David and Goliath, Jonah and the Whale (or the “Big Fish”), the Three Wise Men, Noah’s Ark, The Good Shepherd, and many more unique stories from the Bible have been shared for as long as Christianity has been around to children and adults alike. Across the world pastors and priests have taken every imaginable angle in teaching these stories from complex visuals to deep connections for worldly application.

Before I begin I’m not claiming to be any Bible scholar or know it all when it comes to Christianity but just a casual observer who has seen many of the positives of the organized Church but has also seen a fair share of the negatives and downfalls of it. The term “Church” is going to be used liberally and for the sake of my personal knowledge will only be referring to the Christian Church. I understand that there are many other religions out their practiced in America but for this article I will only be addressing Christianity and at times may come across like I’m speaking to the entire population but understand that this is more for the Americans who have danced around with Christianity before.

According to the Hartford Institute of Religion Research, “more than 40 percent of Americans “say” they go to church weekly. As it turns out, however, less than 20 percent are actually in church.”

Why are 20% of people claiming to go to Church on a weekly basis when the numbers tell a different story? Why lie about attending something that you obviously have no desire to attend? Why put yourself through the guilt of answering yes to the poll when you know for a fact that you will not be singing worship songs and listening to a forty-five minute sermon on Sunday morning?

It doesn’t make sense.

Or maybe it does? The Church is not blameless in this new trend but actually have themselves to blame for a considerable amount of the issues. In this day and age, media and technology dominate the world. The Christian Church was founded on century long traditions and in some ways has failed to adapt to the modern world. For the most part if you step into a Church nowadays depending on the particular location and the type of demographic that the Church caters too a good majority of the people are old. Old people tend to like tradition and not all the flashy histrionics that the younger generations have grown up with and depend on to be captivated. Pew Research Center calculated that of the people age 65 and up, 90% of them are affiliated with a religion, while only 67% of people ages 18-29 claim to be religiously affiliated.

Steve McSwain in his Huffington Post article titled, “Why Nobody Wants to Go to Church Anymore” highlights seven major trends impacting the decline of the Church, Including Technology, which “instead of embracing the technology and adapting their worship experiences to include the technology, scores of traditional churches, mainline Protestant, and almost all Catholic churches do not utilize the very instruments that, without which, few Millennials would know how to communicate or interact.”  Social media is ever growing and needs to be used by Churches to promote attendance but also get members engaged and active in the Church. Modernization is key; people want to come to a place where they feel comfortable and free to be themselves. The Church has also unfortunately gone through a lot of leaderships crisis’s that have brought a bad name to the religion, making the desire for people to go to church lessen even more.

Enough about the Church though the heart of this issue truly lies in the individual. Now in no way am I saying that in order to be a follower of Jesus Christ that you must attend Church on a weekly basis. However, if you truly are living a godly life and striving to be a Christian (a little Christ), which many people claim they are, then I question why there isn’t a desire for you to attend Church. Christians are called to be apart of a community and to help strengthen and support one another in their faith. That’s not to say that you can’t find a community of followers that you can rely on to support you and vice versa in each other’s faith. That can totally work for some people but not everyone is afforded that luxury.

In order to continue the distinction between a follower and a believer needs to be addressed. A believer is somebody who believes in their heart but doesn’t necessarily carry out what they believe. On the other side a follower is someone who believes in what they are following and is willing to lay down their own life for support of a particular cause or individual. It’s one thing to believe but a completely another thing to follow.

I want to address the believers for a second because truly they are to blame for the perpetual downfall of the Christian Church. The hypocrisy of the Church largely comes from this group and it’s sad to see the followers have to deal with the effects that the believers are bringing to the Church.

In Ed Stetzer’s article in Christianity Today titled, “The State of the Church in America: Hint: It’s Not Dying” he argues against the notion being made that the Church is dying and instead suggests that it is just going through a transitional period. He argues that the reason the numbers have declined in recent years largely have to do with the fact that “Cultural Christians”, people who say they’re Christians simply because their culture tells them they are, and “Congregational Christians”, people who have grown up in the Church and have a “home church” are leaving the religion and instead professing no ties to a religion because they are no longer facing societal pressures to be “Christian”. When you look at it this way, it looks like a positive for the Church because the people who are committed to their faith are holding on strong while the others who were in the religion for the wrong reasons are dying off because the new norms of society tells them they no longer have to. This holds up with data found in a Pew Research Center study where it was found that “a third of adults under 30 have no religious affiliation” the highest number ever recorded in Pew Research Center polling.

People are no longer going to Church because the growth of humanity is leading into a more secular society not rooted in century old traditions questioning what is truly accepted in this world. Although this new wave of culture in America is causing more and more previous “Believers” to step away from the religion the true followers are sticking firm to their beliefs resulting in a stronger Church.