The Crisis of Christian Commitment to the Local Church Do you see, do you see All the people sinking down? Don’t you care, don’t you care Are you gonna let them drown? How can you be so numb Not to care if they come? You close your eyes And pretend the job’s done… Keith Green wrote those words in 1978. He sang them with the kind of holy fury that made comfortable Christians squirm in their seats — which was exactly the point. "Asleep in the Light" was not a gentle hymn. It was a prophetic alarm, a shout from a young man who looked at the Church and saw something deeply, dangerously wrong: a body of people who had received the greatest news in human history and had somehow … fallen asleep. Forty-seven years later, the alarm is still ringing. And the pews are emptier than ever. The Numbers Don’t Lie We are not speaking of a slight cooling of enthusiasm. We are speaking of a collapse. The data, assembled from Gallup, Pew Research, Barna, and the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University, paints a portrait of a Church that has, in startling numbers, chosen to sleep in on Sunday. In the early 1990s, roughly 67% of Americans attended and supported a local church. By 2023, that figure had plummeted to 33% attending weekly — a drop of nearly half in a single generation. Gallup found that between 2016 and 2019, an average of 34% of U.S. adults reported attending religious services in the past week. By 2023, that average had fallen to 30%. More telling still: weekly church attendance has sat at its lowest recorded rate since 1992 for the past two consecutive years. But the headline number obscures a more alarming shift in behavior. George Barna’s 2023 research from the Cultural Research Center reveals that the segment of adults who attend church infrequently — less than once a month, or never — has leapt from 35% to 56% in just six years. The majority of the nation now has no regular, meaningful connection to a local congregation. A majority. Among self-identified Christians, the picture is no less sobering. Pew Research’s 2023–2024 Religious Landscape Study found that 62% of U.S. adults still call themselves Christians — down 16 points since 2007. But identification and commitment are two vastly different things. Barna’s research notes that church membership itself is in freefall, with growing numbers of Christians actively resisting formalizing their commitment to a local congregation. The pandemic accelerated what was already a long retreat. Since 2020, church attendance has dropped by an estimated 15 million weekly participants. Barna’s data shows that by the end of the pandemic, adults who attended infrequently or not at all rose from 41% to 56% — and the evidence strongly suggests that most of those who drifted away during COVID have not returned. The Rise of the “Dones” Researchers have coined a term for a growing spiritual demographic: “the Dones.” These are not skeptics or atheists. They are men and women who would identify themselves as followers of Jesus — who believe in the resurrection, who pray, who read their Bibles — but who have concluded that the local church is optional. Unnecessary. Even harmful to their faith. They are not a fringe group. Barna estimates that 156 million Americans — including roughly 42 million children and teenagers — are currently unchurched. Critically, 76% of unchurched adults have firsthand experience with one or more Christian churches and have simply decided they can better spend their time elsewhere. These are not the never-churched. These are the once-churched who walked out the door and didn’t come back. Meanwhile, Lifeway Research reports that small group participation — one of the most reliable indicators of genuine community and spiritual formation — has dropped from 50% of worship attendees in 2008 to just 44% in 2022. Even among those who still show up on Sunday, the depth of commitment is thinning. What We Are Really Saying It would be easy, and too convenient, to blame the pandemic, cultural secularization, or the failures of institutional religion. And there is truth in each of those explanations. But the prophetic tradition demands we speak plainly: when the people of God habitually absent themselves from the gathering of the saints, it is not merely a sociological trend. It is a theological statement. It says: I can follow Jesus alone. It says: the Body of Christ is optional. It says: my comfort, my schedule, my preferences outweigh my covenantal obligations to brothers and sisters who need me, and whom I need. It says, in the words Keith Green borrowed from the mouth of God himself: “The world is sleeping in the dark / that the Church just can’t fight / ‘cause it’s asleep in the light.” The writer of Hebrews did not suggest that Christians gather together. He commanded it — and tied it explicitly to the age of spiritual danger in which we live: “Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching” (Hebrews 10:25). The nearer the darkness, the more essential the fire. Yet the data tells us that as the day approaches, the assembly is dispersing. The Convenient Gospel Part of what has been lost is the very concept of inconvenient love. The local church, at its best, is not a concert, a podcast, or a spiritual spa. It is a covenant community — a place where the messy, ordinary, sometimes infuriating work of living with other people in the name of Christ actually forms us into something we could never become alone. The rise of online-only attendance has done genuine good in some contexts — the homebound, the ill, the geographically isolated. But for the healthy and the able, consuming church from a screen is not a lesser version of church attendance. It is the spiritual equivalent of watching a wedding on YouTube and calling yourself married. Something essential — presence, accountability, shared