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One summer morning, the Rev. Melissa Wagner stepped into the pulpit of her church and delivered a sermon that no pastor ever wants to give.
Wagner fought back tears as she spoke in her stately United Methodist church that had stood in Belding, Michigan, for 120 years. To celebrate their faith and prosperity, the town’s leaders had built a grand edifice with a soaring domed ceiling, massive stained-glass windows and an 8-foot painting of Jesus overlooking the altar.
But on that Sunday in 2024, Wagner spoke to a nearly empty church — about 12 elderly members, sitting far apart from one another in a sanctuary built for a thousand people. Wagner stood alone in the pulpit. There was no choir, no church organist, and no children or young families.
She was delivering a eulogy — not for a person, but for her congregation. She was announcing that their church would close because of dwindling membership.
“You are still the church,” Wagner said as one elderly woman dabbed her eyes with tissue. “And while where you worship will change, the one you worship does not.”
What Wagner experienced with her shrinking congregation is arguably the most urgent challenge facing churches across America. Experts project an estimated 100,000 churches in the US will close or be repurposed over the next decade. Many churches will be unable to escape this “tsunami” of closings — a grim trajectory one pastor described as, “Every year the pews are getting emptier and the collection plates getting lighter.”
This is the challenge that “Christianity at a Crossroads,” a new TV documentary series, examines. The comprehensive four-part series, which premieres Thursday on PBS stations, features heart-wrenching scenes like the last days of Belding United Methodist Church. It also shows how mass church closures will hurt communities across America — including people who don’t attend church or care nothing for organized religion.
The filmmakers talk to an astonishing range of churchgoers from leaders such as the Rev. Robert Jeffress, a vocal supporter of President Trump, to the Rev. Adam Hamilton, the Democratic Senate candidate in Kansas, to people who attend a virtual reality church as avatars.
The shadow that hangs over the entire series, though, is the perilous future of the church. Christian leaders have been warning about the decline of American churches for decades. What’s new about the PBS series is that it presents portraits of the people and congregations behind this decline, along with specific numbers and a timeframe for the expected church closings.
At the same time, the series offers Christians glimmers of hope: stories of churches that are bucking the trend by adapting, embracing technology and growing their congregations.
Why church closings affect more than just churchgoers
Despite churches’ struggles, Christianity remains the dominant religion in America. It’s woven into the fabric of American history as well as the nation’s political and civic culture. About 62% of adults in the US identify as Christian, and the series says that an estimated 30% of Americans — about 100 million people — still attend church every week.
There are recent signs that the gradual decline in church attendance has leveled off. For the first time in 25 years, the number of people attending in-person worship in the US has increased, according to a new study from the Hartford Institute for Religion Research. Worshippers are showing up in greater numbers, giving more money to congregations and volunteering more, the study found.
But there will be no return to the glory days of the mid-20th century, when almost half of Americans routinely attended a church, synagogue or mosque, the same study concluded.
The filmmaker behind “Christianity at a Crossroads” agrees with that assessment.
“The tsunami is going to continue for a while, says Martin Doblmeier, the founder and president of Journey Films, a production company specializing in movies and TV series about faith.
The docuseries, though, also looks at churches that defy this trend. They include thriving immigrant churches like Korean Central Presbyterian Church in Northern Virginia. Others like Alfred Street Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia, have about 10,000 members and expanded their congregation in recent years by making their church a more attractive destination for people outside their church walls.
“They still have a packed house but now also have about 15,000 people who view them online,” Doblmeier tells CNN. “It’s no longer an in-person church with an online option. It’s an online church with an in-person option. That’s quite intentional, and a sign of the future.”
Some churches have rightly been accused of being partisan, hypocritical and discriminatory toward women and minorities. But film argues that most American churches are “engines of social good.” At a time when the social safety net is fraying and affordability is a midterm-election mantra, churches are stepping into the void.
Various studies show that regular churchgoers donate more to charity, are more active in politics and more likely to join civic groups. Volunteerism has declined for years in America, but churchgoers step into the gap.
