» 4. Decline

I’m reading Catholicism and modernity: Confrontation or capitulation? by James Hitchcock. Written in the late 1970s in the wake of Vatican II. He writes as an orthodox Catholic facing the growing liberalisation of his faith from within the Church.

There are striking parallels in the story of the Episcopalian demise in the US and Canada and [...]

I got mad the other day and wrote this piece. Fortunately I had the wisdom to check it with Michelle before publishing. She told me “don’t you dare!”. Too negative. Too many names named.

So it sat here amongst my drafts with instructions to publish it when I die. But I got tired of waiting to [...]

David Mills asks, If it’s true that religious bureaucracy deforms and hinders Christian ministry, what should be done?

Western churches must radically change the way they work. They must reorganize their lives, by exchanging a centralized system run by processes with impersonal rules and directed towards centrally chosen ends, for a decentralized system allowed to work [...]

Some wisdom from David Mills on why we must resist religious bureaucracy.

1. Religious bureaucracy tends to define the mission of the church as the continuing life and success of the institution as it is, which means, that its processes continue to process.

Bureaucratic processes prefer “process people,” people who by personality and usually conviction fit [...]

What’s going on when a religious movement becomes a religious bureaucracy? David Mills paints a terrifying picture of the damage they inflict.
Any revival in these (mainline) churches will require not the reform but the abandonment of the many layers of bureaucracy they have built up over the last few decades, giving the local bodies the [...]

Declining organizations don’t want to know the truth about their demise. They deceive themselves and others. They hide from painful reality. Until it is too late.

The exception is the Presbyterian Church (USA). They are to be commended for the courage to confront the brutal facts and to publish them online.

But do they have the right [...]

The Christian Century has some bad news for the US church. . .

Every year about 3,700 churches close their doors in the US. That’s one in one hundred churches. That makes 3,700 new churches required each year in the US just to maintain the status quo—if you forget about population growth.

Now for the good news [...]

The estimated cost of repairing all England’s 14,500 listed places of worship is almost £1,000,000,000 over the next decade – and that doesn’t include thousands more unlisted ecclesiastical buildings.

The bill is almost three times what the parishes, by the most optimistic calculation, could possibly raise. The statutory charity, the Churches Conservation Trust, will be able [...]

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I’ve been collecting historical and statistical data on church planting in Australia for the next1000 initiative.

It’s scary.

Not just the findings. . . . What is really scary is the flight from reality by so many denominations. They are intentionally that are hiding from the reality of their decline. Not only do they hide the data [...]

This animation of the Titanic sinking got me thinking about denominations that are in decline and in denial.

To help you pass the time as you go under, here’s 10 suggestions as you listen to the sound “Nearer my God to Thee”.

Blame it on external factors beyond your control. Use words like secularization, urbanization, and globilization.Turn [...]