Show Notes
On this episode of Nuance, Case is joined by Daniel Copeland, Vice President of Research at Barna Group. Together they unpack seven prevalent myths about Christianity that shape perceptions both inside and outside the church. They explore how these myths impact the understanding of Christian calling, the reality of church closures, and the dynamics of pastor burnout. Copeland emphasizes the importance of relationships and reverence in the church, challenging the narrative of decline and encouraging a deeper understanding of the church’s role in the modern world.
Episode Resources:
https://www.barna.com/
The State of Pastors, Vol. 2: https://shop.barna.com/products/the-s…
The Human Flourishing Program at Harvard: https://hfh.fas.harvard.edu/
Nuance is a podcast of The Collaborative where we wrestle together about living our Christian faith in the public square. Nuance invites Christians to pursue the cultural and economic renewal by living out faith through work every facet of public life, including work, political engagement, the arts, philanthropy, and more.
Each episode, Dr. Case Thorp hosts conversations with Christian thinkers and leaders at the forefront of some of today’s most pressing issues around living a public faith.
Our hope is that Nuance will equip our viewers with knowledge and wisdom to engage our co-workers, neighbors, and the public square in a way that reflects the beauty and grace of the Gospel.
Learn more about The Collaborative:
Website: https://wecolabor.com/
Get to know Case: https://wecolabor.com/team/
Episode Transcript
Case Thorp
We live in a time when many see the church as either irrelevant, intolerant, or disconnected from the real world. These misnomers limit how believers engage the broader culture with clarity and confidence. We may hold back, feel ignorant or out of place, or even question, maybe I am the ogre some people say I am because I believe in Jesus. Well, by addressing these misconceptions head on, the church can reassert its place in the public square not as a relic of the past, but as a vital voice for truth, compassion, and whole life discipleship. Today, we’re diving into research from the Barna Group about seven contemporary myths impacting the church. These aren’t just abstract ideas, they’re real cultural narratives shaping how believers think about the church, about truth, our mission as Christians, and even our own callings both at work and into the greater world. Well, to help us unpack it all, Daniel Copeland, Vice President of Research at Barna joins me today. Daniel, welcome.
Daniel Copeland
It’s great to be here.
Case Thorp
Well, I really appreciate it and you should, listeners should know Daniel’s coming off of wisdom teeth surgery. So thank you for pushing through.
Daniel Copeland
I appreciate that. It’s a great footnote if I say anything a little too out there, but I’m feeling great today. Thanks for acknowledging it.
Case Thorp
So today we’re going to talk about why these myths matter, how they subtly shape the way Christians approach their faith at work, and what the church and marketplace leaders alike can do to respond with clarity. So I want to thank you, our viewers and friends. Welcome to Nuance, where we seek to be faithful in the public square. I’m Case Thorp, and please like, subscribe, share. It helps us to reach even further. Now, you’re a vice president of research, Daniel. Now in some ways that seems kind of obvious but explain that for folks.
Daniel Copeland
Sure. So, my name is Daniel Copeland. I’ve been at Barna Group for seven years this spring and have the great, great honor of serving as vice president of research. What do I do as vice president of research? The majority of what that means is that I oversee the design of our research and then the execution of it. And I lean really heavy into describing the design side of research because we live in a time that has so much data. There’s data everywhere. News organizations use data, social media uses data, researchers use data, everybody’s using data.
Case Thorp
And they’re scrambling for what’s the truth, what’s true data.
Daniel Copeland
My job in many ways is to ask, when somebody asks us a question, hey, Barna Group, have you ever looked into this? My job is to find out is that question researchable? And if it was, how would we do it? How would you get to a defendable answer about that question? Because in the world of the information age, we can get to answers. That doesn’t mean they’re objective. That doesn’t mean they’re defendable. Doesn’t mean they’re rigorous. But you can get to an answer. You can find somebody else online who agrees with you. That’s why we’re on this podcast. My job is to figure out, okay, of that question you have, whether you’re a ministry, a Christian nonprofit, a humanitarian organization, what’s researchable about the question you’re asking? And then maybe a step further for my role at Barna Group is specifically, and what would the Barna version of that study be? How would Barna provide a research solution to that question? And sometimes that looks like a quantitative study. Sometimes that’s a qualitative study. A lot of my work is helping the people we work with focus and hone in what could research do for you? What could data solve for you. And sometimes it’s also acknowledging what data will not solve for you.
