Special Episode with Ryan Burge: Part II | Episode 30

Rodney interviewed Dr. Ryan Burge for a second week on the YTTB podcast.

Ryan Burge is a political scientist and former pastor who's become one of the country's leading data analysts on religion in America, with six books and writing in the New York Times, POLITICO, and the Wall Street Journal.

His research has helped us clarify and bring to life many of the presentations we've given in the church—genuinely fascinating and useful work. To learn more about Ryan, visit drburge.com.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Okay, welcome back to the Year Through the Bible podcast. My name is Rodney Adams. I'm the executive pastor at Asbury Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And this week is part two of a two-part series that we have recorded with Ryan Burge, who is a social scientist. He's the professor of practice at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics. He has a website called Graphs About Religion. We've used a lot of his work in our thinking in our church and some of our presentations. We recorded part one last week, so if you missed that, go back and watch that or listen to that and get ready for part two. So we talked about these denominational trends, and by the way, um the the there's something bigger going on than just mere faithfulness with these um institutions that are sort of fading away. I think I think if you just talk, excuse me, if you just talk about the faithfulness part, you could look at the the tribe that we came out of, the United Methodist Church, and you can see that there's um some some um some issues with with their orthodoxy and sort of their the way that they've taken um their doctrinal positions. There was the book of discipline had more pages in it than the Bible itself. There was everything everything that they needed was there for quote unquote accountability. So I don't I don't I don't just adopt wholesale that large institutions are the only way accountability um is provided. It seems to me like there's a there's just a demographic trend going on involving the baby boomers, particularly. It seems like denominational life in America was very closely um linked with just how Americans did life in general. Um I've always thought that Putnam, Robert Putnam put his finger on this with bowling alone, and I hadn't really thought about it until the last couple of years, but basically in 1955, or whenever the high watermark of American church attendance was, Americans joined things. They joined stuff. You joined the the the Lions Club and the Elks Lodge, and you joined the the um Rotary Club, and you joined these other named organizations, the VFW station number, whatever. You joined these named things that that link you with like-minded people and also like affirm a part of your identity or something like that. And it just seems like Americans are joining things less and less. There's just less of those things, less church softball leagues, less you know, work softball leagues. Is all that is that is my um assessment relatively true, just given your work as a kind of a demographer, and like what do you see that as like a parallel? Like like American denominational life also kind of mirroring just American cultural life in general?

SPEAKER_01 3:00

I I this is something that I think the church needs to be more aware of and think through more carefully. Because whenever we talk about religious decline, people want to all automatically come back to believe things. Like maybe the doctrines got wrong. You know, they they started preaching a false gospel or they didn't call people to repentance. It's the thing you hear oftentimes, right? Like the Catholics will say, Well, we got when we instituted Vatican II, that's when attendance started falling. Like that this caused that thing to happen. And I and I I this is I think where being a social scientist helps me because I really do think that belief plays a very small role in why churches have declined. Like, I don't like I should write a book about this. Like the title is You're thinking about religion all wrong. Because like religious people always start with belief. They always start with belief. And I think it's because listen, who teaches religion? Theologians. And guess what? Theologians think about all day belief. Like it's it's it's always a psychological understanding of religion. Why, why do people come to church? Because they believe in God. Why do they stop going to church? Because they don't believe in God. Guess what? The data is so clear on this, it's hard to be more forceful when I say this. For most people, it's not about belief. It really truly isn't. So why are churches declining? It's because social organizations are declining. Period. Like it's really that simple. Why would you think, like, just think about this proposition? Yes, I know the VFW and the bowling leagues and the elks and the moves and the boy scouts and the girl scouts and everything else has declined, but churches shouldn't. Just think about the logic behind that. Like, take your own personal proclivities about religion away from that conversation and think to yourself, why should religion buck the trend that's basically this macro level trend in America the last 75 years? There's no reason to believe that religion should be especially immune to the large trends happening in American society. And I think that's the that's the flaw in the in the way that people think about religion, that it's different, like fundamentally different than other things. I don't believe that to be true. I believe it's somewhat different than other social organizations, but not fundamentally different than other organizations. So the thing that no one wants to talk about with Putnam, Putnam started, so he traced bowling league attendance, you know, VFW, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, all these social organizations going back to the post-war period. And he wrote his book in 2000, by the way, and he'd already shown a huge decline in all those things between 1950 and 2000. And he blamed it, by the way, on cable television. But think about this. So if we want to blame it all on the internet, then how do you just how do you explain the fact that all this social stuff was collapsing in the 70s and 80s? Long before the internet ever came around, social atomization was already on the march. So there's something happening, and this is something I don't have an answer to that I think about all the time is why is Western culture's default position in the direction of social atomization? Like, why is that the default state of society? Is that we're gonna pull apart, not come together? Because that is exactly what's happened in America in the last 80 years. And one casualty of that is American religion, just like the elks and the moose. So, like when you think about it that way, the solutions to the problems facing the American church is not particular to the American, it's not, you know what the answer doesn't become? Better doctrine. That does not become the answer. When you start thinking about in a macro way, the answer becomes why are we socially pulling ourselves apart from each other? That, if you solve that problem, then church attendance goes back up almost naturally because people are going to want to join organizations. So I think we're actually approaching this from a completely wrong perspective. And that we think if we get our doctrine right, if we pray hard enough, like the problem with I think theologians, I think is everything is spiritual. The problem with me is think everything is social. We got to find a meeting between the two of those things to answer these questions because it's not just about your well, you know, the the church drifted from God's plan. That cannot be the answer to the problem. There's something else going on here.

