Mainline and Southern Baptist churches in South Carolina are in decline

...I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Matthew 16:18b

...Nevertheless, when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth? Luke 18:8b

This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come.
For men shall be lovers of their own selves,...
...Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away...
...For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears;
And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables. II Timothy 3:1-2a, 5; 4:2-3

The New Testament prophesies that the last days preceding the return of the Lord Jesus Christ will be times of increasing apostasy, so it comes as no surprise to this blogger to read that even in America's alleged Bible Belt (as in Canada's alleged Bible Belt), nominal Christianity is in decline.

The Lord is still building His church--right on schedule. The churches that are in decline are the ones that "have a form of godliness," but have fallen into apostasy--as indicated, for example, by the presence of women in positions of leadership, and substituting the social gospel for the true gospel--and the gates of hell are prevailing against them.

Many of the new churches that are springing up are using the methods of the Church Growth Movement, marketing Christianity as a consumer product to satisfy the desires of the customer. As the saying goes, "what you win them with is what you win them to," also stated as "what wins them is what keeps them." If worldly entertainment is what attracts people to church, that will be what keeps them there, and they'll leave if they're being sufficiently entertained. There's nothing particularly "consumer-friendly" in the true gospel of Jesus Christ, yet His church has been around for 2,000 years, and will be around for eternity.

As reported by Sarah Ellis of the Columbia State, August 9, 2018 (bold, links in original):

South Carolina churches are shedding thousands of members a year, even as the state’s population grows by tens of thousands.

In the place we call the Bible Belt, where generations have hung their hats on their church-going nature and faithful traditions, an increasing trend of shrinking church attendance — and increasing church closings — signal a fundamental culture shift in South Carolina.

At least 97 Protestant churches across South Carolina have closed since 2011, according to data from the Lutheran, Presbyterian, United Methodist and Southern Baptist denominations. An untold number of other closings, certainly, are not captured by these statistics.

Many churches are dying slow deaths, stuck in stagnation if not decline. And if they don’t do something, in the near future, they’ll share the fate of Cedar Creek United Methodist, a 274-year-old Richland County congregation that dissolved last year; Resurrection Lutheran, a church near downtown Columbia that will hold its last service on Sept. 2; and the dozens of churches that sit shuttered and empty around the state.

At the same time, some churches are growing, and some growing quickly. But they might not look much like the churches your grandparents (and their grandparents) were raised in. From meeting in unconventional places to tweaking their traditions, many churches are adapting, offering something different that many people thought the church couldn’t do for them.

What they’re doing reflects the results of an ongoing conversation among churches: How can they stay alive?

At Whaley Street United Methodist Church near downtown Columbia, the small crowd of remaining members are quick and cheerful to say they’re a “small but friendly” church. A couple dozen people sat spaced out among the wooden pews on a Sunday morning earlier this summer, when the Rev. Joe Cal Watson delivered an efficient sermon titled, “What is church?”

“I miss the days when church and Sunday were so important … the world stopped so we could focus on our faith,” Watson said from the pulpit. Sunday mornings still matter, he told the flock, but how the church treats people and helps people in need are more important.

Whaley Street’s congregation is a fraction of the size it once was when the surrounding Olympia and Granby mill villages were thriving.

The church simply doesn’t know how to grow these days, though it hasn’t stopped hoping for growth.

“We’re open. We’re friendly. But we do have an old-time service,” said Mary Anna Spangler, a member of 30 years. “But the big problem is how do you get (people) in the door and then keep them?”

FAITH BY NUMBERS

The South is slowly catching up to national and European trends shifting toward what many call a “post-Christian” culture — that is, a society with characteristics no longer dominantly rooted in Christianity.

Studies and surveys have documented the decline of self-identified Christians and the rise of “nones,” or the religiously unaffiliated, across the United States for years.