Case Thorp
So do I assume you got a, I don’t know, a college degree in statistics?
Daniel Copeland
I have a bachelor’s and a master’s in sociology. I had a specific focus in, I went to Georgia State University in downtown Atlanta.
Case Thorp
Okay, okay, in my hometown, Atlanta, Georgia. Well, I grew up in Conyers, as we effectively say, Con Vegas. And my parents are from Decatur, back there now. I went to Emory, so Atlanta’s home.
Daniel Copeland
I live about 10 minutes from Decatur, so know the area really, really well. We’ll catch up on that in a different medium. Yeah. Exploring Atlanta. Well, it’ll be a great podcast. My background’s in sociology and my degree program had a very, very strong emphasis on quantitative methodology and statistics. There are other degree programs out there that might be more qualitative focus, mixed methods focused. Mine was very quant heavy. Sociologists’ jobs are to understand society, agnostic of the individual. So what is changing in society that might be reflected through what an individual is experiencing? Whereas sometimes we think about psychology being what is an individual experiencing that affects how they view the world? They’re not two sides of the same coin. That’s kind of a misnomer, but my background was in looking at the macro movements of society and culture. The funny story about this around, you know, connecting my background academically to Barna is I had never heard of Barna Group before. I grew up in the church, but I’d never heard of it before. And got out of grad school, thought I was just going to be like a freelance researcher, freelance data dude for a little while, realized that does not pay the bills very well, started looking for a big boy job. On Wednesday, I’d never heard of Barna, got introduced via friend of a friend to the vice president of research, interviewed Thursday, started Monday, and now it’s been seven years and it was a good fit.
Case Thorp
Wow. Well, I want everybody to know the Barna Group’s mandate is to understand the times and know what to do. Understand the times and know what to do. Since 1984, Barna has been helping churches, nonprofits, and businesses navigate the landscape of Christianity to see the whole and to know what to do. Barna has chronicled adults’ relationship with the Christian faith, explored their perspectives and ideas regarding religion and how these matters intersect with broader culture. So I’m grateful, as you know, Daniel, at the Collaborative we’ve just finished a partnership with the Barna Group on studying the trends in the workplace. It’s been a great project and I’ve learned so much and so for my listeners -stay tuned and we’ll be sharing those results soon. So Daniel’s research at Barna, he offers seven prevalent myths that influence perceptions of the church both by those inside and outside the church. Seven different myths. Daniel said, okay, if I read the myths. So number one, this myth that Christianity is in decline. Now that one’s interesting to me because I was convinced. Number two, churches are closing their doors. Number three, Jesus is a foreign unknown figure. So that’s a myth that people think that he is a foreign unknown figure. Myth number four, young people are done with religion. Myth number five, the future is digital. Myth six, pastors are burning out at extreme rates. And I was, I’ve just been pronouncing that myself. I’ve seen it all over the place. So I’m interested in that. And myth number seven, the church isn’t relevant enough. The church isn’t relevant enough. So, you know, why this question? And how did you go about gathering and interpreting data to get to these myths?
Daniel Copeland
Yeah, great place to start. So first and foremost, just punchline for any listener. You’re not gonna be able to Google Barna Group 7 myths and have an immediate response come up. That’s because when I lay out these myths, I’m basically giving you a review of seven years of doing this work. I touch about 30 projects a year, so you can do the math of how many projects I’ve done in the last seven years. And if I was to summarize a lot of what I think are the most prevalent, thought-provoking findings over those years of the course of different studies, how would I explain it in a narrative-driven way? And I came up with this idea of myths. And so why this question is because I think that, and I hold very strongly that even though we live in an age of data and information, that we’re still a very stories-oriented people. We are compelled by narrative. And whether you grow up in the church or not, you hear a lot of stories about the church, who the church is, what Christians do, where culture is heading, how a Christian acts in the world. And then as somebody who grew up in the church, did my deconstruction days throughout college, and found my way back throughout young adulthood. What I would say if we were, this is a little off topic to miss, but if I was to try to describe deconstruction to somebody, spiritual deconstruction, I would talk about the point in your life where you come to realize that all the stories you heard weren’t exactly true. They weren’t entirely accurate. That doesn’t mean they were false. That doesn’t mean they were a lie, necessarily. Maybe they were, but they weren’t entirely true.
