WHERE DID EVERYONE GO? Dechurching/Deconstruction

Introduction: The Empty Seat

Look around this room. I want you to think, not about who’s here, but about who used to be.

Maybe it’s a sibling who grew up in church and now wants nothing to do with it. A college student who left for school and never came back, not just to this church, but to any church. A friend who used to worship next to you, posted something about “leaving organized religion,” and has been quiet about faith ever since. Maybe it’s you. Maybe you’re sitting in this seat today and something inside you is held together with less than it used to be.

I want to name what’s happening. We are not imagining it. This is real, it is widespread, and as a pastor I believe it is one of the most urgent conversations the church needs to stop avoiding.

Part One: The Scale of What We’re Facing

In 2023, researchers Jim Davis and Michael Graham released a book called The Great Dechurching. They commissioned the largest and most comprehensive study of dechurching in America ever conducted—surveys and interviews across every region, every denomination, every income bracket and age group.

Here is what they found:

We are currently experiencing the largest and fastest religious shift in U.S. history. Greater than the First and Second Great Awakenings—and every revival combined—but in the opposite direction. The Great Dechurching

In the last twenty-five years, roughly 40 million Americans have stopped attending church. Not transferred. Not found a new congregation down the street. Left. Nearly three in ten Americans now identify as religiously unaffiliated. Among Gen Z, that number is roughly 40 percent. Forty percent of the next generation has no religious affiliation at all. In Spokane County - a 2020 statistical account shows that only 42.4% of the county has a religious affiliation, which includes non-Christians.

Davis and Graham found no safe corners. This is happening across theological traditions, across politics, across ethnicity and education and income. And according to Barna Research, 42 percent of American adults report that they have deconstructed “the faith of their youth.”

That is the world our congregation lives in. And if we are going to be the church of Jesus Christ faithfully in this moment, we need to understand what is actually happening.

Part Two: Two Words We Need to Understand

Dechurching

Dechurching simply means stopping church attendance.

Davis and Graham identified five categories of dechurched people—from cultural Christians who drifted because of busyness and relocation, all the way to what they call “Dechurched Casualties”: people who left because of abuse, hypocrisy, political confusion inside the church, unaddressed suffering, and a perceived failure of the church to engage the real world honestly.

Here is what is important to hear: the majority of dechurched people in America still believe in God. Many still identify as Christian. They did not lose their faith. They lost their footing inside an institution. That is a different problem, and it carries a different invitation.

Deconstruction

Deconstruction is something more internal. It is the process of pulling apart the architecture of your faith: questioning doctrines you were handed, examining foundations you were never allowed to examine, asking whether what you were taught is actually true.

The late Tim Keller wrote about this phenomenon in depth. He made a distinction that I think is essential for us to hold. He said deconstruction can be understood in two very different ways:

For some people, ‘faith deconstruction’ means that they have come to see the historic teachings and doctrines of the church as crafted to make us pawns and suppress our personhood. They are walking away from both the church and traditional Christian faith altogether.

For them, deconstruction—a dismantling—is the end-point of the process. Tim Keller, “Reconstructing Faith,” Gospel in Life (2022)

But Keller offered another image. He said deconstruction can also look like a building renovation. Parts of the structure—especially the foundation—are left intact while other parts are taken down in order to build something better. In some cases the deconstruction is so extensive that no one can live in the building for a season. But the reconstruction that follows is often the strongest and most honest version of the faith the person has ever held.

The question is not whether someone is deconstructing. The question is whether they are doing it in a way that leads somewhere more healthy. Whether the questions are taking them to God or away from him. Whether there is a community around them that can hold them while the renovation is underway.

The Cave (1 Kings 19)

I want to take you to a man in the middle of his own spiritual collapse. His name is Elijah.

To understand chapter 19, you need to know what just happened in chapter 18. Elijah called down fire from heaven on Mount Carmel. The prophets of Baal were defeated. The people fell on their faces and declared that the Lord is God. It was the greatest single ministry moment in Israel in a generation. And then—

1 Kings 19:1–3 NIV

Now Ahab told Jezebel everything Elijah had done and how he had killed all the prophets with the sword. So Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah to say, “May the gods deal with me, be it ever so severely, if by this time tomorrow I do not make your life like that of one of them.” Elijah was afraid and ran for his life. When he came to Beersheba in Judah, he left his servant there,

He ran. The man who stood alone against 450 prophets, who prayed fire down from the sky, ran from a letter.