The Pew Research Center describes the United States as in the midst of “significant religious change. ”The share of Americans who identify with Christianity is declining, while those who say they have no religion is growing rapidly.”

In the South, more than three-quarters of adults identify as Christians, and more than 8 in 10 people consider religion to be somewhat or very important in their lives, more than in any other region of the country, according to Pew.

But, as in the rest of the country, a shrinking proportion of Southern adults say they regularly attend religious services — 74 percent in 2014, down 3 percent from seven years earlier. And surveys tend to inflate how often people actually attend religious services, Pew notes.

South Carolina is in step with those trends, and it shows in church statistics, particularly among Protestant denominations.

While Catholics are actually increasing in number in South Carolina, largely driven by influxes of northern and Hispanic newcomers to the state, major Protestant denominations report declines in membership and numbers of churches in recent years.

Consider:

--United Methodists and Southern Baptists, which together account for more than 3,000 churches and nearly 800,000 church members in South Carolina, report five-year membership declines of 5 percent and 18 percent, respectively.

--United Methodists lost 12,707 members and closed 30 churches in the state between 2012 and 2017. By comparison, 29 new United Methodist churches opened in the state in the past 50 years.

--The number of S.C. Southern Baptist churches has held steady at around 2,100 during the past five years — thanks in part to new church plants canceling out closures. Not all Southern Baptist churches report their statistics to the convention each year, but among those reporting, there were nearly 130,000 fewer members in 2017 (568,519) than in 2012 (698,041), according to statistics published by the S.C. Baptist Convention.

“The reality is that 80-plus percent of (S.C. Southern Baptist) churches are plateaued or declining, meaning they haven’t grown by any measurable percentage in 10 years, or they’ve actually lost membership,” said Jay Hardwick, who leads the church-planting team for the S.C. Baptist Convention. “And a large percentage of those are in a window where if something drastic doesn’t happen within five to 10 years, they’ll close their doors. They won’t have anything.”

NOT-SO-SACRED SUNDAYS

A church, particularly a Southern church, used to be a community center.

It was where you made friends and kept up with friends, where you ate supper on Wednesday nights, played on a softball team, sent the kids after school, fulfilled your community service duties, made business connections, got your musical fix in the choir and maybe joined a reading or knitting club.

And being a part of a church once was, essentially, a status symbol for many people in the South.

“Where do you go to church?” was a regular get-to-know-you question; the answer said something about who you were.

“You didn’t have a choice when I was a child. You went to church,” said Happy Meglino, who grew up in a Southern Baptist church and now attends Whaley Street United Methodist with her husband, Mark, and their 5-year-old daughter, Julianna. “My mom played the organ, and my brother and I were going to be there every time the doors were open. And your friends were there, too. … If you were going to be a good Southern girl, accepted socially, you went to church. If you didn’t go to church, mmm, we don’t know about you.”

Now, though, a church isn’t a line you need on your social resume.

“If you just want to be a philanthropic person, there are a gazillion opportunities for you to feed hungry people, clothe cold people, do service projects, build a house,” said David Turner, the minister of music and worship at Ebenezer Lutheran Church in downtown Columbia.

The oldest Lutheran church in Columbia, Ebenezer once boasted a large, multigenerational congregation of families who lived in nearby neighborhoods. The city used to close streets for its annual vacation Bible school.

Now, Turner said, the church’s attendance numbers are lower than ever.

“1950 was great, but it’s not 1950 anymore,” Turner said.

A key issue for the future, Turner says, is whether church leaders will have the knowledge and skill to guide churches toward a new future or be stuck in a past when Sunday mornings were sacred.

Many of the churches that are failing have not kept up with the pace of change in their communities, and they stopped making a difference outside the walls of the church.

When a church becomes more concerned with looking inward at itself rather than reaching outward to the people around it, it’s lost its core function, said Hardwick, the Southern Baptist church planter.

