Lyle Schaller

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Podcast: Why are churches closing? There are many forces at work, but doctrine still matters

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Podcast: Why are churches closing? There are many forces at work, but doctrine still matters

For years, there was a simple answer to the old question: Why do some churches grow, while others shrink?

You simply bought a copy of the 1972 book “Why Conservative Churches Are Growing: A Study in Sociology of Religion” by the late National Council of Churches leader Dean M. Kelley and that provided information answering lots (but not all) of the big questions. It was crucial that this groundbreaking book was written by a mainline Protestant insider, as opposed to a Southern Baptist or Assemblies of God leader.

Of course, everyone knew that some churches grew because of location, location, location. Also, there were always a few liberal churches that grew because of talented preachers or other strengths. Like I said: Kelley answered lots of church-decline questions, but not all of them.

What about 2022 in post-pandemic church life? For starters, many churches will never be post-pandemic — because many congregations (and maybe denominations or communions) were changed forever and we will see more evidence of that in the next few years.

All of this is an overture to this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in) which focuses on a must-read feature story by Godbeat veteran Bob Smietana. The headline at Religion News Service: “For a small Chicago church, closing down was an act of faith.” This was a personal, heartfelt story for Smietana, since this was a congregation that he once called home.

Like so many pastors around the United States, the Rev. Amanda Olson has kept one eye on the Bible and another on the evolving religious landscape.

She knew change was coming to the church in America.

Yet she hoped her congregation might be spared the worst of it.

“Everyone thinks that churches are going to close,” said Olson, the longtime pastor of Grace Evangelical Covenant Church on Chicago’s North Side. “But nobody thinks it is going to be their church.”


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When is the Midnight Mass? All humor aside, there's history (and news) linked to this rite

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When is the Midnight Mass? All humor aside, there's history (and news) linked to this rite

Once upon a time, before the creation of the Internet, there were these very, very powerful and all-knowing professionals known as “church secretaries.” Yes, I know that they have evolved into office managers and web czarinas.

But, long ago, if anyone needed to know something about church life, or really needed to reach the pastor (this is before smartphones, too), they called the “church secretary,” who basically served as an air-traffic-controller for everything happing in the church family.

Back in the 1980s, I wrote a news piece for The Rocky Mountain News (#RIP) about the question that church secretaries in Catholic parishes used to dread hearing over and over during the three or four days ahead of Christmas Eve. That question, of course, was: “When is the Midnight Mass?”

Honest. People would ask that and, truth be told, the Midnight Mass, in some parishes, doesn’t start at midnight. Hold that thought, because we will come back to it.

But this post, in the week before Christmas (for most Christians in America), is about the importance of the Midnight Mass and other Christmas Eve and Christmas services. You see, there are potential news stories here. Let’s discuss several of them, briefly.

First, there is an interesting fact that I learned long ago from the late Lyle Schaller, a Mainline Protestant maven who was an often-quoted expert on church growth and, as the Mainline world imploded, church survival. The easiest way to sum up the Christmas news angle that I learned from him is to share the top of a 2015 tribute column that I wrote about his work (“Lyle Schaller, the church fix-it man in rapidly changing times”):

All pastors know that there are legions of "Easter Christians" who make it their tradition to dress up once a year and touch base with God.

What can pastors do? Not much, said the late, great church-management guru Lyle Schaller, while discussing these red-letter days on the calendar. Rather than worrying about that Easter crowd, he urged church leaders to look for new faces at Christmas.


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Next big news story: After 40 years of war, is United Methodist establishment ready to bargain?

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The late Lyle E. Schaller was always popular with journalists because he had the rare ability to dig deep into statistics and demographics, while speaking in direct-quote friendly language. But it was always hard to know what to call him. He was an expert on church-growth trends. But he was also a United Methodist. Wait for it.

Schaller used to laugh whenever he was called a “United Methodist church-growth expert,” in part because of that flock’s serious decline in membership over the past quarter-century or more. If he was a church-growth pro, why didn’t his own denomination listen to him? It was something like being an expert on Baptist liturgy, Episcopal evangelism or Eastern Orthodox praise bands.

But when Schaller talked about the future, lots of people listened. Check out this material from a column I wrote about him entitled, “United Methodists: Breaking up is hard to do.”

