use them regardless of the questions. But, I was never going to get the chance to say it all eloquently, effectively nor in the right order. “Did you get through it all?” the man with the notepad asked at the end. “Have three clear points you want to make and some stats,” said the producer. I made a note to approach it like a sermon next time, reference a survey. Everyone else had one of those to hand, mainly the recent census.

The topic was an important one, one that required more than twenty-five minutes of discussion. “Are people ditching the church but keeping the faith?”². I wanted to take a deep breath, start at the very beginning, cover the history of the church, Acts, the Lindesfarne Gospels, Hildegard of Bingen, the Reformation, the Westminster Confession, Bonhoeffer, the charismatic movement, the pandemic, how revival is not hysteria but renewed vision, revitalised spirits, the fact that humans psychologically retreat in times of crises, that churches would have been ideal places to press pause, to provide space to process the trauma of Covid but that this isn’t happening in the rush to get back to normal, that resisting things returning to the way they were before is not loss of faith. I was conscious the panel all had a faith, that they were unconsciously biased, on the inside looking out. It was important to hear from those on the outside looking in. I reckoned the church needed to conduct a few decent listening exercises. They could start by reaching out to the woman who texted in after the 10am news, who felt somewhat comforted that we were even talking about a topic she was wrestling with. I reckoned a lot of the judging needed to stop too - labelling discerners as consumers, questioners as doubters, peripatetics, nomads, wanderers as church-hoppers with commitment issues. I don’t think people have lost their faith. They’re just not worshipping in the same way, in the same place, all the time anymore. Many are searching for more - more depth, more growth. They are spiritually hungry, yearning for the intimacy of true Christian community, for more authenticity and vulnerability, accountability, not a quick, polite chat in the carpark, but a journeying together through the messiness of life. There are those who want to emulate Jesus, who want to love their neighbour, to move beyond their social circle, to others they can’t easily identify with. People want to be part of something bigger, to grasp how their church can be missional in its context and serve the community around it. They want to understand what lived-out faith means, that it’s not just how they present themselves on a Sunday morning, but how they present themselves all week - at work, with their friends and families, in their book clubs and running clubs, in the supermarket, in the school playground. They want less rules. They want to feel less stifled, less guilty, to embrace freedom in Christ, to find adventure, to take risks, to follow the call to leave their comfort zone and move on. They are looking for churches that are willing to engage in the tricky, divisive subjects, who offer nuance not a party line. They are looking for inclusive cultures, ones where all types of people are visible and represented. They want to get off the treadmill of activity, to not be burned out again, stuck in an endless cycle of meetings, attending yet another seminar on leadership, left to run the badminton club. Or maybe, ‘they’ is just me. You tell me.

By Sunday teatime, I’d been available to download on BBC Sounds for a few hours. I’d over-analysed my contribution, sent the link to my mother. She couldn’t get it to open, didn’t think it was relevant to her as she hadn’t been to church since 1976. I went to a mission service. I had a small part to play in the running order. I wasn’t sure if I’d get the cold shoulder, if I’d let down my denomination, if I’d been too honest. I wasn’t anyone’s employee but I had emphasised it was all personal opinion. The worry was completely unnecessary. No-one seemed to have listened. “I avoid Sunday Sequence like the plaque,” said a fellow contributor. He might as well have said I close my ears. It was an exclusive gathering. I wondered what an alien would make of it if they dropped in from outer space, what someone who’d never walked through a church door before would make of it. I was mindful of the little boy often quoted by one of my favourite preachers. “Mister, what do they do in that building?”. I read out a prayer, one I’d prepared earlier. I prayed for courage to lay down the past, a willingness to accept the realities of the present. It felt so inadequate without any accompanying action to envisage the future. When a ‘thank you for participating’ email arrived, there was a reminder about being positive to counteract all the recent negative press. I hoped it wasn’t directed at me. I’m not convinced that we aren’t confusing realism with negativity, saying all the right things with positivity, that we might be forgetting that alongside placing our hope in a Saviour, we also need to tackle the elephants in the room. “I guess prophets are those who do not care whether you are ready to hear their message. They say it because it has to be said and because it’s true”³. The prophetic is not just encouraging words. Its purpose is to pave the way for the Gospel to progress in uncharted places⁴.

“Why do we keep seeing the culture outside as against us?” I said a week later. I wasn’t planning to start an argument with an elderly gentleman at a church I didn’t actually belong to but I was tiring of that continually-perpetuating bemoaning that the church is constantly under external attack. “What the Northern Irish church suffers from is a belief that it has lost its place in the culture and it interprets this as persecution,” said the lecturer at the course I attend on Thursday mornings. “But we still live in a free society,” he said, “we have no idea what persecution is”.

I’d listened to a podcast, been pleased to squeeze a quote from it on to the radio. I was becoming more and more convinced that there was another culture we needed to tackle. “People are starting to realise that perhaps their faith has been built on a shared culture rather than on a shared understanding of a Saviour,” it said. “There’s a church machine that perpetuates a church culture. People have been giving themselves to sustaining the church rather than enacting the mission of God in the world”. “Why do you think churches fail to see disciple making as their main thing?” was the question asked at the event where I told the elderly gentleman it was nice to meet him even though he’d been clear that having four children, a full-time job and a husband that travelled was no excuse for not taking myself to a quiet room and praying regularly on my knees. “Legacy - we do what we’ve always done,” said one person. “We have made God in our image to fit our culture,” said another, “white, male and middle-class”. “We think that’s what we are doing,” said a third. “We’re too busy doing other things,” was the most common response.

“If change and growth are not programmed into your spirituality … your religion will always end up worshipping the status quo, protecting your present ego position and personal advantage …. as if it were God”⁵. “Churches that will not let that (machine) die are dying. The churches that are growing are the ones that are willing to let the machine die”⁶. Yes, some are definitely ditching the church. It is in decline, suffering from a range of operational issues - reduced commitment from its members, reduced capacity to run its programmes, a reluctance to enter difficult contexts but these are probably symptoms of a much larger problem, evidence of an internal culture that has lost its strategic vision, that urgently needs to consider change. If there is no desire to acknowledge the impact of the existing internal culture, a refusal to look inwardly, a tendency to continually blame an external culture, then there is a strong likelihood that churches will continue their decline.

Are people ditching the church but keeping the faith? Twenty-five minutes isn’t enough, 1500 words isn’t either. Thank you for making it this far. I’m listening. I’d like to hear what you have to say….

[1] Hint…

[2] BBC Sunday Sequence 5 March https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001js16 (external link)

[3] Falling Upward, Richard Rohr

[4] Reframing The Prophetic https://theodisc.podbean.com/e/christine-westhoff-reframing-the-prophetic/ (external link)

[5] Falling Upward, Richard Rohr

[6] The podcast https://theodisc.podbean.com/e/bev-murrill-the-leadership-landscape/ (external link)

*I have a new publication on Substack called ‘Days Like This’. I will be consolidating my writing and monthly newsletter there and winding down on Medium. If you would like to connect with me there plus engage with a wider community of people interested in the topics I write about, you can find me on Substack at https://deborahsloan.substack.com/.