1 Kings 19:4 NIV

while he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness. He came to a broom bush, sat down under it and prayed that he might die. “I have had enough, Lord,” he said. “Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors.”

This is deconstruction in the Bible. This is a man who believed everything—who had seen God act in undeniable ways—now sitting in the wilderness, done. Finished. The whole project of his life felt hollow and pointless.

Keller noted that thirty years ago, Redeemer Presbyterian in Manhattan was filled with people in exactly this condition—former evangelicals, burned out and disillusioned, “suspended between belief and unbelief.” He called them, borrowing from D.M. Lloyd-Jones, “men as trees, walking”: people who had been touched by faith but whose vision was still blurry. They could make out moving forms but could not yet see clearly.

If you have ever sat in your own version of that broom bush—I want you to know: you are in biblical company. Elijah is not a failure. He is an honest man.

What God Does Not Do

God does not rebuke him. God does not send another prophet to correct his theology. God does not give him a list of reasons his doubt is wrong.

What does God do?

1 Kings 19:5–7 NIV

Then he lay down under the bush and fell asleep. All at once an angel touched him and said, “Get up and eat.” He looked around, and there by his head was some bread baked over hot coals, and a jar of water. He ate and drank and then lay down again. The angel of the Lord came back a second time and touched him and said, “Get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you.”

Get up and eat. The journey is too great for you.

God’s first response to Elijah’s collapse is not argument. It is bread. It is water. It is touch. God meets him in his body before he meets him in his theology.

Sometimes people leave the church not because they have lost faith in God, but because they are running on empty—and no one noticed. No one offered bread. The church kept asking them to perform, to serve, to show up, while they were hollow inside.

The Cave

Elijah travels forty days on the strength of that meal to Horeb—the mountain of God. He finds a cave. He goes in. And God shows up.

1 Kings 19:9–10 NIV

There he went into a cave and spent the night. And the word of the Lord came to him: “What are you doing here, Elijah?” He replied, “I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty. The Israelites have rejected your covenant, torn down your altars, and put your prophets to death with the sword. I am the only one left, and now they are trying to kill me too.”

Notice what Elijah believes inside that cave. He believes he is the only one left. He believes the entire movement of God has failed. He believes the work is over.

None of this is true. But it feels absolutely true inside the cave.

God does not stay outside. God comes in. And God asks not “what is wrong with you” but “what are you doing here?” It is an invitation to speak. To be honest. To put words to what is falling apart.

The Still Small Voice

1 Kings 19:11–12 NIV

The Lord said, “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.

God sends a wind that tears the mountains. Then an earthquake. Then fire. Elijah is not moved by any of it. The God he is waiting for is not in the spectacle.

Then—a still, small voice. A gentle whisper. And Elijah wraps his face in his cloak and goes to the mouth of the cave.

God asks the question again. Elijah gives the same answer. And God does something remarkable: he does not correct Elijah in a lecture. He gives him an assignment. He sends him back. And he tells him: there are 7,000 in Israel who have not bowed to Baal—seven thousand people Elijah did not know about, hidden in plain sight.

You are not alone. The story is not over. There is more than you can see from inside the cave.

Part Four: Why It Happens (And What the Church Must Own)

Tim Keller identified several recurring situations that tend to trigger deconstruction. I want to name them honestly, because if we do not understand why people’s faith fractures, we will keep offering the wrong responses.

1. Suffering and injustice

When a person faces profound suffering or injustice and the faith they were handed cannot hold the weight of it, something breaks. Psalm 73 traces exactly this journey—a believer crushed by the prosperity of the wicked, coming to the edge of losing his faith entirely. What was actually breaking was not his faith in God. It was a naive version of faith that assumed God always gives good people good lives. That mistaken belief had to come down before something more honest could be built.

2. Disillusionment with Christian leaders

When someone they respected—a pastor, a mentor, a parent—is exposed as a hypocrite, the faith built around that person shakes. Keller was direct about this: if someone’s faith completely evaporates when a leader falls, it may mean their faith was resting more in that leader than in Jesus. The collapse becomes an occasion not for abandonment but for reorientation.

3. Conflating primary and secondary beliefs

This is one of the most common and most preventable causes of deconstruction. When a church presents every doctrine—from creation and end-times to its own cultural preferences—as equally essential, it sets people up for a crisis. If a young believer discovers that one secondary teaching doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, and they’ve been told it was all or nothing, they tend to conclude it’s nothing.