SPEAKER_00 7:10

It kind of makes me wonder if there's if there are other parts of the world that can inform kind of how we because humans are humans. And it just it makes me think of the underground church in different places that's that's thriving. It makes me think of so what happens when our cultural and social sensibilities break down, we you know, relationships break apart, relationships with institutions, whatever. But Christ's church still remains. It's just what form, what form will it remain in, and how is relationship built both uh with the body, with other people who are outside the body, and then with Christ. It just makes me wonder if the if the Underground Church has already answered this in other cultures where this is this is broken down. I'm curious if you've ever, if you've I'm sure I'm curious how much of your work is looks globally to church trends and things like that.

SPEAKER_01 8:03

The problem is that it's every part of the world has its own unique thing. You know, like can you who do you compare us to in America? You compare it, you can't compare us to the Middle East because obviously that's Islam. We're Christianity. Um, Europe's tough because in some ways, like Europe is very secular, and in some ways it's not. Like Poland is actually, if it was in America, it'd be the most religious state in America. But then you've got Iceland, which is in America, it'd be easily the least religious state in America. You know what I mean? So it's like you've got to almost like Ireland and um Italy are probably our closest like comparison cases between us and somewhere in Europe. But man, generally speaking, it's hard to figure out. Like, and you in some ways we can like kind of compare ourselves to Europe, but Europe is actually way more social than us. Like the Danes join more organizations than America ever thought about joining. You know, it's like so that's the problem, is with social science, and we all call it the Earth 2 problem. You can't create Earth 2 and then like to control this and then change that, and then look at the differences between the two. We don't have a control group for America. And and to be clear, we are a very odd country because we're actually very religious compared to our uh if you look at our GDP, we should be incredibly irreligious and we're not. So either we need to get a whole lot poorer or a whole lot less religious. So that's what makes it really hard to like compare America to anywhere else. Um, I don't even think Europe's a good, and then you go to South America, South America's Catholic, you know, like 90% Catholic. So like that's not a great comparison. You go to China, can't compare there, it can't go to right, you know. So you're going to the list and you're like, we don't really have a reference case in America. So I don't, I don't know the way that America's going, but I do wonder if what we're seeing here is a natural decay trend away from socialization or just a long cycle trend. You get what I'm saying? Like where the pendulum will swing back in the direction of socialization as we move forward. I'm hopeful for that. I don't see any of the data that points to that, but I think that's a possibility that keeps me at least hopeful that we're not going to continue to atomize.