When pews go empty, those outside a church’s walls also suffer, the Rev. Jacqueline J. Lewis, an author, activist and senior pastor at Middle Church in New York City, says in the film.
“In so many neighborhoods, the church is the food pantry, the immigration station,” she says. “This is the place that is (there) for the outsider, the stranger.”
A Maryland church makes a tough decision
The film explores the reasons that church attendance began declining around the 1960s. Some are well-documented: declining trust in institutions, debates over homosexuality, clergy sex-abuse scandals and the rise of “nones,” those who describe their religious beliefs as “nothing in particular.”
A result of this trend is that thousands of churches across America are now like the United Methodist church in Belding, Michigan. Their peak days are in the rear-view mirror. They often face brutal choices: whether to close or limp along, living off endowments and the tenacity of a few dedicated worshippers.
This was the situation facing the Rev. Matt Braddock, senior pastor at Christ Congregational Church in Silver Spring, Maryland. Membership had dwindled below 100 people, while the sanctuary cost about $400,000 a year to insure and maintain. The pressure to keep the church open became so acute that Braddock developed a migraine headache that lasted for six months.
“Every year was so stressful because we were always cutting corners in every budget to pay for the building,” Braddock tells CNN.
His church, which is featured in the PBS series, made the difficult decision several years ago to close its building. But they continued to worship by moving into the basement of another church, where Braddock discovered some surprises. He found that he liked the intimacy of worship in small spaces. The church saved enough money to hire staff. Membership stabilized, and pledges are now strong, he says. His headache is now gone.
He says the experience has made him, and his congregation think anew about how the “church” should be defined.
“It was important for me to remind everyone that the church isn’t a building, and it never was,” Braddock says. “It’s the gathering of God’s people. Where we are gathering, God’s always with us, wherever that is. I understand the attachment to a building, but I question whether we should have been attached to the building in the first place.”
What unites churches that thrive
But many declining churches don’t adapt. Its leaders don’t demand change, and its members don’t pursue it until it’s too late. Doblmeier, an award-winning filmmaker who has been making documentaries about faith for decades, thinks he knows why.
The same reason many go to church is the same reason why many churches struggle to survive: the allure of the familiar.
“Church is the place you go to because you feel as though it’s not changing,” he says. “People look forward to the same rhythms, prayers and rituals that they’re so used to … This is the one place where they can have comfort and stability.”
The PBS series spotlights churches that have successfully defied the wave of closings. One example is the Church Project in Texas, a faith community that has returned to the practices of early Christianity by primarily meeting in small groups in members’ homes.
What unites churches that grow?
As the documentary series shows some shared traits — accessible parking, lively music, powerful preaching and efforts to shower visitors with hospitality — seem mundane. But they are non-negotiable elements for growth. The film also spotlights the Church of the Nativity in suburban Baltimore, Maryland, which has learned another key to expansion: make church fun for young people. It draws about 800 kids and youths for its Sunday services.
“They saw early on that if the children want to come, they will bring their parents,” Doblmeier says.
One of American church leaders’ biggest fears is that their country will become more like Western Europe — a “post-Christian” landscape filled with empty cathedrals and church buildings converted to condos.
Yet Braddock, the Maryland pastor, has faith. He says humans need community.
“People can get together for other reasons,” he says, “but there’s something important to people with similar spiritual questions and hungers getting together and finding meaning. That doesn’t go away. Having vitality doesn’t mean numerical growth. Churches can still be full of life without having to be megachurches.”
The first Christians worshipped primarily in each other’s homes. They didn’t define the church as a building — it was a “body of believers — it was wherever Christians gathered in Jesus’ name.”
That belief is part of why Christians’ faith lived on, despite persecutions and scandals through the centuries. This is the faith that Wagner, the pastor in Belding, alluded to when she looked out on her mostly empty church and told its remaining members, “the one you worship does not change.”
This is the faith that many churches in America hold onto today. And it also poses their biggest challenge.
How do you hold onto “God’s unchanging hand” but change just enough to keep filling the pews and collection plates?
In the years ahead, every church will have to answer that question.
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