The After-Church World August 24, 2025
Dr. Roger Ray
The church, as we have known it is dying. Not quickly, but the trend lines are irrefutable. Catholic mass is often still rather crowded but monasteries are closing and it is increasingly difficult to find anyone who is willing to enter the priesthood. Conservative, and especially the mega-churches still dot the skyline of many cities but many are learning that they have to stoop to fireworks shows and monster truck competitions to draw a crowd. Most mainline churches are nearly empty except for the elderly who just won’t quit. My former associate minister and I would often ask ourselves if we were just church addicts . . . it was still important to us but it seemed like most of our congregants could take it or leave it, and increasingly, they were leaving it.
The old myths and superstitions that once held the church together no longer carries much creedence in the world. By and large, very few people believe that God wrote the Bible, the Torah, the Quran, or the Upanishads. We once felt that we really needed to raise our children in a religious community to give them moral training and instruction in your family’s religious beliefs, but that conviction pretty much went out with leisure suits and 8 track tape players.
From the days of Moses and Buddha, religions have operated around two foci which sometimes worked in harmony and sometimes worked at opposites to one another – we have always had our priests and our prophets. Priests were associated with the organization of religion and prophets were the revivalist or social critics, speaking sometimes within the faith community, and sometimes from the outside, shaking a fist at the temple or the steeple.
Protestant ministers were always something of a hybrid. We have been known primarily by our preaching skills but, if you did a time analysis of what we actually do in a week, preaching was a fairly thin slice of it. Ministers have a lot of priestly roles. We are expected to preside over weddings and funerals, baptisms, and public holidays. We visit the sick, provide frontline counseling for mental health and care for troubled marriages. We are expected to be teachers, writers, administrators, fund raisers, and property managers.
In the mid 90’s I came within a whisker of becoming the senior pastor of National City Christian Church, a huge cathedral located uncomfortably close to the White House in Washington, D.C. At the last moment I had a number of good reasons to turn down the offer of that job but not a small consideration was the fact that the administrative part of the job looked like it would take a 100 hours a week before I tried to write a sermon and I still had an 8 year old daughter at home. It was no wonder that the guy who had vacated the office had only been there for a couple of years. I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t last for 6 months.
It is little wonder that most ministers get consumed by the priestly role of keeping the institution alive. In these days when people are less inclined to attend and even less inclined to make significant contributions to the church, honestly, I don’t know how they keep the lights on and keep the roof from leaking.
In fact, many congregations have had to give up simply because the facility overhead was killing them. For me, the death of priestly role of church, synagogue, and temple is not much of a loss. People rarely get married in churches these days and even funerals and memorials are held in various public locations. I still like going to the Unitarian Church here in my hometown. I sometimes preach there when our minister is away and I appreciate its simple aesthetic beauty. We raise most of the money that it takes to keep the building by renting out the space for musical performances and when I look around the room on Sunday mornings, I realize that I am one of the younger people there and I can’t say that in many settings these days.
I was never entirely comfortable in a traditional pastoral role. I kept trying to find other ways to be prophetic in a conservative world. I taught classes at a small liberal arts college, I wrote weekly ethics columns for the local paper. I published some books and did lecture tours but, in 2007, I burned my bridges with my denominational past and went to work for my favorite charity as the national director of a relief agency that did poverty related work in Nicaragua.
I loved the work that we did in Nicaragua, but I quickly learned that the majority of my responsibility was in fund raising and while I had always had to do some of that in my church life, it was almost all of what I did as the director of a charity that had to find a couple of million dollars a year to keep doing the excellent work we did in Nicaragua.
So, after just a year out of parish ministry, friends prevailed upon me to start a church that was free of denominational corruption where we could be free thinkers, progressives with a prophetic voice. It was an exciting experiment and more than a little frightening, starting a church without a dime in the bank, no congregation, building, or blueprint.
We were entirely unaffiliated, free and unscripted, but looking back on it, I can tell you that our first few months we looked an awful lot like the denominational church that we had just left the year before. I despised a lot of the fiction and superstition of the church but the language of the church was still embedded deep within me. We initially named ourselves the Community Christian Church. We had hymns, communion, prayers, Sunday school classes and within a year we even bought a small church building.
Fortunately, we attracted some very bright people who participated in our evolution. I was challenged by people who saw the disconnect between what I was saying in the pulpit and how we were being the church. I was often blinded by tradition and church nostalgia, but members of the church would ask me, “If we don’t believe in the Trinity, why do we sing a doxology?” And “If we don’t believe in supernatural theism, why do we say prayers of intercession? Why do we sing a hymn of praise?”
We eventually renamed ourselves, The Emerging Church. We were no longer Christian. We rarely even referenced the Bible in our services. We eventually gave up on congregational hymn singing and communion. We recognized that our gatherings were not aimed at a supernatural deity who needed our worship, we gathered to form community, to encourage and support one another. We did service projects together. We read books and watched films, and I did my best to deliver sermons that encouraged critical and ethical thinking about current events.
I still had a priestly roll in the event of weddings and funerals, and I still had to do some fund raising and property management, but most of our efforts were focused on being a community that tried to live out our spirituality in compassion for the poor and sensitivity to the needs of one another. Being prophetic, in my opinion, should not be a solo act.
Early in our history, my good friend, Rob Martin, put us on YouTube and iTunes and we quickly discovered a global audience which, at one time, exceeded ten thousand viewers. I often heard from listeners who encouraged me to give up on the little congregation I had in Springfield, Missouri, and to focus only on my online congregation so that I could travel and speak around the globe. But I always insisted that none of our listeners make our YouTube channel their only church. I encouraged people to find a peer group, whether it was a church, a book study, or a service group. I have never been able to believe that anyone can live out a prophetic life on their own. I need community and I believe that most of us do.
However, in 2020, when the pandemic hit, our numbers were legally reduced and when the pandemic was being managed by vaccines, I was reaching retirement age, and we never really reconstituted our work after that. I eventually accepted that we would give up the seated services we had held for 15 years. I moved to Florida, established this studio in my home, and we have survived on line exclusively.
Most of the people I know have given up on church attendance. Outside of the mutual encouragement and organization of a congregation, very few are involved in community service. We are progressives, liberals, thinkers who can say that love is our religion . . . we believe in women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, we believe in universal healthcare, a living wage, and diplomacy over military might but we don’t do much about those things. Having prophetic thoughts is not the same as being prophetic.
I miss being a part of a church that could field a team to go to Nicaragua and build little cinder block houses for the poor, that could load up chain saws and wheelbarrows to go to disaster sights and help people recover their lives. I miss standing in the serving line at a homeless shelter, serving a hundred hungry people the hot meal we had prepared in our kitchen. And I miss the courage of defiance I felt in our music, our preaching, our gatherings.
The church I attend is comprised of mostly older people, maybe we are physically limited to being rather more mild than the church I remember so fondly. Full disclosure, this message was recorded in July because I am currently laid up recovering from shoulder surgery. Old age is better than the alternative but it comes with more medical issues and a lot less energy.
I expect the trend towards declining churches will continue, not because we do not desperately need prophetic communities of faith but because our current generation is not disposed toward attending and volunteering in them. But as fascism is on the rise world wide and civil rights are being limited or eliminated even in the most progressive nations, I implore you to find ways in which to organize, build community, and fight back.
