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Other Relationship Church Dropouts - Is There Any Hope?
Other Relationship Church Dropouts - Is There Any Hope? | Church Dropouts - Is There Any Hope? |
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| Tuesday, 23 June 2009 | |
 For a church whose eschatology eschews the “secret rapture” theory, in which believers are snatched away before the tribulation period begins, some Seventh-day Adventists may feel “left behind” these days.
It’s not a prophetic reversal, but rather a
continuing trend of “church dropouts,” people who once attended
faithfully, and then stopped showing up at weekly worship, Bible
studies, and other events. They often are still in the neighborhood,
but they no longer attend church.
In 2007 the world church reported that “out
of the 5 million people baptized into the [Seventh-day Adventist]
church between 2000 and 2005, 1.4 million left.”1 That would
suggest a dropout rate of 28 percent among new members, but the number
isn’t as clear-cut as might first be suspected. Some of that adjustment
comes from more thorough checking of church records. Since 2000 world
church leaders have insisted on more accurate membership records and
audits, which have resulted in the “dropping” of long inactive, perhaps
even deceased, members.2
Yet even after allowing for improved recordkeeping, a good percentage of the membership decline comes from people who entered the church through the “front door” of evangelism and left via the “back door” of unmet needs, personal crisis, or neglect, observers inside and outside the Adventist Church say.  “Most
of our churches have about 25 to 35 percent of the names on the books
that have not participated in church in any meaningful fashion for a
year or more,” says Monte Sahlin, a Seventh-day Adventist pastor who is
director of research and special proj-
ects for the Ohio Conference.
“Some church boards have an aversion to dropping any names, while
others have dropped names in violation of the rules,” he noted.
Has “Membership” Been Devalued?
Cultural shifts have compounded the
confusion, Sahlin says: “The notion of a membership in a free church
association is a very eighteenth-century, Enlightenment construct. As
time goes on it becomes less relevant to life in the contemporary
Western world. The word has been diluted a lot by organizations such as
AARP or AAA that will sell you a ‘membership,’” which is really just a
service, he adds.
As a result, Sahlin asserts, “when you
devalue membership, then whether people are members of a church or not
isn’t very important to them, and they don’t even keep track of it.”
According to Paul Richardson, the North
American Division’s coordinator for “reconnecting ministries,” the
church may not be suffering from an exodus so much as an inactivity
crisis.
His research found “only a small number” of
people who identify themselves formally as “ex-Adventists,” he told
Adventist Review in a telephone interview from Walla Walla, Washington.
“Most are [just] inactive in their attendance. They’re still part of
the family; we just don’t see them at family gatherings.”
Those who join the church and then leave
are only one part of the problem, however. New research, released in
March 2009, suggests that the very
religious fabric of the United
States is changing.
According to the American Religious
Identification Survey (ARIS), released
in March 2009, some 18 percent
of Americans number themselves as “unaffiliated” with any religion,
outpacing the percentage of the population that claims any church,
synagogue, or mosque affiliation.
Further, the study’s authors concluded,
“The percentage of Christians
in America, which declined in the 1990s
from 86.2 percent to 76.7 percent, has now edged down to 76 percent,”
according to a news release from Trinity College in Hartford,
Connecticut, where the survey was headquartered.3 “Ninety
percent of the decline comes from the non-Catholic segment of the
Christian population, largely from the mainline denominations,
including Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians,
Episcopalians/
Anglicans, and the United Church of Christ. These
groups, whose proportion of the American population shrank from 18.7
percent in 1990 to 17.2 percent in 2001, all experienced sharp
numerical declines this decade and now constitute just 12.9 percent.”
Among evangelical denominations, “Southern
Baptist churches baptized fewer people in 2008 for the fourth year in a
row to reach the[ir] lowest level since 1987,” the Associated Press
reported on April 25, 2009.4
A Malaise in Churches
There’s “a malaise, especially among
evangelicals,” about belonging to, and participating in, formal
communities of worship known as churches, said Julia Duin, an assistant
national editor at the Washington Times in Washington, D.C. Last year,
Duin, a veteran religion news reporter, published Quitting Church: Why
the Faithful Are Fleeing and What to Do About It (Baker Books), noting
the trend of church dropouts across a spectrum of denominations.
“I don’t think it’s a good thing,” Duin
told Adventist Review in an interview. “For a society to become
‘de-churched’ really removes morality as a baseline.”
What are the reasons for this trend? In her
book, Duin cites people who felt cut off from the church either through
a life change, a personal crisis, or inability to have their needs met
by a local congregation. In one case, a dedicated church member,
legally blind, stopped attending his church when promised weekly
transportation fell through. For others, being unmarried leads to
feeling the “odd one out” in family-oriented churches, leading to
disassociation.
Some departing Seventh-day Adventists voice similar concerns and reasons, Richardson and Sahlin said.
“More than anything, it’s a person saying,
‘I’m going through X, and I want a place that’s safe to support me. I
can’t handle it alone. . . . When it really comes down to it, I want
someone to journey with me, because when I go through these things, I
get the feeling God is distant or unhappy with me,’” Richardson
explained.
In one case Richardson described the
experience of a member who, when he tried to return to his Adventist
congregation, received a bracing welcome from a “greeter” in the
church’s lobby: “You’re on the fast track to hell. What are you doing
here?”
 Needless to say, he added, that individual didn’t feel welcome.
“We do damage in those moments,” Richardson said. “And people go, ‘It’s as bad as I remember it.’”