SPEAKER_00 10:04

Yeah, I think for me, my my um my personal thought on that is we are we are entering a decade where authenticity is gonna be the word of the of the decade. What is what is authentic, what is real, what can be authenticated. Just think about AI trends and all these different things everybody wants to talk about. You never know. I think I'm wondering if we're gonna get to a point where um it's so hard to trust what is real and what is not real um anymore, and we just get sort of online weary, we just kind of get tired of it, like we're we're done. That I wonder if the pendulum will come back the other way towards socialization, toward, toward, and hopefully, I mean, I have a vested interest in this because it's my life's work, but I I hope I'm hoping the church will um begin to be seen as a place where in-person relationship is valued, the the organic nature of the body is valued, um, and will be almost like a bomb or a salve um to a a world weary of you know this increased mistrust and atomization as you're talking about. I don't know if that's going to happen. That's what I hope will happen, um, but I'm not very good at picking cycles and trends. So uh neither is really anybody else.

SPEAKER_01 11:27

And I think uh but it starts with us though, you know, like it starts with us being intentionally being more social. Like that's one thing I've been thinking about a lot recently. Like my job is very socially isolated. Uh I know I'm talking to you right now, obviously, which is not, but it's not, you know, I don't see people like during the summer. Like I'm not on campus, I'm not teaching classes, I'm doing a lot of like staring at my computer, writing books, making graphs, doing all those things. I talk to my wife and kids, but I mean, there are times where I go two weeks without doing anything social with someone my age, like going out to dinner, going to a, you know, you know, anything social at all. And I've realized it actually hurts myself, my psyche, you know, my mental health, my spiritual health by not being connected to other people. It's something I'm trying to work on. But the problem is if I work on it by myself, guess what? You can't be social by yourself, right? So, unless all of us sort of like commit to the idea that we should go hang out with other people more, it's not gonna work. And it almost becomes like a no, you go first phenomenon, or then you go first. And you know what ends up happening? No one, no one is social. Everyone sits at home and watches Netflix for eight hours, you know, like it's bad for us. Like, I wish we'd all come to that realization that scrolling TikTok for four hours a day is not good for you. I don't care what anyone says, it is not. Being social is good. And I think I've been telling churches more and more that they need to be more forceful about that message, yeah, right? That like at some level, we're just happy that you're here part of a social body of people. Do we care if this stuff or none of this stuff? Particularly right now. You know, we'd like for us in belief as a, but we're just glad you're here.

unknown 13:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:06

Well, where they are, and you know, don't leave them there, bring them closer. But you know, you don't have to believe what do you have to believe to be to be to come to our church? The answer is nothing, right? You literally have to believe in nothing. Uh, we're just happy that you want to be part of who we are. And I I think it's it's not heretical to say that the social body of believers is has its own salvific ability, you know, not in the cosmic way, obviously, a theological way, but in a very practical way. You know, like who can take you to see the doctor when no one else can? It's the body of believers who drops food off at your door whenever you can't cook for yourself because you're sick. It's the body of believers, like who takes care of you? It's the body of believers in its own way. That is salvific. And I think we need to be clearer about that from a church standpoint is we offer more than just doctrine, more than just theology, that we offer a whole way of being, right? An orientation toward life.

SPEAKER_00 13:58

Yeah, and I think I think those, I think those can actually work together. Like I think we've we've we've seen it work here at least, where clarity about why we exist and what we believe is actually helpful on the front end. And it's it doesn't actually repel people. Like it actually, again, with the authenti authenticity thing, um, once someone experiences um a body with clear convictions about their purpose and what they're what they're for, particularly in Christ, and also they're welcomed, um, their people love them, it's a warm place, and all the things you just described, when people experience that those two things can coexist because on the online world they can't, and in most of their social circles, they can't. Like I have to affirm everything about you to be around you, or else we can't be we can't be in relationship. Um when they come to the church and the church can love them well and also be clear about what we believe and why. Um I've I've not I've not really witnessed that as being a repellent. I I have witnessed it being more attractive than what most people would think.

