Review: The American Church in Crisis by David Olson
David Olson is a pastor, church planter and church planter coach for the Evangelical Covenant Church. A long-time resident of Minnesota, he recently moved to Chicago to take a position with the national office of the Evangelical Covenant Church. His book The American Church in Crisis is a statistician’s attempt to make sense of the overall decline in the American church using worship attendance records of the period 1990-2006 from a data base of 200,000 churches in many denominations. Almost every way conceivable for one to parse the data is used in the book, and to great effect.
Olson begins by noting the difference between what people report to pollsters about church attendance vs. how many actually attend. The self-reported figure for a week in 2000-2005 is 40-44%,[1] while the actual figure based on 2005 attendance records is 17.5%[2]. Quite a difference! Furthermore, he states that while total church worship attendance was about 51 million in 2006, the US population grew by nearly the same amount from 1990-2006; thus while numbers of attendees from 1990-2006 declined, the percentage of Americans attending church declined significantly. Factoring in deaths and immigrants, 91 million people are new to the US during those years.[3]
After discussing the attendance decline in every area of the country and in each denomination he studied, Olson goes on to hypothesize the reason. Young churches on average grow more quickly than older ones. The older the church, on average, the lower the growth rate in members. In addition, for the churches studied, churches with under 50 members and those over 1000 members worshipping each week grew in attendance while those churches in between declined[4] This is true for conservative evangelical churches as well as for the mainline denominations. Thus, he begins a very convincing case for more church starts.
Why did the smallest and largest churches grow? Olson states quite reasonably that very small churches have family-like closeness, while the largest churches have resources to do worship and many other aspects of church with excellence. Those churches in between are both too large to be intimate and too small to compete with the larger churches in resources. Many pastors have told me that their middle-sized congregations have a self-esteem problem from looking at the largest. As a growth strategy, Olson suggests that in-between churches try to foster intimacy using small groups (imitate small churches) and not attempt to compete with the largest churches in all areas but instead choose only a couple aspects of church to do very well.
Why did the youngest churches grow? Young churches grow quickly and tend to be more attractive than older ones because they are flexible, dynamic and adaptable. Olson then goes on to say that much of the reason the American Christian church is not growing is because decades after the 20th century church building boom many churches are older and hence numerically stable. Today, fewer churches are being started and thus denominations are not taking advantage of the growth rate of young churches. The ELCA, for example, has 81% of its churches over 40 years old, 17% between 11-40 years old and only 2% of churches less than 10 years old.[5] Olson states a denomination needs to plant 2 churches per year per hundred existing churches (2%) to keep up with population growth (mainline denominations’ rates range from .2% for UMC to .4% for PCUSA and ELCA). The reason evangelical denominations are growing says Olson, is that they simply plant more churches (3-4% of existing churches per year).[6]
Olson spends the last portion of his book explaining the shift from “American Christendom” to a postmodern world and beyond. Since 2000, Olson states we are living as mission churches in a “secular yet spiritually curious culture.”[7] For Olson, the need to plant churches is not only Biblically mandated but also essential if the American Church is to survive. The message and mission of the church is the good news of Jesus Christ.
The message and mission of the church is not to return to the status quo. Rather it is to reach out beyond to the millions who have not heard the gospel. In this, I agree with Olson wholeheartedly. A critique of Olson’s excellent book might be that numbers growth does not always equate to spiritual health and that decline in attendance does not necessarily mean the church is spiritually unhealthy. Perhaps many of the church attendees in generations past attended church due to social obligation rather than to faith. Thus, the American church today might be smaller but truer to the faith of Jesus Christ. Still, it is reasonably clear from Olson’s research and statistics that the American church needs to do a better job in the future of reaching out than it has in the recent past. I heartily recommend Olson’s book, a surprising readable look at the statistics of church attendance and decline.
Pastor Glen Bickford
[1] David Olson, The American Church in Crisis: Groundbreaking Research Based on a National Database of Over 200,000 Churches (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2008), 26.
[2] Ibid., 29.
[3] Ibid., 35ff.
[4] Ibid., 83, 86.
[5] David Olson, The American Church in Crisis: Groundbreaking Research Based on a National Database of Over 200,000 Churches (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2008), 125.
[6] Ibid., 146.
[7]Ibid., 167.