Sahlin spoke of those who confront personal crisis and fail to find help in their congregations.
“They quit attending, hoping someone will
call or knock on the door and give some emotional support,” he said.
“Churches don’t do that, unless they’ve got people who’ve been trained
to do that in a specific way.”
Then, he said, “after a period of time, six
weeks to three months, they say, ‘well, forget them,’ [and] emotionally
cut ties and reinvest the time and energy into going somewhere else.
Among Adventists, a number say they invest in spending time quietly on
the Sabbath. The majority of Adventist dropouts still observe the
Sabbath.”
How churches respond to dropouts is important, Richardson said.
“People who are not attending churches talk
to each other,” he explained. “They tell each other about the status
[of a congregation]. A church’s reputation is well known by those who
aren’t actively in attendance.”
That’s a signal, Richardson said, for
congregations to pay attention to those who leave. Duin said church
leaders could talk to departing members, not necessarily to win them
back immediately, but to learn what motivated them to exit.
Keeping Young Adults
Still another area of church dropouts that
recently has been studied, and specifically within Adventism, is the
loss of young adult children of church pastors. Martin Weber, a pastor
and communication director for the Mid-America Union in Lincoln,
Nebraska, surveyed 123 pastoral families, including 57 retiree
families, on whether the pastors’ children are still affiliated.
According to Weber, “The greatest single
predictor of whether a teenager is going to be in the church 10 years
from now is whether they approach a clergy father with spiritual
questions on their own.”
If the child feels open enough to do this,
that’s a good thing. Another key predictor, he said, “is if parents
entered ministry in their 30s, than either immediately out of college
or later in their 20s.”
Weber speculated that those who become
pastors in their 30s might undergo a career change the spouse doesn’t
fully support. Or, children who were accustomed to having Dad there on
Sabbath during a more or less stationary period in seminary now see the
seventh day as the one “where Daddy’s gone” overseeing a circuit of
churches.
He added that the “biggest thing was love
and freedom” in a clergy home. If those factors were there and if
children were “allowed to discover Adventism for themselves,” those
children were more likely to stay active in the church as adults.
However, Richardson said, there’s another
challenge to keeping Adventist youth, clergy or otherwise, in the
church. Once they graduate from Adventist schools, their initial church
experiences may serve to push them away from active membership.
“A lot” of these young adult graduates,
Richardson explained, “just went to school where the best churches
are—the best programming, best preachers, and the best music. They take
a job somewhere, often not where they grew up, go there, and it really
is kind of a shock to go to some of the local churches they find
wherever they’ve taken this new job.”
One solution, he noted, had its origins in the North Pacific Union.
“What is excellent is what some of the
Adventist universities are now doing—it started at Walla Walla
University, and now Pacific Union College and Southern Adventist
University have picked [it] up,” Richardson said. “They not only help
graduating seniors look for jobs in their field, but look for housing,
introduce them to alumni in that area, and introduce them to a church.
Fully 70 percent of the 2008 graduating seniors at Walla Walla asked
for that help. That’s a wonderful solution [and] response.”
To stem the tide of church-leavers, pastors are being told to keep an eye on who’s attending services—and who isn’t.
Count the Sheep
“Count your sheep,” said Mark Finley, a
general vice president of the General Con-ference, alluding to Jesus’
parable of the lost sheep recorded in the New Testament, in addressing
world church leaders two years ago. “How will you know if new believers
are slipping away?
If they’re not [in church], what are you going to
do about it? Do you care enough to go out and find them?” he asked
those gathered for the annual Council on Evangelism and Witness (CEW)
meeting in 2007.
“Love does not wait for new members to
return; it passionately pursues them. Care must replace complacency,”
Finley, who also acts as CEW secretary, added at the time.5
Adds Monte Sahlin: get everyone involved, and get ready to listen.
“Make a fervent appeal to the people to . .
. get involved in ministry,” he said. “There are lots of hurting people
who still in their heart want to be part of the Adventist Church [but]
feel like they’ve failed and want to be reconnected. Take time and
trouble to listen to them, don’t argue, [and] just love them.”
Sahlin added that it’s also vital to be
trained to help members reconnect. He suggested “Learning to Care,” a
training curriculum developed by Ben Maxson, a former NAD stewardship
director who is currently pastor at the Paradise Seventh-day Adventist
Church in California, as a prerequisite for members seeking to go out
and reclaim others.
For those who are concerned with seeing as
many people in the kingdom of God as possible, it’s clear, as in the
parable, that there are “lost sheep” who need to be gathered in. The
good news, it appears, is that there are ways and means to bring them
back home.
_________
1See
Elizabeth Lechleitner, “World Church: Keep ‘Counting Your Sheep,’
Church Leaders Say,” Adventist News Network, April 6, 2007; accessed
online at http://bit.ly/Ft4pn on May 7, 2009.
2See Elizabeth Lechleitner, “15 Million Adventists, but Who’s Counting?” Adventist Review, July 12, 2007, p. 20.
3American Religious Identification Survey 2008 Web site, www.americanreligion
survey-aris.org/; accessed May 7, 2009.
4Rose
French, “Memberships, Baptisms Down for Southern Baptists,” Associated
Press, published in Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 25, 2009, http://bit.ly/ahsWs; accessed online May 7, 2009.
5As quoted in Lechleitner, op. cit., Adventist News Network, April 6, 2007.
______________
Mark A. Kellner is news editor for Adventist Review and Adventist World magazines. Comments (0)
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