SPEAKER_01 15:10

It's people want to be called to something higher and better, right? They want to be challenged. You're seeing this a lot in the culture. Young people are, you know, doing achetic things, right? They're like, I'm not, I'm gonna go on this plane and not look at my phone for four hours. That's a spiritual practice. That goes back to the ascetic monks, the pillars, the styleites, the pillar saints, you know, who stood on top of a pillar for 90 days to get closer to God. Like they're trying, they're trying to make their lives harder because their lives are so easy. Like, let's be clear about that. Like, Generation Z and Generation Alpha have the easiest existence in the history of the world. They need to be challenged. They're looking for a church that challenges them, it makes life hard that talks about things like fasting and prayer and and holding the daily office and kneeling and service and all those things, you know, like Lent. I think that I think there's actually a huge opening for Lent to come back in America as a practice because people want an excuse to deny themselves, to make their lives hard that has a something meaningful to it. So I think, you know, calling people to more than what they're used to, there's some there's a tremendous value in that, but then also explaining those people that they belong to each other too, you know, and what it means to be accountable to your brothers and sisters, and they're accountable to you, that you owe you don't owe each other anything, but yes, you do. You know, like it's part of being in a community of people is yes, we want you to rise and fall on your own, but we want to help pick you up when you fall and celebrate you when you rise. Like those are great, those are great things. And I think like a lot of the struggles that we have, you know, the mental health, the isolation, the anxiety, all the things we struggle with are in large part because we just we don't have that anymore. We don't have a social safety net, you know, a friend group that can get us through these moments. And guess what? Church is a fantastic way to create those things.

SPEAKER_00 16:55

Well, and not to mention social sharpening. I mean, you know, we've got our kids are 12, 10, 6, and 2, and and so the olders are kind of getting into places in church and school life where where their social circles are kind of starting to form a little bit. And and um, you know, like nobody likes to say the word shame on a Christian podcast, but like a little social, a little social pressure uh is good for for uh particularly, you know, preteen boys. Like they they actually respond well to being part of a part of a pack. Like they're you know, and and the boys express themselves in ways that are different than I do with my friends now, they're giving each other a hard time. But like that, you can see the sharpening happen as these boys, and particularly under the guidance of of you know experienced um grown-ups who are also kind of shepherding them. A little bit of social pressure and a little bit of social social response to to your you know, your personality and the way you go about your life is actually a good thing. Like it's a healthy thing to let to exist in a body.

SPEAKER_01 17:57

We should. We should. I once preached a sermon where I said our job is to call people to account and tell people they're better than that. You know, like the things they say, the things they do, the thing who they are, they deserve they they are better than what they think they are. Listen, good preaching does two things. It comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. And you should go to a church that does both to you on a regular basis. If you're only being comforted, that's not what that's not what Christ called us to. He also told us that we need to be told to be better. Like I like why do I need church? I need to be told two things on a constant basis. One, that there's no goodness in me, right? That I'm a sinful creature at my core. But two, that Jesus Christ loves me unconditionally. Like I need to be told both those things that I'm awesome and terrible. I need to hold those things in equal account. Like we call it a come to Jesus meeting on purpose, you know, because we've got to come to Jesus and and and have an assessment of our lives. Like that's what that space creates. You know, that's what pastors should be doing is is not beating everyone down every Sunday, but also not just telling them how great they are every Sunday either. It's it's saying you're great, but you can be better. You know, Christ called you toward more. It's you know.

SPEAKER_00 19:02

Yeah. We I think we you said something earlier um about the aesthetics, and and I I wonder if our country is sort of ripe, ripe for this, particularly in the church. And we're seeing we're seeing that sort of um well, we're seeing kind of the the the secular stoics and and their online presence grow and people are following these guys all over the place. Um I think it's because the the generations that are coming up actually they want this. They want they want a little bit of uh a little bit of difficulty, a little bit of challenge, a little bit of healthy struggle. You so you mentioned you kind of breezed by um Gen Z for a minute there, and then we went off on something else. But I'm curious, I'm curious to get your observations on Gen Z and then who's behind them? What are the what are they called?

SPEAKER_01 19:51

Is it Alpha? I mean that's what that there's no name, like I don't know who picks a name, but Alpha is kind of what I hear. Okay, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:58

Are they like eight right now?

SPEAKER_01 19:59

Who's do we have so we think that probably Gen Z was born between 1996 and probably 2010-ish?

