Churches have long been mainstays of American culture, particularly in smaller towns. But of late, churches have become a losing proposition for pastors. More and more of them are struggling to handle rising operational costs, not to mention dwindling membership. The worse Christianity’s decline gets, the more obvious it becomes that no gods are helping or hindering churches.
Today, let’s explore the very and entirely natural economy of churches.
(When this post goes live on the main site, it’ll live here. Patrons get early access – thank you! Sorry, I couldn’t get a recording done in time tonight, but I hope you enjoy this post!)
SITUATION REPORT: Churches are becoming a losing bet, financially
Some years back, I got to sit in on a hilarious Reddit takedown of a Calvinist evangelical seminary grad from Atlanta who wanted to start a church in Eugene, Oregon. His main motivation for starting a church there, he said, was wanting to live in Oregon. At the time, I admired his up-front honesty. Usually, evangelicals pretend Jesus appeared to them in a vision to tell them to move somewhere to save heathens.
Of course, the good Redditors living in Eugene had a lot of things to say to him about how likely he was to succeed as a pastor in their hometown. He was apparently so humiliated by their pushback that he deleted first his post and then his entire account! But I saw enough of it to know who he is and what his doctrinal leanings are. (Back then I wasn’t quite as buggy about archiving as I am now, alas, and he DFE’d with a quickness.)
When I look at modern churches these days, this incident is always in my mind. This guy looked at a church plant as no different, essentially, from opening a restaurant. He didn’t know how to do anything but pastor, which was why he proposed a church plant instead of a restaurant. In his own purely secular way, he was investigating the feasibility of his business plan.
I’m not snarking this guy at all. Actually, I’m applauding him for being way ahead of the curve.
Churches aren’t a good bet for pastors anymore. Smaller ones fail more and more often these days. Only the really big ones are doing okay—but there aren’t infinite staff positions at even the biggest ones, and they’re generally plateauing in a K-shape similar to the rest of our economy. And if a pastor does something stupid or gets caught in a scandal, that spells disaster for the rest of the staff.
Today, let me show you why aspiring pastors are right to be careful about church positions—and why it’s the natural, earthly considerations that matter, rather than the imaginary, supernatural ones.
Cost centers vs profit centers in churches
I realize most churches’ leaders make mouth-noises about being nonprofits in the legal and technical sense. But it’s hard to take these noises seriously because they act like the owners of regular secular businesses—just with no real third-party oversight, no mandatory financial transparency, and no legal accountability for violating the few laws that govern churches.
The further right we go in the Christ-o-sphere, the more churches start resembling private clubs for members only, and the less accountability their leaders allow about their financial decisions. Their leaders act far more like the CEOs of businesses than the humble shepherds of a flock of believers. Whatever they do, they must keep their own paychecks in mind. (It’s why the central plot conflict of the 1980s novel This Present Darkness was so ridiculous: Very few pastors would ever, EVER throw out a high-rolling, tithing member for any sin.)
One of the most potent illustrations of the concept of churches as a business involves their cost and profit centers.
In the world of economics, a cost center is part of a business that generates only costs for the company. For churches, this would be payroll, building maintenance, outreach efforts, and whatever their various programs for members cost.
By contrast, a profit center directly generates revenue. In churches, this usually takes the form of donations from members in the form of tithes, love offerings, maybe tickets to church-sponsored dinners or door fees from bingo, and payouts from dead members’ wills. However, tithes and offerings predominate.
Cost centers can help generate profits, but they do not, in and of themselves, generate any themselves. A company might pay for a huge research division, but that research doesn’t generate revenue itself. The products the researchers create certainly can, though, at which point those products become a profit center. Similarly, in churches with lots of member perks and programs, these can help drive revenue. But if nobody donates money as a result of participating in them, then they aren’t helping generate income.
As a potent example, consider Vacation Bible School (VBS), a sort of Bible- and evangelism-focused summer day camp program for children. Churches spend money to run these events. They participate in VBS because these events draw in children from unaffiliated families. Very occasionally, a family will join the sponsoring church as a response to their children enjoying VBS. However, if a church consistently sees very little membership growth through VBS, its leaders may decide to drop the program—or charge money for it, an unthinkable offense in the Christ-o-sphere, to at least gain revenue that way.
Since learning of this concept (first described by Peter Drucker in 1945), I couldn’t help but apply its ideas to churches. No wonder churches are shutting down in such numbers. Their profit centers are shrinking fast, and they can’t prop up cost centers without more revenue than they’re getting. Unless a leadership team is willing to go through the capital-raising nightmare that is opening a megachurch, they can’t compete.
Small churches as an ill-advised business venture
Churches’ cost centers are only growing more demanding, but their profit centers simply aren’t keeping pace. One of the best places to see these disparities is in the job market for pastors.
Seminaries are certainly enrolling students at decent rates. But those students don’t seem to be pouring into pastoral positions afterward. To figure out why, let’s look at the process of becoming a pastor itself.
