They plan to satisfy one last time on Sunday – the handful of mostly elderly members of the First Baptist Church in Mt. Vernon, Illinois.
They say the Lord's Prayer, recite the Apostles' Creed, and listen to a passage typically used at funerals: “To everything there is a time… a time to be born, and a time to die.” They sing classic hymns – “Amazing Grace,” “It Is Well With My Soul,” and, poignantly, “God Be With You Till We Meet Again.”
Members will then vote on whether to shut the church, a century and a half after it was founded by poor farmers on this community of 14,000 in southern Illinois.
Many U.S. churches close their doors yearly, often with little fanfare. But this closing has a poignant twist.
First Baptist pastor Ryan Burge spends much of his time as a researcher documenting the dramatic decline in religious affiliation over the past few many years. His latest book, The Nones, focuses on the estimated 30% of American adults who don’t discover with any religious tradition.
One way he uses his research is to assist other pastors who want to achieve their congregations. He can be often invited to fly across the country and speak to audiences far larger than his weekly congregation.
But it shouldn’t be a tutorial abstraction. Burge has experienced the fact of his research every Sunday morning within the increasingly empty pews of the spacious nave, built to accommodate tons of of individuals throughout the years of peak churchgoing within the mid-Twentieth century.
“It's strange that I've become something of an expert on church growth, and yet my church is dying,” says Burge, a political science major at Eastern Illinois University. “I often try to figure out how much blame I bear for what's happening around me.”
Burge took over the leadership of the congregation in 2006, when “there were about 50 people on a good Sunday,” he recalls. In the years that followed, he earned a doctorate and worked as a professor. He developed a big readership online and in print, partly by turning extensive statistical tables into easy-to-understand graphs of non secular trends.
During all this time he remained pastor of the small church.
“I admit that I'm not as good a pastor as I could or should be,” he said. “But I also don't admit that it's 100% my fault. If you look at the macro-level trends that are playing out in modern American religion, it's difficult to build a church in America today, regardless of denomination. And in many places, there are far more headwinds than tailwinds.”
The American Baptist Church is a component of a bunch of so-called mainline denominations – Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans and others that after played central roles of their communities but whose membership numbers have declined dramatically. The country's largest evangelical denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, can be losing members.
Although there is no such thing as a annual survey of closed churches within the United States, in line with Lifeway Research, a company affiliated with the Southern Baptists, about 4,500 Protestant churches were closed in 2019.
Scholars say churches are shrinking for quite a lot of reasons – scandals, conflict, mobility, indifference, lower birth rates, members switching to a church they value more highly. Sure, most Americans remain religious, and a few larger churches are thriving while many smaller ones are shrinking. Some polls suggest that the long rise of the “unaffiliated” has slowed or stalled.
Yet nonreligious persons are way more common within the United States today than they were a generation ago. many other nations.
“If Billy Graham had been born in 1975 instead of 1918, I don’t think he would have been as successful, because he reached its peak “right around the time when the baby boom was starting and America was really craving religion,” Burge said.
The situation is particularly difficult where communities are shrinking, such as in the Rust Belt and rural areas.
Burge hopes his research and personal experience can provide some comfort to other pastors in similar situations.
“It's not all your fault,” he said. “You know, in the 1950s you could be a terrible pastor and still build a church because there was so much growth all over America. It doesn't seem that way anymore.”
Eighty-year-old Gail Farnham has witnessed this development in church life first-hand.
Her family began attending First Baptist Church when she was 5. Her parents quickly became involved as volunteers and “never looked back,” she recalls. Like many American families in the '50s, they joined during the booming growth of church involvement. First Baptist peaked at about 670 members by mid-century, leading to the construction of a large new church building and a number of Sunday school classrooms.
Farnham raised her own children in the church and continues to serve in an important leadership role as a moderator of the congregation.
The First Baptist Church has had its share of divisions and controversies in the past, but has largely followed the typical pattern of many Protestant churches, flourishing in the 1950s and only gradually losing its sustainability. Last Sunday there were eight believers in attendance.
The remaining members, especially the older ones, have found a new mission in recent years despite the uncertain future. They participated in a program to provide packed lunches for needy school children. At times they were able to provide 300 meals a week.
The closure was “bittersweet,” Farnham said.
Now everyone, including Burge, can be searching for a brand new church. “I've been preaching every Sunday since August 2005 and I need to be a member of a church for a while, not just be at the front,” he said.
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