SPEAKER_00 20:07

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 20:07

Or so.

SPEAKER_00 20:08

So yeah, the oldest ones are probably just entering high school right now. So here's things that I keep hearing about Gen Z. This is the Jesus generation. Um, young men are coming back to the church. Um I hear that the Orthodox and kind of the Catholic movements are growing, particularly in young men, the more sort of liturgical trends, like um, but I haven't looked into it. I haven't even really looked at your stuff on this, if you have any. So, where what's your Gen Z, what's your Gen Z assessment? Like what's what's what's the reality? Not what do we want to be reality, what is actually happening?

SPEAKER_01 20:47

Yeah, the answer is it's probably impossible to know. Like, for instance, if young people are going toward the Orthodox Church. I mean, obviously you hear these um anecdotes, you know, online about things like that happening, but I don't I don't traffic in anecdotes, I traffic in data. And you gotta understand, like, the Orthodox Church is not that big. Like we have a country of 340 million people on an average Sunday, less than a million of them go to an Orthodox church. So you gotta think, like, okay, so it's a million total, and then we're only talking about Gen Z. That's probably 200,000, and then that only men, you know what I mean? So you're like, you're cutting it down to where it's almost nothing. And so that's why like all these anecdotes are interesting, and people want me to sort of validate them with data. But when we're talking about people don't realize how much things have to change in order for it to show up in a line graph, like at a macro level. It can't be like we had 10 new people come to church every Sunday. Go no, no, no, I would need 10 new people to come to every church in America every Sunday for the next 10 years to really see a macro level shift, you know. So I mean, I d it's an interesting story, and I get asked about it all the time, but I just don't see anything in the data that says that actually the data says the Gen Z, by almost any objective metric, is the least religious generation in American history, least likely to be even God without a doubt, most likely to never attend religious services. Um, they're more likely to be non religious compared to millennials. I mean, there's Nothing you see in the data that makes you go, wow, there's a revival happening here. I call it the vibes revival. Like everyone talks about how great religion is right now and how it's coming back. You know, that's something called the vibe session, right? Which is like everyone thinks the economy's bad when objective metrics say it's actually good. In religion, it's the opposite of that. The metrics are bad and everyone thinks it's good. And I don't know why that is so much, but I see nothing in the data that says that Gen Z or Gen Alpha will be particularly religious. You know, they I'm they will almost certainly not be more religious than their grandparents. I don't see anything in the data that points to that. So, no, I I think secularization has slowed down among Gen Z, but it's it's not stopped, nor has it reversed in any meaningful way.

SPEAKER_00 22:39

Yeah, to your point about the length of time that a trend must be sustained in order for it to even register as a as a meaningful trend. I remember um I I am not I am not apolitical, but but I don't desire to make this a modern American politics um episode. But I remember the shift um in the most recent presidential election when it really did feel like overnight it being it became okay to to say you're Christian online. Like all of a sudden, all of a sudden all the Christians, all the popular people came out of the woodwork um as being Christian and sort of just your anecdotal like you know online circles. Um and I'll be curious to see if in 2036 how that actually what that actually translates to. Because I don't think we're gonna know right now. I think we're still in the we're still in the sorting of that, but like I'm curious if if um if you've thought about that or if you're if there's something you think would be interesting to track over the next 10 years to see if being a Christian culturally falls back into favor if we'll see any sort of um actual response on the ground in churches or or I'm just curious what you are paying attention to with that sort of stuff.

SPEAKER_01 23:55

So I've got a um I've got an op-ed that I pitched to the New York Times. I don't know if they'll take it or not, but it basically makes the case that like if you look at the data, people are asking, you think religion's growing influence or shrinking influence in American society, and more Americans say growing now than the last 20 years among young men, the sheriffs say religion is very important to them, it's gone from 28% to 42%. These are all vibes questions, though, right? They're not like, are you going to church more often? And by the way, young men are not going to church more often than they were five years ago. So it's like they like the idea of religion, but not the actual religion part, not the actual like putting their butts in a seat and going on Sunday. So I think this divide, right, between like we the idea of religion versus actual religion is more and more what I'm leaning toward and trying to understand and like why those things have become so delinked. And for a lot of people, it's like I like the idea of like if you look at, for instance, like if you look at um Republicans, the share of them who stopped going to church is the same, is is rising at the same rate as Democrats, but on religious importance, there's no change in religious importance among Republicans, but there is among Democrats. So it's almost like for Republicans, they like the what what religion teaches in terms of morality, but they're not actually going to go. Um Democrats just kind of throw everything by the wayside. And I don't know which one's better, by the way. I think both of them are deeply problematic for different reasons.

