When this is all over, I think there will be one demographic that will suffer far worse than others

[Aquaria]

57. Megachurches don't kill little churches

Megachurches are a direct result of the death of little churches. It's a consolidation of dying churches--not new churches to draw in members.

Think of it this way:

I attended a school district that was a consolidation of two different districts. At one time, each district had a couple of thousand students of their own. Then a major industry left the area, the jobs dried up, people moved out to places with jobs, and as they moved out, the student population dwindled. Eventually, the two districts were down to only a couple of hundred students, between them. So they consolidated, to pool their resources. Even gave themselves a fancy new name to hide that the old districts were essentially dead and now a seemingly bigger new district. Oh, they kept the old elementary schools, while all of the junior high kids went to one campus and the high school kids attended another. But even that wasn't enough. When the decline is on, it doesn't let up. That's why their numbers dwindled to such an extent that the junior high campus was closed entirely. There just weren't enough kids to justify keeping both campuses open anymore.

What did NOT happen was the community coming in and saying, let's build this new district because we have so many people for it. It was the dying schools banding together as one to keep going. Same thing with these megachurches. They're a consolidation of failing smaller churches. Not a new church.

This is the dark secret of xianity in the US these days: Their internal numbers are horrifying, and they know it. When pollsters ask not "Did you go to church?" (halo effect material) but instead, "What did you do last weekend?" weekly church attendance plummets from 40% to the mid-teens, save for Easter and Christmas, which sees a slight uptick. This mid-teens number is equivalent to European numbers. Americans simply have better things to do on a Sunday morning than waste time getting yelled at or talking to air.

And the bad news keeps on coming: Congregations are not only shedding members, but also getting ever older. And fast. Catholic, Mainstream Protestant, Evangelical--all of them have an average congregant age of mid-50s these days. This is because young people have left, and they're not coming back. And if they're not in church, they're not raising their own kids in church--which means no new members for the future.

It's only a matter of time now for the collapse to come. It probably won't happen during my lifetime, but it is coming.