Researcher Ryan Burge is one of the few people around who’s studying the decline of Christianity in America. He’s also a former pastor whose small Illinois church closed about a year ago. In a recent opinion post, he shared his feelings of guilt and grief after that closure—along with the reactions he’s received from his fellow evangelicals. These reactions are familiar to ex-Christians, many of whom face these same reactions after others learn of our apostasy.
As his church’s closure made news, Burge ran into the voices in evangelicals’ heads. All too many evangelicals get overwhelmed by these voices whenever a fellow Christian faces defeat or admits to off-limits emotions or behaviors. These voices drown out whatever that other Christian actually says. They’re chasing a “theology of glory,” which insists that church growth comes from divine favor and decline means failure. Today, let’s check out this common shortcoming—and see how it serves the interests of this subset of believers.
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 7/22/2025. They’re both available now!)
SITUATION REPORT: Ryan Burge reveals how evangelicals respond to Christian failures
On July 12, Ryan Burge wrote about how he’s doing a year after his church closed. He’s a pastor with the American Baptist Church (ABC), which is slightly less conservative than the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Or at least, he was. His church closed due to lack of support and simple demographic shifts, but naturally he has deep and often conflicting feelings about it.
But Burge isn’t just a Baptist pastor. He’s also one of only a few dedicated researchers studying the decline of Christianity in America. His research is an ongoing source of excellent news and analyses on the topic. So he’s not only studying his topic, but also experiencing it on a personal level.
As he’s one of the few pastors who’s very open about his church’s closing, he’s becoming a tall poppy within evangelicalism. Since he began writing about his church’s death, he says he’s been getting a deluge of advice and admonitions from the rest of his tribe. And a lot of it will sound very familiar to anybody who’s dared move outside lockstep within evangelicalism.
Evangelicals learn to think and talk like this because their system can’t handle deep introspection and honest questions. As one of his friends told him:
They aren’t writing to explain to you why things didn’t work out, they are writing to explain to themselves why they (or their church) won’t be in the same position in five or 10 years down the road.
This is exactly correct. Evangelicals aren’t taught to actively listen and engage with troubling information. They’re taught to take it in, twist it into something they can better defeat, and engage with that instead. In a very real sense, they’re taught to strawman anything challenging to their beliefs. So when they read Burge’s writing about his church, they’re not seeing what he actually wrote. They can’t.
Actually looking at what Burge has to say would destroy those ghosts, just like what happened when the Bishop of Aquila finally looked square upon Isabeau and Navarre in Ladyhawke (1985).
I’ve seen these same things happen with an attempted church plant in the 1990s, with the same results. Church closures aren’t usually the fault of their pastors. They come down to the simple reality of church growth as a completely earthly process with earthly elements—but that’s a reality that evangelicals can’t face. They avert their gaze from it and plunge back into the comforting arms of their myth-singing ghosts.
Evangelical myths about church failure and success
For many years now, evangelical leaders have taught their flocks that any fool with “anointing” can lead a successful church. “Anointing” used to be a literal dabbing with oil to signify someone’s or something’s consecration to Yahweh. Nowadays, they still use oil, but really it’s made of Jesus’ personal approval. Anointing is, evangelicals believe, what makes evangelical projects succeed. Jesus only gives his anointing to pastors who really, truly, completely believe in what evangelicals call “preaching the word” and “the whole gospel.” Both terms mean that the pastors’ beliefs and customs closely match those of the judging evangelical.
Anointing is like thick, super-sweet supermarket-cake frosting. Evangelicals spread it so thickly upon church growth that they can ignore its earthly reality.
That’s why so many officers in the SBC these days are megachurch pastors (like one of its former presidents, J.D. Greear). These huge churches are about the only ones that are successfully growing these days. But evangelicals don’t like thinking that megachurches succeed because their leaders have budgets and staffing that allow them to offer a vast range of luxuries and amenities that members can’t get anywhere else as easily or cheaply.
