By JOE GRIMM
Director of the Bias Busters project at MSU School of Journalism
As Ryan Burge tells his story: It wasn’t supposed to go this way!
Want to learn more about those folks who are leaving churches? Click on this cover to visit the book’s Amazon page.
Burge is a nationally recognized expert on why people are leaving church—and he also was supposed to be an expert on what churches could do to bring people back into the fold. That’s the pitch for his new Zondervan book, The Great Dechurching: Who’s Leaving, Why Are They Going, and What Will It Take to Bring Them Back
However, that cultural, social and religious tidal wave was just too powerful for Burge and his small circle of members to save their aging, shrinking congregation knocking around in a big old building that once housed a thriving community.
When Burge announced publicly that he was helping to close down his own church—the news of their dilemma went viral.
In a version of his story that was published by the Utah-based Deseret News—Burge admitted:
I researched the decline of organized religion while having a front-row view of the change in my own life. What’s happened at my own church is especially poignant since in my day job I research trends in American religion. And when I first became a pastor, right out of college, there were ominous signs, but I did not foresee how quickly the end would come, hastened by a pandemic.
Who is Ryan Burge?
One of his online bios explains: “Ryan Burge is an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, where also serves as the graduate coordinator. He has authored over 30 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters alongside four books about religion and politics in the United States. He written for the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. 60 Minutes has called him, “one of the country’s leading data analysts on religion and politics.”
And here’s another twist in this tale:
There is a lot of good news in this story, despite its ironic conclusion.
On balance, the many years that Burge and these families devoted to their First Baptist Church of Mount Vernon, Illinois, were a powerful, inspirational force in their lives that continues to shape the world.
Bob Smietana, a reporter for Religion News Service, attended Burge’s last sermon and wrote a column titled In Small-Town Illinois, a Little Church Says Goodbye. Smietana reported that the congregation’s embrace of a Brown Bag Program in 2008 had renewed Burge’s faith. Over 15 years, the church’s small number of elderly members packed nearly 55,000 lunches.
Over the years, Burge worked hard at shoring up the congregation. At one point, Burge tried to find a buyer for the church. In 2017, the church was transferred to a Christian school as a last-ditch move to preserve the building’s Christ-centered mission. The deal meant the congregation could continue worshiping there on weekends, but it was no longer their building.
However—transferring the church to the school was never more than a short-term fix. Burge wrote, “every six or eight months, we would lose a key member, then another, then another. That two dozen became 15, then 12, then 10.”
On July 21, 2024, Burge wrote, “I stood behind the pulpit of First Baptist Church for the last time.” He walked out the doors, uncertain what the future holds for him and pessimistic about the future for organized religion.
Pessimistic about religious change?
Well, one place to start lifting your spirits in a practical way is with the Michigan State University School of Journalism Bias Busters book series.
For more than a decade, the guiding force behind this project has been helping Americans understand each other—especially those “others” who somehow seem different than “us.” We do this in our MSU team by “answering questions everybody’s asking but nobody’s answering.” We want our readers not to fear their neighbors.
That includes those millions of “religiously unaffiliated” Americans living all around us—in our families, our places of work, schools and communities.
Burge’s news story “went viral” because of its ironic hook—a nationally known expert seeming to fail in his own area of expertise—but that’s not a complete summary of this story, as Bob Smietana indicated in his reporting. Burge and his friends in Illinois found themselves caught up in a historic tidal wave—which should prompt our curiosity about how those same waters are moving through our communities.
That’s really the message summed up in the little quote from a church member that closes Bob Smietana’s story: “We are not done with each other.”
And, frankly, that’s also a pretty good tagline for our MSU Bias Busters series.
Instead of walking away from our neighbors in fear, anger and exhaustion—our students who produce these books keep rolling up their sleeves each year, ready to explore yet another corner of our communities.
Why do they do this?
Because, in our vision of America: We’re not done with each other.
