The Coming Tsunami of Church Closings Will Change America and Evangelical Church Leaders Must Take the Brunt of the Blame
Daniel Whyte III, President of Gospel Light Society International, says the Evangelical intelligentsia and the Evangelical industrial complex must humble themselves and shoulder the blame for the collapse and the falling away of the once Bible-based Protestant movement in America as they have led the Protestant church to be more concerned about political power and compromise changing America instead of the church obeying the Great Commandment and the Great Commission. The Evangelical leaders’ strategy of collusion with politicians and government has failed God, Jesus, the church, government, and the world, and has made the Judas-Jezebel-Laodicean church that Jesus Christ has spewed out of His mouth.
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. 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.
“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.”
Scripture tells us why. “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” (2 Timothy 4:3-4). What happened in Belding is not merely demographic. It is theological. It is the bitter fruit of a church that traded the authority of Scripture for cultural relevance, political access, and institutional survival.
Experts now project an estimated 100,000 churches in the US will close or be repurposed over the next decade. One pastor described it plainly: “Every year the pews are getting emptier and the collection plates getting lighter.”
This is the crisis examined by “Christianity at a Crossroads,” a new four-part TV documentary series premiering Thursday on PBS stations. The series features scenes like the last days of Belding United Methodist Church and shows how mass church closures will hurt communities across America — including people who never attend church.
The filmmakers interview a wide range — from the Rev. Robert Jeffress to Democratic Senate candidate Rev. Adam Hamilton to people who attend virtual reality church as avatars. But the shadow over the entire series is the perilous future of the church itself.
From a biblical standpoint, the documentary gets the symptoms right but misses the disease. Church leaders have warned about decline for decades. What is new is the scale and the timeframe. Yet Scripture already gave the diagnosis: when the church ceases to preach “Christ crucified” (1 Corinthians 1:23), when it seeks the favor of princes rather than the power of God, it withers.
There are glimmers the series highlights — thriving immigrant churches like Korean Central Presbyterian Church in Northern Virginia, and Alfred Street Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia, with about 10,000 members and 15,000 online viewers. “It’s no longer an in-person church with an online option. It’s an online church with an in-person option,” filmmaker Martin Doblmeier says.
But technology is not revival. Parking lots, lively music, and hospitality do not save souls. Only the Gospel does. “I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation” (Romans 1:16).
The film rightly notes that most American churches have been “engines of social good” — food pantries, immigration help, charity. Regular churchgoers donate more, volunteer more, and anchor neighborhoods. When pews go empty, the Rev. Jacqueline J. Lewis says, “In so many neighborhoods, the church is the food pantry, the immigration station.”
That is true, and it is tragic. But the church was never called first to be a social agency. She was called to be the bride of Christ, “the pillar and ground of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:15). When she abandons truth for utility, both are lost.
Consider the Rev. Matt Braddock of Christ Congregational Church in Silver Spring, Maryland. Membership fell below 100 while the sanctuary cost about $400,000 a year to maintain. The stress gave him a migraine that lasted six months. His church closed its building and moved into another church’s basement — and found new life in smallness.
“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.”
He is right about the building. The first Christians met in homes. They did not define the church as property but as “a body of believers.” Yet the deeper question remains: what Gospel is being gathered around? A church can meet in a basement and still be dead if Christ is not preached in power.
Doblmeier thinks churches struggle because “church is the place you go to because you feel as though it’s not changing.” People crave the familiar — the same rhythms, prayers, rituals. There is comfort in stability.
But biblical stability is not nostalgia. It is fidelity. “Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever” (Hebrews 13:8). The church that refuses to change its methods may die. The church that changes its message will die eternally.
The series spotlights the Church Project in Texas meeting in homes like the early church, and the Church of the Nativity in suburban Baltimore drawing 800 kids on Sundays. “They saw early on that if the children want to come, they will bring their parents,” Doblmeier says.
Children matter. But what will they be taught when they come? Entertainment draws crowds. Only truth keeps souls.
One of American church leaders’ biggest fears is becoming like Western Europe — a post-Christian landscape of empty cathedrals turned into condos. Braddock expresses hope: “People can get together for other reasons, but there’s something important to people with similar spiritual questions and hungers getting together and finding meaning.”
That hunger is real. But meaning without Christ is vanity. The answer is not better marketing. It is repentance.
“And unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write… I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot… So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth” (Revelation 3:14-16).
The tsunami of closings is the Lord’s warning. Evangelical leaders must humble themselves, confess their collusion with political power and cultural compromise, and return to the Great Commandment — “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart” (Mark 12:30) — and the Great Commission — “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations” (Matthew 28:19). Until then, the buildings will keep emptying, because Ichabod has been written over the door: the glory has departed.