It's not your fault

American author and social critic James Howard Kunstler coined the phrase “long emergency”¹ to describe the effect of decades of small changes. For example, if your congregation were to lose half its members in one year, that would be an emergency. But if it were to halve its membership over two decades, losing maybe three of four per year, you would adjust and carry on. But, says Kunstler, it’s still an emergency – a long emergency.

Here’s how it looks on a national scale.² In 1977, when the United Church began recording average weekly attendance, 378,000 people went to church. That number peaked at 404,000 in 1984. Since then, attendance has gradually declined by 2.5 percent each year, so that in 2011 the number was 167,000. And if the rate of decline for only the past 10 years does not change, attendance will drop to 25,000 by 2025.³

But here is the really bad news: It’s not your fault. The decline in worship attendance is not because you need a better minister, cheerier music, more small groups or jazzier youth programs. It’s not because you need to read one more church-improvement book or to attend one more workshop. It’s not because the United Church is too liberal or too political.

The simple fact is that Canadians are not going to church like they used to. In fact, Canadians aren’t going to synagogues, mosques, temples, or Kiwanis either. Volunteer membership organizations of all types are declining.

Attendance decline is not a problem that can be fixed. It is simply a reality to which we must respond. Congregations must plan to be fewer, smaller and without buildings or payrolls. The challenge is too big for individual congregations to meet on their own; we will need to close, merge, and work together in new ways.⁴

The good news is that the United Church was founded by those who left the beloved familiar behind and embraced the desired unknown. Where that heart still beats, our hope for the future can be found.

Rev. David Ewart is a United Church minister in Vancouver.

Published in the January, 2014 issue of The United Church Observer, page 41.

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Notes:

1. Kunstler, James Howard. The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century. Grove/Atlantic Monthly Press. 2005.
      
2. The graphic is copied from The United Church Observer, January 2014.
      
3. I do not have the reported worship attendance data for 2025. Attendance data was significantly disrupted by COVID in 2020. And the severity of annual decline moderated in the 2010's. The reported attendance in 2019 was 115,000, whereas the projection from the data above was 91,000.
      
4. "Work together in new ways" means we cannot do this one congregation at a time. The scale of change needs to be denominational - or regional at a minimum. And likely multiple strategies will have to be pursued. What might work in an urban environment will not work in a rural one.