Key Takeaways
- Focusing on the culture will lead to the decline of the church. The Western church’s attempts to conform to contemporary culture is resulting in its decline.
- Focusing on Biblical doctrine and mission will grow the church. The churches that are faithful to Biblical doctrines and mission are growing and thriving.
- The risk of attempting to make Christianity appealing to the modern mind is that we might render it redundant.
The mission field has reversed.
The landscape of global Christianity is undergoing a seismic shift.
In 1900, over 80% of the world’s Christians lived in Europe and North America. By 2020, that dynamic is completely flipped: more than 60% of the world’s 2.4 billion Christians now live in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Today the U.S. became the 5th largest nation with the most non-Christians residing within its geopolitical borders. The continent of Europe is reflecting an even more sobering reality.
For decades, a specific narrative dominated Western academic and media circles: that for Christianity to survive the modern world, it had to evolve, to adapt to the culture and it had to become more appealing. It needs to soften its demands, it needs to forget its teachings about Jesus as the only way to heaven, about sin, hell, resurrection or sexuality. Christianity needs to shed its supernatural claims, and align itself with the shifting winds of secular progressivism.
But history has delivered a remarkably different verdict. The data shows that the version of Christianity which compromised on doctrine to stay relevant is the very version facing institutional extinction, while traditional, mission-focused Christianity is thriving and growing globally.
No figure embodied this fatal paradox more than the former Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong. In his book Why Christianity Must Change or Die, Spong argued that traditional theism was a relic of a pre-scientific worldview. He denied the resurrection, the virgin birth, and the existence of hell. He warned that unless the church adopted his radically modernized theology, it would lose the modern world.
The irony is that the churches that followed Spong’s advice, did, in fact, die. Spong’s own diocese of Newark experienced some of the steepest declines in the entire Episcopal Church. The effort to save Christianity by secularizing it became the very medicine that killed the patient.
Data Shows: The Western Collapse is Continuous
The decline of Mainline Protestantism in the United States and across Western Europe is not recent; it is a continuous, 60 year collapse. While it is true that a broader wave of secularization has caused even conservative churches to experience losses since roughly 2006, liberal denominations are declining at two to three times the rate of their conservative counterparts.
The statistics from their peak in the mid-1960s to the 2020s tell a devastating story of institutional attrition. Both the United Methodist Church and the Episcopal Church lost appr. 55% of their members, the Presbyterian Church of America lost 74% of its members, Disciples of Christ lost 80% and the United Church of Christ lost 60% of their members. The demographic realities behind these numbers are even more stark. For every person who joins a mainline Protestant church, two people leave. In 2022, the Episcopal Church recorded three times as many deaths as baptisms. The average age in their pew is 59. This is an extinction, not just a decline.
The Reasons behind the Collapse
What led to the decline of the most educated, prestigious, historic and culturally respectable branch of American and European Christianity? Here are just four reasons:
The Loss of Doctrine
Many Western churches gave up the doctrine to follow the culture. They are driven by a desire to make Christianity appealing and relevant to the culture and to the modern mind. In their desire to make Christianity appealing they rendered it unnecessary. Once they adopted the culture values, they became irrelevant and redundant. Their modern cultural values became their doctrine. And they did with this message what modern culture does: colonizing the world.
When Western liberal denominations have tried to export their progressive theology to the Global South, it has been profoundly rejected by African Bishops saying: “Western Cultural Imperialism Masquerading as Theology”. The Western churches desire to please the culture and to adapt to modern cultural values and narratives led to major chasm between the Global South and Global North. In response to the liberal drift of the West, conservative global leaders formed the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON), which now represents the majority of practicing Anglicans worldwide. Peter Akinola, the former Archbishop of Nigeria, who led a church of approximately 20 million Anglicans bluntly stated that the Western church had abandoned the Christian faith.
The traditional mission field has effectively reversed, with the churches of the formerly colonized world now telling the churches of the former colonial powers that they have completely lost their way.
The desire to make Christianity acceptable to modern culture and science traces back to 19th-century German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher. Following the Enlightenment, educated Europeans became deeply skeptical of supernatural claims like miracles, the divinity of Christ, and the authority of the Bible. To save the faith from embarrassing its adherents in front of their intellectual peers, Schleiermacher argued that Christianity was fundamentally about a “feeling of absolute dependence,” making doctrines and miracles secondary. This set a template for liberal theology: whenever the surrounding culture objected to a traditional Christian teaching, theologians would reinterpret or abandon it, claiming it was never essential in the first place.
The Loss of Message
If a church only teaches the same message that people can get from secular culture (be tolerant, embrace diversity, accept sexual freedom and fight for social justice) then the church ceases to offer anything unique. People can get that message from a podcast, a volunteer organization, or a political rally.
When a church does not share its core message (the gospel, the resurrection, salvation, and a relationship with a loving God), the message that only the church has, then the church makes itself unnecessary. When the church gives up her message, then she gives up her power and abandons her mandate. The church without the gospel message becomes powerless and aimless. It will become just another social club.
The Loss of Demands
Many churches accommodate consumers. They compete for people walking into the building. They bend their message and programs to please the ear of people who are accustomed to a consumer mentality. Sociologist Dean Kelly noted in his 1972 study, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, that churches thrive when they make serious demands on their members. When a religion requires sacrifice, enforces moral standards, and claims exclusive truth, people take it seriously and invest their lives in it. When a church asks for nothing and blurs the lines with the surrounding culture, people have no compelling reason to show up. Low demands yield low commitment. This consumer-focused, low-demand mentality feeds into the phenomenon called, “The Walmartization of Christianity”. Where Walmart shows up, poverty grows because small businesses go bankrupt. Where megachurches are showing up, small churches are closing. In a megachurch people’s commitment and giving significantly declines. Their volunteer hours and finances are not needed as much as in a small community.
Jesus gave a very serious demand to his followers: pick up your cross, leave behind everything and follow me! That high demand yielded high commitment. High commitment led to great fruit and growth.
The Loss of Mission
Many denominations and churches forgot their missional mandate: demonstrating and proclaiming the saving message of the gospel of Jesus Christ, to represent her Lord and Savior in this world and pointing people to His Kingdom. They have increasingly become entangled with the cultural and political goals and parties. They function less as sacred institutions and more as political action committees with a religious taste. When a church’s public statements read like political press releases, it alienates those who don’t share that narrow ideological alignment and loses its identity as something set apart and sacred.
In 2013, pastor and author Tom Rener conducted a study analyzing the characteristics of both growing and declining churches in America. The research found that declining churches typically had inward-looking mission statements. Their focus was primarily directed toward the church itself, maintaining a pleasant, comfortable environment for their existing members. In contrast, growing churches utilized outward-looking mission statements. Rather than focusing on internal community maintenance, their missions were driven by goals they believed had eternal significance, such as encountering Christ, making disciples, and transforming lives through the gospel. The study revealed an impact: an outward-focused mission creates a vital sense of urgency, and urgency is inspirational and invitational. This urgent, eternal purpose motivates people to sacrifice their time, money, and personal comfort for the church’s cause.
The Future of the Church: Biblical Faithfulness and Mission
The data leaves us with a clear conclusion: The future of the global Church belongs to those who remain anchored in Biblical doctrine and relentlessly focused on an outward mission.
The churches that survive and thrive tomorrow will not be those that attempt to be relevant through compromise, but rather those that offer the modern culture a radical, unapologetic alternative to secularism. By maintaining their Biblical teaching, their distinct identity and high-commitment demands, these communities provide a sacred space of meaning that secular culture cannot replicate.