The Vanishing Church and Faith Retention
My essay “How Do Our Kids Stay Christian?” has been included in Mere Orthodoxy‘s inaugural ebook, Spiritual Formation for the Family. If you become a member of MO you have access to this and all future ebooks. That essay was the origin of Keeping Kids Christian, which is published in one week! You can find it for pre-order with free shipping at BakerBookHouse.com; on pre-order and 40% off at Westminster Books (it was WTS Books’ promotional focus last week, which was cool and humbling); and for pre-order at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Christianbook.com.
Ryan Burge is the guru sociologist of religion who writes at Graphs about Religion. I’ve followed and appreciated his work for years now, and have read all of his books. His most recent is The Vanishing Church. It explores the decline of the mainline tradition and its central thesis is that the moderate sensibilities of mainline congregations couldn’t handle the increased polarization of American culture and that very sensibility is something desperately needed to moderate the most extreme impulses in our society, both religious and secular. It was classic Burge: lots of statistics that are easy to digest, the familiar recounting of the American religious landscape over the last 75 years, with the vulnerability of a pastor whose church shut its doors.
What left me scratching my head was how he contrasted mainline with evangelical sensibilities when it comes to Christian discipleship…
Three Stages of Religious Decline
Keeping Kids Christian: Recovering a Biblical Vision for Lifelong Discipleship comes out in just under a month. You find it for pre-order for 40% off with free shipping at BakerBookHouse.com; on pre-order and discounted on Amazon and Westminster Books; and at Barnes & Noble and Christianbook.com.
There is a decent time-lapse between writing a book and its publication. In this case, I submitted my manuscript in mid-January 2025 and it’s officially out 13 months later. One of the inevitabilities that occurs in that gap is the publication of something relevant that would have been really helpful to engage.
In August 2025, a group of researchers published “The three stages of religious decline around the world” in Nature Communications. The secularization transition hypothesis is that countries become less religious and more secular over a 200-year span. As nations become more industrialized and modern, the importance of religious symbols and rituals to bind the country together and present solutions to life’s problems fades, and the people gradually become less religious. This hypothesis has been criticized as being overly focused on Western, traditionally Christian nations, and the researchers sought to establish whether it could extend to non-Western, non-Christian nations.
The researchers “propose that secularization follows a consistent sequence: first, participation in public rituals declines; second, importance of religion drops, and third, people shed their formal belonging. We refer to this as the Participation–Importance–Belonging (P-I-B) sequence…
Passing Down Christianity and Adult Children
Keeping Kids Christian: Recovering a Biblical Vision for Lifelong Discipleship comes out in a month. I’m excited about my first book, which is being published by Baker Books. You find it for pre-order for 40% off with free shipping at BakerBookHouse.com, and also on pre-order and discounted on Amazon and Westminster Books.
Ryan Burge has a good article examining weekly religious service attendance based on birth cohort — how frequently people born in a five year period (e.g. 1950-1954) attended religious services at different stages of life. He tests a common theory called the “life cycle effect”, which says that kids are raised religious, drift away from religion in their chaotic young adult years, return to church when they have their own kids, and then once their kids move out either stick with church or walk away from it.
Most pastors have seen the latter possibility play out time and time again. I know I have. When parents are in church for the sake of their kids they leave once their kids are “done”. In most of these cases I’ve observed that both children and parents subsequently walk away from the faith…
The EPC’s Confession of Faith and Women’s Ordination
Recently I have been pressed on two fronts about the ordination of women in the EPC. The first concerns my claim in Women’s Ordination in the EPC: Learning from the CRC that “[Women’s ordination] is not addressed in the Westminster Confession and Catechisms, and so lies outside the system of doctrine taught in the scriptures.” I have been challenged on whether this is an accurate representation of the Confession and Catechisms. The second concerns the absence of the topic in What the EPC Can Learn from the PCA, with some stating that for the EPC to grow numerically and to grow in doctrinal and confessional rigor requires repudiating the ordination of women.
In regards to the first claim, I have several starting presuppositions. First is that the Westminster Divines were familiar with and well-versed in the Reformational documents and debates on both the European continent and colonial America, and that these informed their deliberations and finalized standards. The second is that the Divines, as Puritans and scholastics, did not make theological or liturgical assumptions, but rather developed and defended their assumptions. The third is that the Divines were trying to forge a Puritan/Presbyterian consensus built on the pre-existing English, Scottish, and Irish Reformational confessions and liturgies. The fourth is the acknowledgement that the Assembly published more than the Confession and Catechisms, and so all of the Standards produced were intended to be taken as a unit. Yet, these additional documents were only ever adopted in Scotland, even if they influenced things in Ireland and America. The fifth is that the specific vow and formulation about “the system of doctrine” is not from the Assembly itself, but was developed by the Irish Presbyterian Church in the early 1700s and has been part of the American subscription formula since the founding of the American Presbyterian Church…