Smaller churches, like the ones Ryan Burge pastored and I attended in the 90s, just can’t compete with larger churches’ resources. This truth makes church growth seem decidedly more utilitarian and earthly than evangelicals would like. Their leaders’ peddling of false claims about the number of church closures—once pegged at an eye-watering 10k per year!—only drive pastors to chase numbers over any other consideration.
For many years, evangelicals have thought that only Jesus can produce church growth. QED. Well, the right kind of church growth, anyway. They’re very suspicious of the growth of churches with heretical doctrines. Those grow because of demons or the appeal of false doctrines. Evangelicals think they’re the ones facing huge scandals, as one writer outright stated in 2018 about Willow Creek Community Church.
Other important ingredients for church success include prayer and evangelism. I’ve seen pastors beat themselves up for not praying enough, and I’ve seen plenty of evangelicals beat pastors up by accusing them of not doing enough evangelism—or doing it wrong.
So churches can only fail if they are missing some essential element. Their pastors didn’t preach the word. They didn’t have anointing. They somehow failed to pray enough or evangelize enough. If all the pieces are in place and done correctly, then the church must grow. If it fails, it fails only because the people involved did something terribly wrong.
Ryan Burge found out exactly why evangelical churches are not safe havens for anyone out of step
When evangelicals encounter Christians talking about failure of any kind, their thinking immediately shifts into myth mode. They interpret that failure against their myths. With input like that, the output sounds predictably surreal. Ryan Burge writes:
The first was a large group of people who wanted to tell me all the reasons why my church had failed (even though it had been vibrant and a source of community and inspiration for more than a century).
Without knowing anything about Ryan Burge, his church, or their entire situation, evangelicals still saw fit to lecture him about all kinds of things that don’t even apply to his situation.
Among many other shortcomings, evangelicals criticized Ryan Burge for being only a part-time pastor. In their mythology, pastors must devote 100% of their working energy toward their churches. However, Burge’s church literally couldn’t afford to pay him full-time wages. Others accused him of being too liberal, even though research consistently shows that bringing politics into the church only divides it more and drives people away. (And further, that lots of deeply conservative churches close too.)
It had to feel just crazymaking to read these messages. I’m sure most of them meant well, but that “theology of glory” made it impossible for them to engage with him on a reality-based level. Its opposite, the “theology of the cross,” might have made them far more sympathetic to him and his efforts to keep his church alive and relevant to its community.
Others, all evangelical men who were equally unfamiliar with him or his situation, offered to take his place. They were positive they could fix his church’s problems. They wouldn’t make the mistakes they were sure he’d made. They’d do it right. Burge writes of his anger over these messages: “the writers were sure they understood the problems facing First Baptist Church better than I did.” I’m equally sure that every one of them thought Jesus himself had told them to contact him.
This is why we see consistently that evangelicals themselves know damned well that they can’t take serious problems or doubts to their churches. Evangelical leaders want to be safe harbors at such times, but their culture completely prevents it from ever happening.
Ryan Burge’s main problem is that he was vocal about the realities of church closure—including his own. That made him a tall poppy that evangelicals are happy to cut down.
Church closures aren’t the only place to see this behavior in action
Any ex-Christian or exvangelical—or even a doubter with serious questions—is long familiar with this same treatment. Evangelicals in myth mode aren’t engaging with us as real people, but as the ghosts in their heads. Those ghosts’ voices drown ours out. We become nothing more than the cardboard cut-out stand-ins for them.
In their myths, our reasons for leaving or doubting are the same as a church’s reasons for closing. We did something wrong.
But I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong. I’d embraced “the whole gospel.” Until my deconversion, I attended church faithfully, studied the Bible, volunteered, and all the stuff any church leader would want to see in a congregant. I even sewed my own clothes in college because nothing in shops fit right and felt modest enough. I knew I’d been born again. For years, in fact, I thought I was the only Christian who’d ever been the real deal, then realized it was false and walked away from it. At the time, I didn’t know any other people like me even existed.
And I’m sure Christian culture, especially in the evangelical flavors, liked it that way.