Aspiring pastors like the one I saw on Reddit can become pastors in one of two ways: They can start their own church, or a pre-existing one can hire them. To be sure, lots of job opportunities exist at pre-existing churches. Many churches across America face a hiring crisis when it comes to finding a pastor. In fact, they’re facing a perfect storm there:
- A general shrinking of the evangelical population between Boomers and Gen X
- Poor working conditions compared to other jobs
- Extremely low pay from all but the largest churches (that one reminds me of the “you can’t afford a nanny” thing from 2022)
- Prospective pastors are more likely to want to start a new church (or pursue unconventional forms of leadership) than to sign on with a pre-existing one, even though there’s far less personal risk there
- Congregations that just can’t afford the swiftly-rising costs of operating a church
Should our aspiring pastors choose to start their own church, they have two choices there, too: They can do it by themselves, or they can join a “church-planting” network like Acts 29. By far, the latter option is preferable. Networks can help with every aspect of the process, even “seeding the hat” with congregants from area churches so potential new members aren’t faced with an empty church. (This isn’t new, either. Back in the early 90s, it’s how my Evil Ex Biff rationalized moving us to a church plant after he humiliated himself in front of our first pastor.)
Either way, though, their new church is more likely to fail than to succeed. And very likely, so will the pre-existing ones that hire them.
Almost a decade ago in 2018, I noticed Thom Rainer (Sam’s dad) talking about 6k-10k churches closing per year. That figure sounded preposterous to me, and what reliable research I could find supported my opinion. The number seemed to be closer to about 5k.
Now, though, the decline has accelerated church closures. In 2025, the National Council of Churches estimated 100k churches would close “over the next several years.” Then, Lifeway announced in January that more churches closed than opened in 2024. (Their takeaway: We gotta start way more churches, guys.)
Even huge churches are failing these days, though
Megachurches, defined as churches with more than 2k members, used to be the goal of pastors. They wanted to grow their little bitty startup churches into megachurches. Pastors who failed at that goal rationalized things in predictable ways, like Travis Nicholson did for Medium in 2023:
I used to think megachurch was the goal. That was our goal when planting a church in Raleigh in 2011. We mailed out thousands of invitations, went to church growth conferences, invested in online ads, and prayed for God to bring the masses. [. . .]
It didn’t happen.
We never became a megachurch.
And I’m thankful.
Those pastors are having a moment right now, as megachurches themselves begin to falter. In 2023, Sam Rainer of Church Answers, an evangelical “church revitalization” business, confidently declared that “the megachurch movement is beginning to wane.”
He’s not wrong.
On YouTube, you’ll find all kinds of AI-slop videos about Lakewood Church declining. After its pastor Joel Osteen’s widely-publicized initial refusal to use his church to shelter people displaced from hurricane flooding in 2017, area residents just turned on him. Sources still claim Lakewood has 45k-50k attendees, and in 2024, Osteen announced the church had paid off a USD$100M loan. So they’re far from dying, but their heyday is very clearly in the past.
Willow Creek Community Church, once the epicenter of the evangelical megachurch movement, is failing as well. After its founder and pastor, Bill Hybels, resigned in 2018 (along with his mentor in 2020) amid sexual harassment scandals, the church never recovered. The pandemic only intensified the church’s struggles. Last year, Bob Smietana playfully snarked its style as “a Coldplay concert followed by a TED Talk.”
And who could forget the complete wrecking of the Hillsong church plant in New York City? Carl Lentz, the fashionable celebrity pastor to the stars, turned out to be a regular cheating horndog. The mother ship fired him in 2020 when his cheating scandal broke into headlines. With new leadership, the church maintains a much lower profile (one might even say bizarrely lower). But the mother ship itself is still facing serious problems due to its main leaders’ scandals.
I could go on, but you get the drift. Not for nothing did Baptist News Global marvel last year, “Megachurches aren’t forever.” As they noted, when one looks at lists of the biggest churches in decades past, most of them are either dead or don’t qualify as megachurches today. Very, very rarely does a megachurch survive once its founder leaves or dies.
The touching reality of modern church culture
Whether they’re large or small, there’s something touchingly human about how churches operate. Modern churches are driven by the personality of their leaders, run just like secular businesses, and fail for entirely natural, explainable reasons. Without cultural privilege propping them up, their sense of divine holiness turns out to be nothing more than basic human behavior.
Of course, Christians in competing flavors of Christianity can and do blame insufficient, incorrect Jesusing for any church’s failure to thrive. Lots of Christians blame Osteen’s “prosperity gospel” teachings for any declines his megachurch faces, for example:
But that’s not what sparked his problems, and it certainly isn’t why countless other churches are failing. They’re not all prosperity gospel churches!
The answer is as natural and reality-based as the universe itself is.
Churches that succeed offer prospective customers a service/product they want at a price they feel is fair. The ones that fail don’t do that—or stop doing it. The leaders of troubled churches can try to cut corners, but at a certain point they must accept that the business itself has costs that must be endured or else its profit centers will stall out.
In the same way, a restaurant owner must be extremely careful about what fat gets trimmed from the business’ budget. Go too far with economizing, and people will find other places for dinners out.
Americans aren’t quite at the point where church affiliation is completely optional, but we’re getting closer to it every year. And as we do, churches themselves discover just how impossible it is for them to operate as secular businesses.
The fewer artificial supports governments offer churches and the less cultural power churches have, the more we see the very natural nature of their workings. Churches are bound by the same rules as every other group—and particularly every other business. No gods are standing by to help or hinder them.
Church members can certainly view that idea as the worst news possible. But in reality, embracing it can only help them choose churches that will be worth their time and resources.
NEXT UP: The UK’s Bible Society finally admits what I’ve been saying for ages: Its ‘Quiet Revival’ cope is nothing but their own wishful thinking. See you soon! <3
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Beloved evangelical myths about small church success collide with reality - Roll to Disbelieve · 04/17/2026 at 4:00 AM
[…] myths about how and why a small church grows—or withers on the vine. This goes far past what we talked about recently regarding church economics! The reality is far more pedestrian, of course, but it’s also […]