Thom Rainer recently wrote a post entitled 13 Issues for Churches in 2013. The issues include an increased emphasis on small groups, multiple-venue churches, growing prayer emphasis, fickle commitment, innovative use of space, heightened conflict, adversarial government, community focus, cultural discomfort, organizational distrust, and reductions in church staff. But the issues I would like to discuss are the impact of people with no religious affiliation and accelerated closing of churches.
According to Thom, some 20% of the US adult population claimed no religious affiliation in 2012, up from 15% in 2007. This compares with 22.3% of Australians who said they had no religion in the 2011 census, up from 15% in 2001. Thus, assuming the figures are comparable, Australia still has a slightly higher proportion of atheists, but the US has a faster no-religion growth rate. Interestingly, amongst the 0.7% of couples that reported themselves as same-sex couples in the Australian census, 39.9% said they were Christians and 48.2% said they had no religion.
Thom says that, as the “builder generation” (people born before 1946) declines, the rate of church closures will increase. He even predicts that the number of closings in 2013 could be 8,000 to 10,000. That seems an extraordinarily high number to me. It would be equivalent to all of the churches closing in Australia, and would represent about 10 times as many closings as are expected in the UK.