“Relevance has nothing to do with how cool and creative the church is, if the music’s cool and the lights are great and the staging’s just right,” Hardwick said. “Relevance has everything to do with making a difference.

“If this church disappeared, would anybody in our community know or care?”...

...NEW METHODS, OLD MISSION

Fewer than 1,000 feet from the door of Whaley Street United Methodist, upwards of 300 people gather in Columbia’s 701 Whaley event hall on Sunday mornings.

They comprise Downtown Church, a 7-year-old Presbyterian church born, in part, out of a feeling that other churches were “answering questions I wasn’t asking and not answering questions I was,” said the Rev. Amos Disasa, co-pastor.

The founders of the church saw people looking for an experience that a so-called traditional church didn’t provide.

“We sensed a need for a place for people who were persistently asking questions about God and were very interested in their own spirituality but were not opting into the formal institutions that would typically provide those answers,” Disasa said. “They’re weren’t going to church on Sundays, but it wasn’t that they had given up on God. They were disinterested in the institution of a church as it is.”

There’s no one-size-fits-all model of church, especially not in 2018. And there’s also no reason to expect people to show up at any church just because it’s there, many church leaders are recognizing.

“We early on taught our folks we have to be the ones that go out and share Christ and share what we’re doing with folks, because if we open our doors and just sit there and expect folks to come up, it’s not going to happen,” said Jody Ratcliffe, the founding pastor of the 2-year-old Church at West Vista.

The door to the Church at West Vista also happens to be the door to a bar.

One Sunday a month, the fledgling church meets at New Brookland Tavern on State Street, a popular Sunday brunch area. The rest of the month, church happens in living rooms throughout the Columbia metro area.

West Vista’s “house church” model is, in some ways, a throwback to the earliest days of the Christian church, but it represents a major shift from the traditional church model of recent centuries.

In a rapidly changing religious landscape, there is one critical element of a church that must not change, Hardwick said: The gospel message and mission.

Almost anything else is fair game.

“The message never changes, but the methods are always up for change,” he said.

‘EXPERIENCE THE EXPECTED’

As much change as the church is undergoing, church tradition isn’t dead — no more than Brookland Baptist Church in West Columbia is at 8 a.m. on a Sunday.

In many ways, Brookland represents the way church has been for generations.

Families sit together in long pews. They wear dresses and suits and ties and hats. A big, swaying choir fills the stage, and paper bulletins double as fans (though, an usher will hand you a real paper fan if they see you sweating). Golden offering plates are passed.

A robed pastor’s booming, lyrical voice preaches a message that lifts you out of your seat, and when he calls you to the altar, it is no suggestion; you come.

But Brookland is also reaching people — 3,500 of them or so on an average Sunday morning — in ways the church never did before. Big screens flank the pulpit, alternating live video feeds with scrolling lyrics to old-school hymns being played by a full band with, yes, drums and electric guitars.

You can pass the offering plate right along and give your tithe via text message or on the church’s website.

If you didn’t come to church on Sunday morning, you might come for lunch during the week at the massive conference center, which is used for all kinds of events, church- and nonchurch-related. Or your kids might play basketball in the wellness center or catch a quick word from the Rev. Charles Jackson, the pastor, on Twitter.

That’s all part of an evolving strategy to reach the people who are and will become the next generation of Christians, the church says.

“First of all, you’ve got to think about who that next generation is,” said Marnie Robinson, a member and church spokesperson. “The church may be trying to force them to be the church of yesteryear, and they’re not those people. … We need to talk to the millennials as if they are important and teach them the message of Christ; teach them and show them.”

But still, “church is church,” Robinson said, and many people are looking to “experience the expected.”

“When you do church, when you go to church, you expect to hear a good word,” Robinson said. “You expect to experience good music, and you expect a good prayer. Music, prayer and the word — you’ve got worship right there. All the other good stuff that happens is extra.”

Brookland will keep adapting, but it’s not going anywhere, Robinson said. And neither is the greater church, she feels sure.

