Recent episodes of Downton Abbey have focused a lot of attention on the way changing society in Britain led to the economic collapse of many estates owned by landed gentry. It struck me recently that this is a nice picture of the situation confronting churches in our time. Society has changed dramatically, and that doesn’t mean that churches cannot continue to have a role, but it probably does mean that they will either need to adapt to the new situation, or fade into obsolescence. Do you think that there is anything churches can learn from Downton Abbey?
Of related interest, two articles that I saw recently struck me as having opposing messages on this subject. On the one hand, there was a blog post from last year by Connor Wood asking about the decline in Mainline church attendance (see the chart below). On the other hand, there was an article about the way church membership declined in a church in Indiana after they fired their gay choir director (see also last year’s PRRI study on this – HT B. R. Gulker). And so there seem to be people who want churches that are like mainline churches, and yet there also clearly seems to be a decline in numbers.
And so others have suggested that the biggest factor in mainline church decline is low birth rates. And Zack Hunt reminds us that millennials, the generation that is typically the focus in discussions like these, is not monolithic.
See also Derek Penwell’s book, The Mainliner’s Survival Guide to the Post-Denominational World
What do readers of this blog think? Many people seem to be looking for more progressive forms of their faith tradition. And so why do those communities which offer what they are looking for have declining membership? Or are we going to see a major reversal of this trend soon?
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In