One side is convinced the United Methodist Church has cancer. The other disagrees and rejects calls for surgery. It's hard to find a safe, happy compromise when the issue is a cancer diagnosis. …

So it raised eyebrows when United Methodism's best-known expert on church growth and decay called for open discussions of strategies to split or radically restructure the national church. Research indicates that United Methodists are increasingly polarized around issues of scripture, salvation, sexuality, money, politics, multiculturalism, church government, worship and even the identity of God, said the Rev. Lyle E. Schaller of Naperville, Ill.

Many people are in denial, while their … church continues to age and decline, he said, in the Circuit Rider magazine for United Methodist clergy. Others know what's happening, yet remain passive.

Sports fans, That. Was. In. 1998.

Schaller told me that he was basing his diagnosis on the open doctrinal warfare that began two decades earlier, in the late 1970s. He was very familiar with a prophetic study that emerged from Duke Divinity School in the mid-1980s, entitled “The Seven Churches of Methodism."

Do I need to say that Schaller’s words are highly relevant in light of the acid-bath drama in yesterday’s final hours at that special United Methodist conference in St. Louis (GetReligion posts here and then here)?

But this is old news, really. Activists on both sides of this struggle have been doing the math (see my 2004 column on that topic) for four decades.


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'Tis the season: GetReligionista work slows a bit, but we will still be paying attention

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So it is Thursday afternoon. And next Monday is Christmas Eve, which will be a holiday for gazillions of people.

In front of that Monday, we have an ordinary weekend. #DUH

That means that lots of folks can skip work on Friday, as in tomorrow, and end up with how many days off in a row? Five or six — for the cost of one vacation day — depending how their office managers handle The Holidays?

So that sound you keep hearing outside your window, this afternoon, may be car doors slamming as people toss packages (or their suitcases, if headed to the airport) in the back of cars as they prepare to head hither and thither and yon. Some of us older folks, of course, will be joyfully preparing for cars to pull into our driveways containing loved ones — some wearing tiny shoes, in which to dash around the house.

So, what’s the point of this meditation?

Some of your GetReligionistas are already on the road and others will soon depart. Work here at the website will slow down, but our cyber-doors will not be locked tight. You can expect, as usual, a post a day, or maybe two, during the Christmas-New Year’s Day season.

I will be at home near a keyboard most of the days between now and, oh, Jan. 2 or thereabouts — but will have a chance, as always, to flee to the mountains of North Carolina, where Wifi and strong cellphone signals are often a matter of theory, rather than reality.

Let me stress, that we still want to hear from readers!

This is, after all, a time of year in which even the most cynical editor/producer has been known to gaze at the newsroom and mutter, “Somebody get out there and do a story about Christmas. I hear that has something to do with religion, maybe.”

The results are can be glorious or fallen. We are interested in both. Please keep sending us URLs for news that caught your eye.


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Bah, humbug! The annual quest to find a valid Christmas news story

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Bah, humbug! The annual quest to find a valid Christmas news story

Brace yourself, religion-news consumers, because we are entering the days appointed for "Christmas stories," care of journalists at major magazines, newspapers and television networks.

"Christmas stories" are very similar to "Easter stories." The only requirements, in most cases, is that they have something to do with religion, provide colorful art (festive or tear-jerking) and, if at all possible, allow the use of the name of the season in the headline.

In newsrooms without religion-beat specialists, general-assignment reporters probably hide under their desks about two or three weeks before Dec. 25, trying not to catch the eye of the assignment editor who has been given the thankless task of finding this year's alleged "Christmas story" for A1.

The quest for a valid "Christmas" news story was the topic that "Crossroads" host Todd Wilken and I tackled in this week's podcast. Click here to tune that in.

You can end up with some really strange, usually shallow, stories this time of year. Our own Julia Duin recently took a look at one of these quickie stories, from The Denver Post.

Long ago, in a city that will not be named, I saw a classic example. One of the big weekly newsmags had a cover story on the whole "does prayer work" question. A week or so later, the daily newspaper had an A1 story -- literally with praying hands and a rosary, if I recall -- about trends in prayer.

You could tell, looking at the sources quoted, that an editor had seen the magazine cover and had walked into the newsroom, found a reporter who was looking the other way, tapped them on the shoulder and said, "We need a (insert holiday name here) story. It looks like prayer is in the news. Go write me a story about prayer."


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