Ryan Burge

And then, you know, I was there for 17 years.

In the last year, we would have 10 or 12 on a good Sunday.

We actually had to give our building away to a private Christian school because we couldn't afford to pay the insurance and the upkeep and the maintenance and all those things.

And then eventually we decided this is sort of a not good use of our time and resources.

So, you know, right after Easter, we voted to close and we were going to close as close to our anniversary as possible.

The church was founded in 1868 and it closed in 2024.

And at the end, we had about 28 people on the membership role and maybe 10 or 12 actual attenders on a regular Sunday.

Why?

Because I'm a bad pastor.

I'm the worst pastor in the history of the world.

So I tell people I've been a part of three churches and two of them don't exist anymore.

So if you want your church to close down, hire me and give it like five years and it'll be done.

But listen, because if you look at macro level religion, guess what?

Christianity in America has been in decline.

Well, it was in decline for 30 years.

The mainline, which is what my church was, has been in absolute freefall for the last 70 years.

There's some data from the 1950s that say over half of Americans were on the membership rolls of a mainline church in 1958.

Today, it's eight.

Eight and a half percent of Americans are mainline Protestant.

And in a lot of these traditions, the average age is about 60 years old.