Award-winning reporter and Pulitzer grantee Bob Smietana has a new book coming out that all church leaders need to get their hands on. Reorganized Religion: The Reshaping of the American Church and Why It Matters is the rare book that I simply could not put down.
Using his deft writing skills combined with the most recent statistical findings and anecdotes makes for a compelling book that will help church leaders make better decisions and experience fewer regrets.
Divided into three sections, Reorganized Religion opens by reorienting our post-pandemic church reality with Part One: Where We Stand. These opening chapters are chock full of startling statistics:
- According to Pew Research in late 2021, 3 out of every 10 Americans (29 percent) is a so-called None, someone who claims no religious identity, up from only 16 percent in 2017. (p. XV)
- The percentage of Christians in America has dropped from 78 percent to 63 percent. (p. XV)
- Less than half of Americans say they belong to a church, down from 70 percent of Americans in the 1990's, according to the Gallup polling organization. (p. 6)
- Less than one-third of Americans, when asked, say they have gone to a worship service within the past week. (p. 6)
- Where congregations still persist despite enormous challenges and an uncertain future is where they offer two key benefits: a sense of community and a sense of mission to rally around. (p. 9)
- We are living in the early days of what Pew Research has labeled "the Next America" - a new nation that differs substantially from its past in profound ways.
Part Two: Why People Are Leaving shares rich, in-depth stories of real Americans who have survived the tumultuous years of the pandemic only to emerge into a post-Christian America where churches and pastors are viewed through a lens of distrust.
Author Smietana writes, "Many church leaders find themselves in a position of authority, with the ability to make decisions that can change the course of institutions, at exactly the time when titles no longer matter -- and where relationships and influence mean more than authority" (p. 91).
In my own experience, I can echo this observation and verily testify to the power of influence over title. After years of evangelical scandals (i.e. Willow Creek, Mars Hill), the 'trust revolution' has touched us all (p.94). Smietana dives deeper into the troubled waters and the inherent fragility of church leadership models by saying, "A fallen small-church pastor is a problem. A fallen megachurch pastor is a disaster" (p. 101).
Part Three bravely asks the question, Where Do We Go From Here? This is where I found the book weaker in prescriptive advice. While I appreciated the stories of churches merging together and tackling social ills without including political power, I was disappointed that evangelism and church planting were not addressed as part of the American Church's solution for the future.
One area I did agree with is Smietana's assertion that the future belongs to multiethnic churches, defining as a multiracial congregation as one that includes 20% or more of participants not being part of the dominant racial group in that religious community (p. 197). America's racial demographics are continuing to thrust us all into the future and the American Church has a lot of ground to make up for (or else fall by the wayside as irrelevant).
In summary, I highly recommend this book. Reorganized Religion: The Reshaping of the American Church and Why It Matters will challenge your understandings of today's religious landscape while informing you on pathways forward in the age of the Nones.