suffering, shared joy — does not stream. In June 2023, Pew Research found that 27% of U.S. adults said they watch religious services online, with 10% doing so exclusively. These numbers are not inherently condemning — but when combined with the collapse of in-person attendance, they suggest that for millions, the digital option has not supplemented church but replaced it. And a faith that requires nothing of us — no presence, no sacrifice, no submission to community — is not the faith of the New Testament. It is a product we consume. A Prophetic Word to a Sleeping Church This is the moment for the Church to hear what Keith Green was shouting in 1978, now amplified by five decades of data and drift: You cannot love the world you will not enter. You cannot disciple the generation you have abandoned. You cannot be the Body of Christ if you refuse to show up. The local church is not perfect. It has wounded people, failed people, and in some cases, betrayed people. Those wounds are real, and they deserve pastoral care and honest reckoning. But the answer to a broken arm is not amputation. The answer to a struggling congregation is not abandonment — it is the slow, costly, unglamorous work of showing up anyway. The statistics we have cited are not merely a crisis of institutional religion. They are a crisis of love. Every empty seat represents a person who decided that the inconvenience was too great, the imperfection too intolerable, the cost too high. And in doing so, they left behind a community that needed their gifts, their prayers, their presence, and their voice. The Twist in the Story And here is where the prophetic word turns — unexpectedly, mercifully — on its heel. Everything written above is true. The data is real. The drift is real. The spiritual danger is real. The Church has, in many places and in many hearts, fallen asleep in the light. Keith Green was right. The prophet’s alarm is warranted. But here is what Keith Green also knew, what every prophet from Isaiah to Jeremiah discovered in the wreckage of their most scorching messages: the hope was never in the faithfulness of the people. It was never in our attendance records or our membership rolls or our small group percentages. The hope was always, only, entirely in the faithfulness of God. The Church does not ultimately rest on our commitment to it. It rests on the commitment of the One who said “I will build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18). The head of the Church is not asleep. He is interceding. He is building. He is calling his wandering sheep home by name. The twist is this: we have been writing about the unfaithfulness of the people of God — and the true ending of the story is not our renewed resolve or our re-commitment campaigns or our attendance initiatives. The true ending is a Shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine to find the one. A Father who runs down the road before the prodigal has finished rehearsing his speech. A God whose faithfulness is not contingent on ours. This does not excuse our sleeping. It does not soften the prophetic call to wake up, to show up, to give ourselves again to the imperfect and irreplaceable community of the local church. Keith Green is still right. The alarm is still ringing. But for every person reading this who has drifted, who has quietly stopped coming, who has told themselves they are fine on their own — the invitation is not primarily a scolding. It is an announcement: the door is still open. The table is still set. The Body still needs you. And the God who began this work will be faithful to complete it. He doesn’t give up on his Church. That, in the end, is the only reason any of us should come back. —

Imagine you've got a box of Legos dumped out on the living room floor. Your grandson is sitting cross-legged next to you, looking up with those big eyes, and he says, "Build something cool." So you start snapping pieces together. A wing here. A tower there. Before long you've got some kind of spaceship, or a castle, or who-knows-what, but the kid loves it. You love it. And why wouldn't you? You built it yourself, from your own head, with your own hands. But then you notice something sticking out from under the couch cushion. The instruction sheet. Turns out this wasn't a random pile of bricks. It was a kit, designed by someone who had a very specific finished product in mind. And the picture on that sheet? It looks nothing like your little spaceship. Nobody's going to arrest you for building off-script. Your grandson doesn't care. But here's the thing. You missed what the designer intended. You had every piece you needed to build exactly what he envisioned, and you never bothered to read the instructions. That's the church right now. Not with Legos, but with something that matters a whole lot more. We've been given the pieces. The Spirit is at work. Jesus has saved us. We've got a community of Christ-followers around us. But without a deep, personal knowledge of the Scriptures, without the instruction sheet, we end up building according to our own preferences. Our own ideas. Our own version of what the Christian life should be. And what we build might appear good to us. It might even appear spiritual. But it might have zero resemblance to what God had in mind. That's the part that keeps pastors like me awake at night. Trusting a Book We Haven't Read There's a question I wrestle with every time I sit down to prepare a sermon. How much can I assume my people actually understand? Can I reference David and Goliath without retelling the whole story? Can I bring up the Prodigal Son and not give background? Can I quote Romans and expect anyone in the room to have read it? The answer, more and more, is no. Biblical illiteracy is everywhere. And I don't mean among people who've never been to church. I mean