SPEAKER_00 25:15

Well, it makes me wonder, too, then if you go back to just the general trend that denominations and church attendance is kind of going away anyway, um, will there be a new will there be a new expression of worship or um a trustworthy metric for for um cataloging action for lack of a better phrase that will emerge over the next like 50 years? That it just it will not look like what it looked like when my grandparents were in church or when I was in church as a kid, but it will be meaningful in the sense that you can say those are disciples of Jesus that are that are um taking steps toward growth. Um I'm curious what that'll look like, and I don't think anybody knows. I I don't think institutions are completely going away. I think the sands are shifting under the I think they're shifting sands, and I think there will be institutions in a hundred years. I just wonder what they will look like and what will count. That's what I'm that's what I'm curious about.

SPEAKER_01 26:16

And that's actually a problem for us as social scientists, because we don't want to change the way we measure things. You know, we want to keep with the same metrics because it creates comparability over time. But if people are experiencing religion in a new way, I don't know how to parse that. You know, I don't know how to how to measure that in a different way. So that's that's what I'm struggling with is religion becomes more amorphous. It becomes less about, you know, going to church on Sunday, then I don't know how we measure that. And to me, it's my my fatal flaw is I believe if you can't measure it, it doesn't exist. And so I, you know, it's gonna really cause sort of a crisis for a lot of people in my line of work to do better uh at measuring, you know, religiosity in various ways.

SPEAKER_00 26:52

Well, we're kind of waiting too when you to go back to something you said about um religiosity, I guess you could say, but also how maybe how that's expressed, like we're and how closely linked they are to just normal social trends. Like they they they kind of mimic what you already are doing in your in your social life. So um we're kind of in a wait and see period as the baby boomer generation um you know cycles through for to give it a cold term that I hate to give it. We have a lot of baby boomers in our congregation, but we've showed them, we've showed our congregation a lot of the work you've done on the beeswarm plots and different things on the on the baby boomer generation. We in fact took your your your plot idea and we put our our own congregation into a bee swarm plot just to see, like where we where we shook out, and it's very very similar to what the what the denominational plots that you showed were. I guess my point is um it's very difficult to know what to count and what will be worth counting until um we find that like thin tail of the beastworm plot actually being the the majority of our congregations.

unknown 28:08

Whatever.

SPEAKER_01 28:09

Yeah, that's no, that's that's something that no church is prepared for. You know, is what what does it look like when the boomers are not um the majority? And they are, by the way, in a lot of churches, they're they're not just like many, they're most of the the leaders, especially the givers, the the sort of the ones that are propping up the the church and volunteer hours and organizational structure. And who's gonna fill those slots in? What does leadership look like? What does church mean when these boomers are gone? I think the next 15 to 20 years may be the most turbulent 20 years in American religion in our lifetimes because of the demographic shift that's gonna happen because of the baby boomers. We've never seen anything. Everyone, like the pushback is isn't this just simple generational replacement? No, it's not. The boomers are numerous. I mean, that's why they're called the boomers, and they're actually fairly religious compared to the generations that came after them. So it's it's the size and the religiosity, and there's nothing in the data that says that we're talking churches are gonna lose 30, 40, 50 percent of their members in a 20-year stretch, and they are not ready for that financially, organizationally, spiritually. It's going to cause closures of tens of thousands. I'm convinced of it, tens of thousands of churches are gonna close down as the baby boomers sort of exit the stage.

