The Great Dechurching Will Hurt Poor People
Churchgoing is good for the poor and vulnerable in a variety of ways: it gives people moral guidance on how to live their lives. It gives them opportunities to directly serve others as a community. It results in tithes that are then spent on a wide variety of charitable works. These things are not salvation, and it is certainly possible for someone to be warming a pew for 50 years without a saving relationship with Jesus Christ. But any person is far more likely to find Jesus while nodding off in a pew than watching Netflix in bed.
It’s brutal to look at any decline this severe in any set of churches. While some conservatives may feel the temptation to smugly remark about the results of theological liberalism, that feels about as appropriate as a lecture about the dangers of drug addiction during the funeral of a young person who died of an overdose. Conservative evangelicals are facing their own demographic challenges, and non-denominational megachurches are overtaking denominational identity. The Great Dechurching is bad news for all Christians, no matter how you slice it.
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