among people who've been sitting in pews for decades. Lifelong churchgoers who can't name the four Gospels. People who mix up Old Testament prophets with New Testament apostles. They haven't touched Acts. They've never opened Leviticus. They've memorized a handful of popular verses, usually stripped from their original context, and they assume that's enough. It's not an access problem. Most of these people own more than one Bible. We've got apps, study guides, commentaries, and podcasts overflowing with biblical content. No generation in history has had more resources at their fingertips. And still, the Bible itself sits unread. Honored? Sure. Studied? Barely. The fallout from this is real. People make bad decisions because they've never read what God actually said about how to live. They swallow false teaching because they can't tell truth from error. They stumble through hard seasons without the comfort Scripture offers because they don't have a clue where to find it. Jesus put it plainly: "You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free" (John 8:32). Flip that around. What happens when we don't? We stay stuck. Trapped by lies. Swept along by cultural pressure. Misled by voices that sound right but aren't. I've watched people in my own congregation embrace bad theology that five minutes in the text would've corrected. I've sat across the table from couples whose marriages were falling apart, and the wisdom they needed was sitting in a Bible they hadn't opened in months. I've counseled parents, business owners, and young adults through crises that could have been avoided or at least softened by the application of biblical principles they simply weren't familiar with. And I'll be the first to admit: leaders like me carry some of the blame. We dumbed things down. We made the gospel more palatable and less demanding. We lowered the bar in the name of being welcoming. That's on us. And it needs to change. The gospel has to be preached in its fullness. Crosses have to be carried, not worn as jewelry. The Bible is not a self-help book collecting dust on a shelf. It is the primary instrument God uses to shape us. When we ignore it, we don't lose information. We lose formation. We stay the same. You can build whatever you want without the instructions. Nobody will stop you. But the designer had a specific picture in mind. Every piece in that spiritual lego box was meant to fit into something beautiful and intentional. Skip the instructions, and you'll build something that comes from you. Follow them, and you'll build something that comes from him. When the Appetite Is Gone I'll say this carefully because I'm not pointing fingers as if I have all my ducks in a row. I'm stretched thin too. I understand what it's like to come home exhausted and reach for the remote instead of the Scriptures. The pull is real. But the pattern across the church is hard to ignore. Bible studies half-empty. Midweek services drawing a fraction of Sunday's crowd. Sermon series on tougher books of the Bible followed by requests for something "lighter." Small groups stay small while recreational leagues fill up in a day. Jeremiah wrote, "When Your words came, I ate them, and Your words became for me a joy and the delight of my heart" (Jeremiah 15:16). That's not a guy white-knuckling his way through a reading plan. That's a man who was hungry. Who tasted something and wanted more. When that hunger disappears, something else is usually going on beneath the surface. Sometimes it's immaturity, like a kid who wants candy instead of real food. The taste for what actually nourishes hasn't developed yet. Sometimes guilt is the culprit. Unconfessed sin has a way of making us avoid the mirror. And sometimes, most of the time if I'm being honest, it's the sheer noise of life. Schedules packed so tight there's no room left for the one thing that could change a life. Sadly, the same people who can't seem to find thirty minutes for Scripture will spend hours studying their fantasy football roster. They'll binge a docuseries on Netflix. They'll deep-dive into a new hobby or research the best vacation deals with stunning dedication. The appetite for learning is alive and well. It's pointed at everything except the one book with the power to reshape a life from the inside out. I, way too often, fall into this trap as well. If I could ask for one thing, one single outcome from years of preaching, teaching, and late-night conversations, it would be this: I want to work myself out of a job. I want to develop people who are so rooted in the Scriptures that they can feed themselves. And then feed others. What I do on Sundays was never meant to replace your own time in the text. Watching a cooking show is enjoyable. But it won't keep you alive. At some point you've got to make dinner yourself. Don't treat the Bible like the ark from Indiana Jones, an artifact you respect from a distance. Pick it up. Open it. Read it, not because someone guilted you into it, but because the God who designed your life wrote the instructions. And what He had in mind for you is better and bigger and more purposeful than anything you or I could come up with on our own. You can build your life any way you want. Nobody's stopping you. But tucked inside the pages you haven't cracked open yet, there's a picture of the finished product. It was drawn by the One who made you. "For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you have need again for someone to teach you the elementary principles of the oracles of God, and you have come to need milk and not solid food." (Hebrews 5:12) The instructions are right there, maybe tucked in a dirty couch somewhere. Pull them out. The Designer is waiting for you to build something glorious. (This blog reflects some of the content in my upcoming book "What Your Pastor Wish You Knew.")