Case Thorp
Well, and I think about as I’ve gotten older, I go, you know what? I don’t know that the story my grandfather told me about swimming with the alligator in the Atlanta Zoo pool at night was true. And I’m like, wait a minute, grandfather stories.
Daniel Copeland
Yeah, so we’re comfortable so often with something like that, like, that was a grandfather story. But we become so uncomfortable about things around religion and spirituality. We don’t like it when somebody kind of messes with the foundation of what we believe. And if we were to think theologically for a second, maybe this looks like when somebody in early young adulthood comes to understand, the gospels weren’t written by the immediate disciples. They came 30 or 40 years later by other people. That’s not what I thought I heard in Sunday school. And so we wrestle with these things and they kind of pull at us as a social researcher, as a sociologist. I am so compelled by the stories we’ve told about the church and about Christians as an institution, as a religion, as a group of people. The stories that I walk into a church today as a Barna researcher and somebody without any data to back them up will look at me and they’ll say, well, you know Christianity’s dying, right? And I’ll go, well, that kind of depends on how you look at it. What does dying mean? What is Christianity? Are we talking about, how would you say Christianity is a singular thing? Is it a group of people? Is it a bunch of churches? Is it your version or my version? There’s been a lot of versions throughout world history. What does that mean? And so then think back to that first question, what does Daniel do as a vice president of research? I ask what’s researchable. So I can look at these questions, these kind of cultural narratives that I hear all over the place, working with churches, working with clients of Barna, these stories that I hear so confidently. And I asked the question, well, what does data actually say about that? And to kind of cap that, I would say a myth, it’s a story, it’s an organizing story, doesn’t necessarily have to be true or false. It just has to be helpful. It just has to be functional. We can get around it. We can organize. And so, I approach this question or this topic of myths in the church from an idea of, okay, here’s the stories I’ve heard about the church. What does research have to say about that?
Case Thorp
And which of these are true? Which of these are not? So I think back to…I was in DC two weeks ago with my son’s class and did Washington cut down the cherry tree or not? And what’s the date of that first being recorded and what was it trying to convey? And yet it has contributed to our understanding of America and her first founding father as being a real boy that had a moment and yet he had to confess to it. So it speaks to character and it speaks to larger understandings of who an American should be. So sometimes that myth word does trip people up. I had a guest a few episodes ago and he too was using the word myth and we were very intent to say not that it’s false. Sometimes we hear the word myth and we think it’s fictional. No. Is it that’s what you’re trying to do to figure out is it true or not and dig into that.
Daniel Copeland
Yeah.
Case Thorp
Okay, so of these seven, which of the seven do you think most directly affects the way Christians understand their calling in the marketplace?
Daniel Copeland
Okay, such a good question. Let me be a sociologist for a second. Marketplace, workplace, from sociology we’re thinking of this from a social research perspective of the place that we express our career, our vocation, the part of my life that I put a little action to my why.
Case Thorp
Okay, yes. And I even mean medicine, education, not just the business environment, but the working world.
Daniel Copeland
Absolutely. So I would look to first, let’s talk about Christianity and decline. I think that the reason when I express this information, express these myths, the reason I start with Christianity decline is because it seems to be the most prevalent myth. And so many people today are really socialized, especially in the workforce, to believe, well, I can’t be Christian here. Christianity is on the way out. We don’t like Christian talk. I like to remind people a stat that shows up in every single time I talk on data. Seven out of 10 Americans identify as Christian. Let’s just pause right there for a second. That’s a super simple stat. That does not mean they go to church. That doesn’t mean they would affirm the Nicene Creed or an Apostle’s Creed.
Case Thorp
Right.
Daniel Copeland
But seven out of 10 people would just raise their hand and say, I’m a Christian. Let’s break that down a little bit more. If that was just 10 people, the other three people, who are they? One of them is of another religious faith. They’re Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist. It’d be a little bit less actually. Keep it to simple 10, just to rationalize or to conceptualize it. The other two are people who identify as atheist, agnostic, and no faith. Of those, half of them grew up in the church. So immediately you can say, if we just thought of US adults as 10 people, we’re pretty Christian. It’s not like it’s two of us or three of us. It’s a lot of us. Now, here at Barna Group, show a lot of charts that are change over time, percentage of people who identify as Christian over time. If you went back 20 years or 40 years, it would be about 85 to 90% of Americans who identify as Christian, whereas today it’s in the mid 60s, about 7 out of 10 rounding up. So you look at that and you think to yourself, okay, that’s down into the right. Used to be 90, now it’s about 70, decline.