SPEAKER_00 29:22

Yeah. I think about that all the time at our church, and because I never want to, one, I've been given um the privilege of a seat with stewardship responsibilities as the executive pastor of a of a large church. I think about this all the time, and I don't want to get complacent. Um, you know, I told you we had 2,800 some odd people on a Sunday or on a weekend. Um, we register about 4,500, 5,000 members. I can't remember what the number is right now. Um the the vast majority of those folks, to your point, are actually in the baby boomer generation, even in a church like ours. So we have, um, I think I might have told you in an email, we celebrated 261 couples that have been married 50 years or longer in our in our church this past year. I mean, lots and lots and lots of older folks here, and it's a real, it's a treasure. Like it's really fun to be in this ministry. It's it's pretty cool to be in um in ministry with like 500 of your grandparents. It's it's pretty cool. Um, but the reality is you know, when you're in the planning business and the strategy business and you're part of a large organization, you know, we have 300,000 square feet of of facility space, plus a facility across the road, plus we have, you know, um tons of technology in our sanctuary and all this stuff. We have all the investment that everybody else is making. Well, at some point, um if if that trend holds in our church and nothing else changes, so we we have real questions to answer, you know, for the 20 years that come after that um after that cycle, because you know, we have a lot of space. We have a lot of we have a lot of stuff that costs a lot of money uh to maintain. And so if if our congregation were to go down to a third of its current size uh seemingly overnight in the next couple of decades, then that would cause a real planning issue for us. I I have reasons to believe why that probably is not gonna happen here, not because I don't want it to, but um, there also is just a trend of uh that you've pointed out where folks are just choosing larger churches more often anyway. So we are still kind of on a growth trend that is not inherently um boomer related. But um I don't I am with you that I don't think that if your church has 5,000 people in it today and you're growing, that that means there's gonna be 12,000 in it, you know, in five years. I just don't think that.

SPEAKER_01 31:49

Oh, you're swimming upstream. I mean, that's that's the reality is that most churches are the modal members of boomer. I mean, let's be clear about that. And and I'm not saying like I'm not gonna go on the tiret about boomers like everyone else loves to do. There's a lot of boomers out there. I mean, and they're they're doing a lot of religious things. And for every funeral, just think about this, just mathematically speaking, for every funeral you do, you got to do one baptism just to keep the number level. That's not to grow, right? That's just to keep the boat level. If you're and when you when you've got how many 261 couples married 50 years, is what you said? 50 years or longer, yeah. Yeah, so that's 530 people right there, or who are at least 75 years old, right? I mean, at least. And you probably got another that many again who are in that same age band who haven't been married that long for various reasons, right? So you've got over a thousand people who are going to either die or be not able to come to church in the next 15 to 20 years. That's the reality that you're facing. Are you gonna be able to do a thousand people in inflow, a thousand people just to offset those losses? And again, that's not growing. That's just to keep the number where it is right now. That's the that's the tidal wave that's gonna happen to America. And by the way, not just American churches, but a lot of American institutions. I read a whole article interesting the other day about there's gonna be so many properties for sale in America in 15 years when these boomers are gonna, you know, they they they have to go to the nursing home or they die, they kind of downsize. Who's gonna buy all these houses that these boomers bought in 1965? It's gonna create a real estate problem, too. So I don't think there's something called the silver tsunami. The healthcare industry is not ready to deal with all these people who have Alzheimer's and dementia, you know, who need around the clock care. There's, I mean, there's all these knock-on effects for just, you know, boomers as they age. And they've done great things for America. They've really built America in many ways and seen us being prosperous. But golly goodness, we need to be prepared for impact because it's going to be hard for everyone. And I think churches need to be more mindful and thoughtful. Like, for instance, should we build a new sanctuary? Well, you know, like think about what that actually means. Are you sure you're going to be twice as large in 10 years? Are you sure of that? Um, maybe not do that because now you've got the overhead and the liabilities and the insurance and the utilities, everything that goes along with having a sanctuary that's too big. Yeah. I mean, there's a real downside to growth. Um, I've been telling I've been telling churches a lot. You think about like, oh, we shouldn't build it too small, but what if you build it too big? You know, what what are you inheriting to the next generation has to deal with a building that's now an albatross and not an asset? Um, you got to keep both those things in in proper perspective, I think.