On a recent hiking expedition with my son in West Virginia, we came across something unexpected on the trail to Seneca Rocks. The trail to Seneca Rocks is an ascent of about 1,000 feet to a jagged ridge overlooking valleys on both sides. It's a beautiful trail filled with wildlife. On our trip, we encountered a doe and her two fawns eating along the trail. They were obviously accustomed to humans because we were able to walk very close to them without disturbing them. About halfway up, we came across something we often see along the side of roads but very rarely on a trail. It was a white cross, memorializing the death of a young man. There wasn't much information about him except for the date he died or even if he died on the trail itself, but it did make us stop and wonder. These sorts of encounters make people think about a number of things, I suppose, but for me, because of my sab batical mindset, I began to think about what legacy I would leave if someone came across my cross someplace on a lonely mountain? When I speak of legacy in the Christian sense, I'm not talking about anything necessarily physical that remains to remind people how wonderful and kind I was or wasn't. What I am talking about is the type of legacy that Jesus alluded to in Matthew 6. “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal.   For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. Matthew 6:19-21 Of course, I believe every Christian should strive to leave a godly legacy behind them. This would include being a good example in your community and living a life of faith so that your children and grandchildren can see Jesus in you. It would include using your spiritual gifts to their maximum capacity to glorify God in addition to finding a place to do ministry in every, and I mean every season of life. It would include working hard with your hands as the Bible instructs us because everything we do we do unto the Lord. It would include showing real, unashamed, Holy Spirit empowered love to everyone we meet. It would include these things and more. You probably have your list and if you don't, why not? Are we not supposed to live with purpose? For me, because my calling is in pastoral ministry, I have to think about another legacy that I leave. Paul instructs Timothy to do something unique as a pastor. And what you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses entrust to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also. 2 Timothy 2:2 Pastors today, wear so many hats. We are expected to be experts in the Scriptures, effective public speakers, extraordinary administrators, wise counselors, computer and internet wizards. We have to be perfect husbands and have trained our children to be completely obedient in every situation. Most pastors have some musical talents, even if it just means leading the hymns from behind the pulpit on any given Sunday. Yet, Paul's instructions here have little to do with those qualifications. Paul's instruction is simply pass on what you know (whether you are an expert or not) to the next generation. Make sure that they are faithful with the Word so they can pass it on next generation. As I contemplate jumping back into full-time ministry in the next few weeks, one thing that lays heavy on my mind is my time management. In my twilight years of ministry, I want to focus leaving a legacy like the one that Paul instructed Timothy to leave. I don't want to be known as the busy Pastor. I don't wanna leave a legacy (though it sounds good) of being a pastor that met People's needs. The legacy that I need to focus on, more so now than ever, is the legacy of the Word of God. I want to spend my time entrusting what God has given me to others who will pick up the ball and do the same. So if you are part of my congregation, will you help me? No Pastor is good enough, smart enough or blessed enough to leave this sort of legacy without a faithful church family. I guess the ultimate goal is to leave a legacy together – to add our names to the long list in Hebrews 11. There is no greater gift that we have been given than God's Word. There is no greater gift that we have been entrusted with to pass on to the next generation so they can see the glorious Works of our God and King . So I make this covenant with you. I will dabble in some administration and counseling. I will get my toes wet with polishing up my preaching in producing some cool graphics for the sermon series. But one thing I will not compromise on is passing God's Word to the next generation. I'm not looking for anything physical: a name on a building, piles of money in the bank, even a cross on a mountain side. I'm looking for God to grant me faithfulness so that my life not only impacts this generation but the next and the next and the... We will not hide them from their descendants; we will tell the next generation the praiseworthy deeds of the LORD, his power and the wonders he has done." Psalm 78:4