As a scholar, he’s charted the decline in religion. Now the church he pastors is closing its doors

They plan to gather one last time on Sunday — the handful of mostly elderly members of First Baptist Church in Mt. Vernon, Illinois.

They’ll say the Lord’s Prayer, recite the Apostle’s Creed and hear a biblical passage typically used at funerals, “To everything there is a season … a time to be born, and a time to die.” They’ll sing classic hymns — “Amazing Grace,” “It Is Well With My Soul” and, poignantly, “God Be With You Till We Meet Again.”

Afterward, members are scheduled to vote to close the church, a century and a half after it was created by hardscrabble farmers in this southern Illinois community of about 14,000 people.

Many U.S. churches close their doors each year, typically with little attention. But this closure has a poignant twist.

First Baptist’s pastor, Ryan Burge, spends much of his time as a researcher documenting the dramatic decline in religious affiliation in recent decades. His recent book, “The Nones,” talks about the estimated 30% of American adults who identify with no religious tradition.

He uses his research in part to help other pastors seeking to reach their communities, and he’s often invited to fly around the country and speak to audiences much larger than his weekly congregation.

But it’s no academic abstraction. Burge has witnessed the reality of his research every Sunday morning in the increasingly empty pews of the spacious sanctuary, which was built for hundreds in the peak churchgoing years of the mid-20th century.

“It’s this odd thing, where I’ve become somewhat of an expert on church growth, and yet my church is dying,” said Burge, a political science professor at Eastern Illinois University. “A lot of what I do is trying to figure out how much I am to blame for what’s happened around me.”

Burge started leading the congregation in 2006, when “there were about 50 people on a good Sunday,” he recalled. In the years since, he’s earned his doctorate and begun working as a professor. He’s gained a wide online and print readership, in part by converting dense statistical tables into easy-to-comprehend graphics on religious trends.

All this time, he’s continued to pastor the small church.

“I’m willing to admit that I’m not as good as I could be or should be” as a pastor, he said. “But I’m also not willing to admit that it’s 100% my fault. If you look at the macro level trends happening in modern American religion, it’s hard to grow a church in America today, regardless of what your denomination is. And a lot of places have way more headwinds than tailwinds.”

The church’s American Baptist denomination is part of a cluster of so-called mainline denominations — Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran and others that were once central in their communities but have been dramatically shrinking in numbers. The nation’s largest evangelical denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, has also been losing members.

While there’s no annual census of U.S. church closures, about 4,500 Protestant churches closed in 2019, according to the Southern Baptist-affiliated Lifeway Research.

Scholars say churches dwindle for various reasons — scandal, conflict, mobility, indifference, lower birth rates, members shifting to a church they like better. To be sure, most Americans remain religious, and some larger churches are thriving while many smaller ones dwindle. Some surveys suggest that the long rise of the “nones” has slowed or paused.

But the nonreligious are far more common today than a generation ago, in the U.S. and many other nations.

“If Billy Graham would have been born in 1975 instead of 1918, I don’t think he would have been as successful, because he hit his peak right as the baby boom was taking off and America was really hungry for religion,” Burge said.

Things are particularly challenging where communities are shrinking, such as the Rust Belt and rural areas.

Burge hopes his research, and his personal experience, can offer some consolation to other pastors in similar circumstances.

“This is not all your fault,” he said. “You know, in the 1950s, you could be a terrible pastor and probably grow a church because there just was so much growth happening all across America. Now it doesn’t look like that anymore.”

Gail Farnham, 80, has seen that trajectory of church life first-hand.