4. Faith that was never truly owned

For many people who grew up in the church—or in culturally Christian communities—faith was absorbed from the environment rather than personally reckoned with. When the environment changed—when they moved to a city, went to college, or encountered thoughtful skeptics for the first time—there was nothing underneath to hold them. The faith was real to the community around them. It had never fully become their own.

I want to say something honestly: some of these causes are failures of the church. We did not teach people to hold primary and secondary beliefs differently. We did not create space for honest questions. We did not prepare people to hold their faith in a secular world. We substituted cultural Christianity for discipleship and then were surprised when cultural Christianity could not survive a change in culture.

We cannot be outraged that people are leaving if we have not examined what we contributed to their leaving.

What We Are Called to Do

So what does the church do? I believe the answer of 1 Kings 19, is this: the church must be the community that goes into caves. And the church must teach people to doubt their doubts.

Go Into Caves

Davis and Graham found that the number one factor driving dechurching was not doctrine. It was belonging. People left because they did not feel known. The community was not real enough to hold them when things got hard.

The writer of Hebrews says:

Hebrews 10:24–25 NIV

And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.

That phrase—“not giving up meeting together”—is not a guilt trip. It is a lifeline. Because isolated faith is fragile faith. The Scripture and the research agree: we need each other to survive.

The most urgent response to the dechurching crisis is not a better argument. It is a more genuine community. It is being the kind of people who bring bread under broom bushes and come into caves asking honest questions.

Teach People to Doubt Their Doubts

But Keller also named something that the church must teach: we must help people learn to examine not only their Christian beliefs, but the alternative beliefs they are being offered.

Christians in our cultural moment will have to rethink their faith, but at the same time they must learn to ‘doubt their doubts.’ They must deconstruct not only their tacit, mistaken beliefs, but also just as importantly, the cultural narratives that are offered as the alternatives to Christian faith. Tim Keller, “Reconstructing Faith,” Gospel in Life (2022)

Many people who walk away from Christian faith trade one set of unexamined beliefs for another. They question the Trinity but never question the secular assumptions they absorb in its place. Honest inquiry must go in both directions. That is what intellectual faithfulness actually looks like.

And this is exactly what the church can offer that isolation cannot: a community of people who are brave enough to hold honest questions and rooted enough to not be destroyed by them.

The Prophetic Word

I want to say something prophetically as your pastor, and I say it with love:

We cannot continue to build a church culture that is a mile wide and an inch deep and then be surprised when people drift the moment difficulty comes. We cannot continue to treat Sunday attendance as the finish line of discipleship. We cannot continue to be a place where doubt is unwelcome, where questions are dangerous, where the honest admission of struggle is treated as a lack of faith.

If Elijah had been in some of our churches, he would have been asked to step down from ministry.

But God sent him back. God used him again. God revealed 7,000 more still standing.

There is a generation right now, in Spokane, in our city that is deconstructing quietly, drifting painfully, sitting in caves. They need to encounter a community that will come in after them. Not to lecture them back into church. To bring them bread. To sit with them. To ask: what are you doing here? And to stay long enough to hear the answer.

Jeremiah wrote:

Jeremiah 17:7–8 NIV

“But blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.”

The goal of our life together is not to produce people who never doubt. It is to produce people whose roots go so deep that doubt does not destroy them. People rooted enough to hold their questions without being swept away by them. That kind of rootedness does not happen alone. It happens in community, in Word, in prayer, in the practice of showing up even when you are not sure—because you have committed your life to something larger than your feelings.

Conclusion: A Second Touch

Keller closed his essay on deconstruction by returning to the story Lloyd-Jones told of the blind man Jesus healed. After the first touch, the man could see—but only partially. “I see men as trees, walking.” Moving shapes but not yet clarity.

What if the man had said: “I’m fine. I don’t need any more help.” He would have settled for partial sight. But he was honest. And his honesty opened the way for a second touch.

If you feel suspended between belief and unbelief, don’t perform your way through it. Be honest with God. Seek him. Ask for a second touch. The journey is too great to make on empty, and you were not meant to make it alone.

The angel did not tell Elijah his doubt was wrong. The angel told him the journey was too great for him to make on empty.

To those of you firmly rooted right now—your calling is not to be smug about it. Your calling is to become the kind of person who brings bread to someone under a broom bush. Who sits at the mouth of a cave. Who says: I don’t have every answer either, but I am not leaving you in here alone.

That is what I want us to be. That is what the church of Jesus Christ is for.