“The church is one of the oldest institutions in the world, so I don’t think it’s going anywhere,” Robinson said. “How we do church may change, may be changing. But church is not going anywhere, and I take solace in that.”

THE END?

Consistency and tradition were beloved among the rural Cedar Creek United Methodist congregation in Blythewood, and consistency and tradition sustained the church for 274 years, until it closed in 2017.

“I think that most churchgoers like things to be the way they’ve always been,” said the Rev. Alice Deal, who retired this summer as pastor of Cedar Creek’s remaining sister churches on the Fairfield Circuit, Bethel UMC and Monticello UMC. About 40 church members, mostly seniors, remain between the two of them.

A command to change, though, comes from the one they worship, Deal said. “The holy one of Israel speaks through the prophet Isaiah and says, ‘I am about to do a new thing. Do you not see it springs forth?’ I think newness is what we’re called to be open to and to embrace, but that’s not always easy to do,” she said.

Some won’t change, held back by fear or stubbornness or practicality or something else.

But some will reach a point where “the pain of staying the same outweighs the pain of change,” Hardwick said.

“They realize, man, if we stay the same, we will put the death knell, perhaps, of gospel ministry in this community,” he said. “Then we’re going to be willing to make the hard decision that it’s going to require of us, kind of a whatever-it-takes mindset.”

But for some churches, the most faithful choice they can make is to close and invest their resources elsewhere, Hardwick said.

The futures of Monticello and Bethel are looming.

“I don’t know what the future holds,” Deal said, “but I know who holds the future. In God’s perfect will and God’s perfect time, what God intends for these churches will happen.”

Examples of what I mentioned at the beginning of this post can be found in this report by Miss Ellis in the State, August 9, 2018:

Sunday mornings at Ebenezer Lutheran Church are almost exactly what you’d expect them to be — except, perhaps, for all the empty pews.

At a recent service at Columbia’s oldest Lutheran church, about 40 or 50 people sat in the hushed hall of Ebenezer’s stunning sanctuary. There were a handful of children, many more white-haired heads and at least one homeless person...

...About 180 years younger than Ebenezer, Downtown Church has built its identity, in part, on its willingness to change — to try new things and to let go of things that don’t work or don’t matter or have run their course.

It’s an attractive place for people like Amanda McAlhaney, who shied away from “traditional” churches most of her life. She felt little personal connection there and was turned off by fear-based messages, she said.

What she and her husband, Shawn, found at Downtown Church is a down-to-earth message that consistently translates to their everyday lives, she said.

“For me, this church is just about being a good human being,” McAlhaney said. “I’m always thinking how I’m going to relate this to life, and I think that has been something missing in other sermons (in other churches). … The formality drops or disappears, and you’re just there to worship. … That’s something that’s been really special about it for me, when people just don’t want the formality of the traditional church.”

Turner said he’s trying to push Ebenezer to look for ways to get people into the church through the “side door and back door” — because, these days, people aren’t walking into a church just because it’s there, he said.

“I think you find some way for people to, first and foremost, connect socially, and then you turn it into a spiritual formation event,” Turner said. “We’re a consumeristic culture now, and so you can fight it and you can roll your eyes about it … it sort of is what it is. So I think, get them pulled in, and you can have that conversation after they’re invested in the program.”

Maybe it’s offering a chance to volunteer at a soup kitchen, opening the church as a performance hall during the week or allowing nonmembers to be married in the sanctuary, Turner suggested. The point is to give people another reason, any reason, to connect with the church.

At Downtown Church, it’s easy to embrace change — to try new things and let go of others — because the survival of their congregation “is not the point of existing,” Disasa said.

“We try really hard to be OK with the idea that Downtown Church may not exist someday,” said the Rev. Dawn Hyde, the church’s co-pastor with Disasa. “And it’s not the end of the world. It’s not the end of faith. It’s not the end of God.”