SPEAKER_00 34:24

Well, and this reminds me of your um your anecdote or not anecdote, your story about your other your former church, and this is all over America. The health insurance, property and casualty insurance, all these things are the fastest growing line items on a commercial real estate sort of income statement or balance sheet, and and and um they're not going away. Like they're these I don't see them trending down either. And so at some point it's like you're paying, you're paying for these buildings uh and for what? Like when when building maintenance is 65% of your entire budget, just to just to have the building itself, um, is um, you know, my I grew up in churches like that, and so I really feel for these leaders that are that are pastoring these churches, and the leaders who are not just pastoring them, but are on the boards, the governance, you know, folks who have to who have to decide. Um so anyway, it'll be I I really appreciate your perspective because um you deal in facts and you deal in in um data, and and there's other there's other ways to arrive at a decision, but but I don't think you can do it without without giving heavy weight to what is actual reality.

SPEAKER_01 35:35

What do you got?

SPEAKER_00 35:36

You got gut feeling?

SPEAKER_01 35:38

You know what I mean? Like and listen, a lot of people do manage by gut, but I'd rather manage by gut and data. Give me both. Data can't tell you everything, but if you don't have it, you're flying blind. Imagine a pilot takes off with no gauges. Oh, I just know the plane's gonna go the right way. Like, come on, man. Like, you need to have at least some, you know, my favorite thing is people go, oh, well, thank God, you know, God doesn't care about what's popular on a survey. You know, like I I don't get that mentality. I'd rather know than not know. I'd rather see these trend lines, understand the world the way it is, because at the end of the day, studying people are studying God. Because if we believe that people are made in the image of God, then studying how people behave and act and think and vote is studying the creator, right? By studying the creation. So I just think there's tons of value in trying to understand the world in a more empirical, objective way. I think it makes our decision making better, makes the kingdom better, makes our lives better.

SPEAKER_00 36:29

Amen. I agree. Well, Ryan, I really appreciate you being on with us. I mean, this has been so fun. I've followed you for a long time, like I said, and it's been cool to get to talk to you. Um, I guess maybe if you have a final thought, I'm curious, is there anything we didn't talk about today that you're just you're personally interested in? You're you're kind of some rabbit trails you're going down, some stuff that that that you're just you know occupies your thought time, you know, at work or not at work that you think is interesting?

SPEAKER_01 36:55

Right now it's it's we have this book coming out next year. Michael Graham and I, uh Michael Graham, Jim Davis, and I wrote a book called The Great De Churchill in the county a couple years ago, and it did really well, sold a bunch of copies, and we thought, how can we top that? How can we do a better something? And so we did a 100,000-person survey of American religion, and we asked people to sort of like take us through their religious past. Zero to 12. How often do you go to church? What kind of church? What do you believe about God? What do you believe about Jesus? 13 to 17, 18 to 29, 30 to 44. So we can really trace people's entire spiritual histories. And so we have a book coming out, uh, and that's what I've been thinking about a lot is like how religion changes as we age. How does it matter differently for the boomers than X or millennials? Um, and so that book is going to answer a lot of questions that we really didn't have a whole lot of answers to. I think there's gonna be a lot of things in there that are gonna really change the way that we think about how American religion works, how the church grows and dies. And so that book's called The Great Church Migration, Great American Church Migration, and it comes out in May of 2027 from Zonder. And that's really all I've been thinking about the last couple of months. I've been working through that book and trying to make the best arguments and the best graphs and make it clear and accessible and all the things. I think there's a lot to be said that we don't we haven't said yet about how religion changes over time.

SPEAKER_00 38:03

Awesome. Well, Ryan, again, I'm so appreciative of the work that you're doing. I think if the church is paying attention, it will benefit from it. Um and um I can't wait till we get to talk again. I can't wait to read your book. And um, until next time, we'll see you again. Thank you so much, man. Really appreciate it. All right, that's gonna do it for today. This has been part two of our part two part series with Ryan Burge. I hope you enjoyed it. Tune in next week. We're back to the Bible and our year through the Bible podcast. We'll see you next time.