Christianity is perfect. Its message cannot be questioned. So if it failed to work for us, then we failed somehow to make it work. They don’t know exactly what we did, but we did something. Maybe we were rebellious. Or maybe we were never real Christians at all. Perhaps we believed all the wrong doctrines, not “the whole gospel.” We didn’t read enough apologetics. Whatever it was, it kept us from permanent lockstep with the tribe.
It’s so much easier for evangelicals to engage with the cut-outs with their clean, easy-to-digest myths than with messy real people whose experiences don’t match the myths in many ways at all.
The situation Ryan Burge faced with his church isn’t new, just more obvious nowadays
Ryan Burge’s church got hit with the same demographic bomb that many churches experience today. That same bomb has hit any number of church plants over the years, including one I attended in my youth.
In the early 90s, an older Pentecostal in my church, Gene, started up a little storefront church in a wealthy suburb of Houston. At the time, that suburb had no charismatic churches. Its residents were genteel mainline Protestants or highbrow pre-fusion evangelicals. They attended big dignified genteel churches with properly dignified, subdued, genteel devotions. In terms of cultural mismatches, it doesn’t get much worse than this. It was like hiring a banjo band to play for the funeral of a head of state.
My then-husband Biff became his “youth minister.” We attended this little church for at least a couple of years, but in all that time it had exactly two families in attendance. Biff and I made up the first, and the second was a family of five. Both families came from far less wealthy suburbs some distance away. I knew Gene had asked Biff to be there to help “seed” the church with members, but I didn’t know that other family from anywhere else, or how they’d found out about this church. They seemed to want to keep to themselves, mostly.
In private, Gene often lamented the lack of growth in his church. He blamed himself. I’d always retort hotly that it wasn’t his fault. It was a tough town to have a Pentecostal church in, that’s all. Even I knew that. So did Biff, who’d grown up there. But my voice got drowned out by the voices of the ghosts in Gene’s head. The mythology of church success was alive and well in Pentecostalism too, even back then.
At some point after Biff and I went to Japan (in 1994), that church failed. Even the internet has no idea it ever existed. Gene passed away not too long afterward. I’ve no doubt he still blamed himself to the very end for not doing something right. I’m also sure he got side-eye from other Pentecostals over the church’s failure. We both knew what the mythology said, what the “theology of glory” told our entire tribe. It was too powerful to resist, even back then.
Christianity is like any private club these days, and evangelicals don’t like that
The truth was that there’s nothing divine about church growth. They’re just clubhouses dressed up in Jesus frocks. That’s what they were even in the 1990s when Gene tried to start his church in the wrong place.
And like any clubhouse must, churches must offer potential members what they want at a price they feel is reasonable. Their leaders can’t just issue an imperious statement like “We believe XYZ. Here are our demands,” and expect members to show up and stick around out of sheer awe of “the whole gospel.” Having a certain slate of beliefs will do no more than attract attention and maybe a visit, just like a chain restaurant’s name might.
I don’t think any Christian likes thinking of a church’s failure or success in completely earthly terms like that. But evangelicals bristle the hardest about it. They’re hooked on the idea of Jesus himself being at the root of proper church growth.
When they still held so much dominance in America, evangelicals could afford to swathe themselves in myths about church growth. They could punish pastors who dared speak the truth about church growth, as Ryan Burge did. Now when the stakes are at their highest and slack is at its all-time lowest for churches, these myths may undermine any real efforts pastors make to change course.
The closure of Ryan Burge’s church wasn’t his fault. He did everything he could, right down to community involvement. He just got hit with the simple demographics of church decline in America. The younger people in his community didn’t want what he offered, that’s all. More than that, he offers evangelicals a large body of research that could seriously help them build good communities that thrive. But they refuse even to look at it all.
They would far rather have the myths sung by the voices in their heads—even when they’re up to their ears in church closures.
NEXT UP: A YouTuber needs to learn the same lesson that evangelicals often do. See you soon! <3
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