{"id":12374,"date":"2025-01-06T13:28:23","date_gmt":"2025-01-06T18:28:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/christnewstoday\/?p=12374"},"modified":"2025-01-06T13:36:47","modified_gmt":"2025-01-06T18:36:47","slug":"churches-struggle-to-keep-their-doors-open-as-attendance-continues-to-decline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/christnewstoday\/2025\/01\/churches-struggle-to-keep-their-doors-open-as-attendance-continues-to-decline.html","title":{"rendered":"Churches Struggle to Keep their Doors Open as Attendance Continues to Decline"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Adobe Stock<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Christmastime remains one of the biggest days of the year for church attendance, but even such a spike cannot overcome the reality of increased church closings. To date, 45 percent of Americans state they are part of a church, synagogue, mosque or temple, with only 32 percent stating they attend a house of prayer. In 2019, 4500 Protestant churches closed<\/a>, while only 3,000 opened, making it the first year that the number of churches being added to the country had declined. The Covid-19 pandemic further exasperated many churches\u2019 problems, with many churches still struggling to recover congregants lost during forced shutdowns. \u201cThe closures, even for a temporary period of time, impacted a lot of churches. People breaking that habit of attending church means a lot of churches had to work hard to get people back to attending again,\u201d said Scott McConnell, executive director at Lifeway Research. \u201cBoomers are about 20 percent ‘nones’ and Gen Z is about 45 percent ‘nones,’ so you’re just seeing this kind of slow wave sweep across America,” said Ryan Burge<\/a> author of\u00a0The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going.<\/em> \u201cEvery year the pews are getting emptier and the collection plates getting lighter. We’re going to see thousands of churches closing in America over the next 20 or 30 years in every part of the country, in every region and every state, urban, suburban, rural.\u201d Burge oversaw the closing of his own church<\/a> in Mt. Vernon, IL this past July.<\/p>\n

Lower attendance has required some churches to get creative with ways of keeping the doors open. For example, the First United Methodist Church<\/a> in Atlanta is having affordable housing being built on its land. Having affordable housing will help the church continue to serve its community while also offering it a way of helping its revenue. Some churches in areas where real estate is in short supply can be sold for a profit, but other churches in rural or poor areas may end up sitting vacant for long periods of time.<\/p>\n

The US\u2019s trajectory towards dwindling church attendance follows the earlier waves that have occurred in places like Canada and the UK. \u201cCanada, Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, the nones rise much earlier, the wake of the 1960s the baby boom generation, this kind of big, growing separation of kind of traditional Christian moral morality,\u201d said<\/a> Stephen Bullivant, author of Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America. <\/em>In certain states, however, like Texas, the decline has been less pronounced, particularly since Texas was less restrictive of churches during the pandemic. John Muzyka of Church Realty said church sales in the area are down and that churches need to learn to adapt. \u201cIf the church ages and doesn\u2019t reach young people, or the demographics change and they don\u2019t figure out how to reach the new demographic, that church ends up closing,\u201d said Muzyka. \u201cYes, there\u2019s financial pressures that will close a church, but oftentimes, it\u2019s more that they didn\u2019t figure out how to change when the community changed, or they didn\u2019t have enough young people to continue the congregation for the next generation.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christmastime remains one of the biggest days of the year for church attendance, but even such a spike cannot overcome the reality of increased church closings. To date, 45 percent of Americans state they are part of a church, synagogue, mosque or temple, with only 32 percent stating they attend a house of prayer. In…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":627,"featured_media":12371,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fbia_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[140],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-church"],"yoast_head":"\nChurches Struggle to Keep their Doors Open as Attendance Continues to Decline<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/christnewstoday\/2025\/01\/churches-struggle-to-keep-their-doors-open-as-attendance-continues-to-decline.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Churches Struggle to Keep their Doors Open as Attendance Continues to Decline\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Christmastime remains one of the biggest days of the year for church attendance, but even such a spike cannot overcome the reality of increased church closings. 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