Case Thorp
Right.
Daniel Copeland
We’re dying. Case, what’s also changed in the last 20 or 30, 40 years in the US society? Let’s think very simple for a second.
Case Thorp
Well, I mean, what hasn’t changed? Online, the iPhone, social media.
Daniel Copeland
Yes, think even more rudimentary than that. There are more of us. There’s more of us. Population growth. There are millions more of us every single year. And so if we were to control, if we were to calculate out the actual number of Christians by a number, not a percentage, you’d see that over the last 30 to 40 years, Christianity is essentially a flat line. So is that decline? Is that death?
Case Thorp
Right. It’s a not dissolution, but dissolving or what do we call it?
Daniel Copeland
Yeah, exactly. And so one way to think about this is let’s go back to our 10 people for a second. Let’s say that in 1980, 90% of people identified as Christian. So that’s 9 of those 10 people said, I’m a Christian. Today, this is a number I’m just making up for an example. Say there are now 100 people in that room. Let’s not say today. Say there were, in the future, there were 100 people in the room, and those nine people are still Christians. Has Christianity declined? That’s a different question. It’s actually the same number of people. It’s the environment that’s changed. And we could have a conversation about culture and how culture is shaped because now we are more, we’re experiencing more diversity of beliefs and perspectives and backgrounds around us. But it’s not that Christianity’s changed, it’s that the room has changed, that we’re all standing in. So let’s go back to the workplace, where I’m expressing my why. What people are expressing as their why, where they’re putting action in their life, would say we’re not, often, Christians are so incredibly and encouragingly attuned to this idea of calling. And they come with this idea of calling, and today I feel like people have really challenged, we’ve put forward this narrative that Christianity is in decline. And so a lot of people feel like, well, maybe I need to have both a Christian calling and a secular calling, a calling I can express in a non-Christian environment. But if Christianity is not declining, if it’s kind of staying in that flatness, well, that kind of changes the narrative for me. If I see actually maybe there’s a lot of people around here who might really understand my faith background. And while we’ve worked to be a more accepting and diverse community, maybe I don’t need to think of this as being under threat. That’s the idea I want to get to. Because let’s then ask, okay, if Christianity is more like a flat line over the last 30 to 40 years, why do we talk about decline? And I would say that it’s often because we see that kind of down to the rightness. We see that change of the room, change of the ecosystem, and we often interpret that as threat. We often interpret that as unstable change. And so then we change how we show up in our environments. And so when I think about the workplace, I would start there and just say, hey, less this change than you think it has, how we show up has changed, but at the same time, we need to be very thoughtful about what the room is like, who we’re surrounded by, but that we don’t need to feel under threat. We don’t need to feel like the room’s collapsing on us, the room’s expanding, and maybe there’s something really exciting about that. That was a lot of thoughts. Do you have any, what does all that bring up for you?
Case Thorp
Well, it makes me wonder then why on your second myth you make it a separate issue and that is churches are closing their doors. That’s actually not true. Now I’ve led in our denomination and I know as Presbyterians we’re not on the front line of growth and I have seen the statistics where when in our particular camp there are churches closing their doors. But why would you separate that from Christianity and decline? Why not roll those together?
Daniel Copeland
Are you PCA or PCUSA?.
Case Thorp
We’re EPC, Evangelical Presbyterian Church. And yet, while we do have doors closing, we have a remarkable strong number of church plants. And so I find encouragement in that regard, but we’re probably not outpacing our doors closing.
Daniel Copeland
Okay, less familiar. Yeah. Okay, so let’s talk about that second myth. Churches are closing their doors. This was the one that I especially, my radars were going up on it during COVID, where we were seeing numbers all throughout the pandemic around predicting the number of churches that were gonna close, how many pastors were gonna get let go. Those are real stories, and I wanna be so empathetic to every single church close. Imagine driving through your hometown right now and think through how many churches on corners of streets you and I talked about both being from the east side of Atlanta earlier. A lot of churches, small churches, big churches, medium-sized churches. So let’s get to your talk first about your first item that was why separate Christianity and decline from churches are closing their doors. Well, as a researcher, I like to tease apart concepts. Christianity, that might be a personal identity. I am a Christian. I am following a Christ-like life. Churches, in a very crass way, these are organizations. 501c3s. Bureaucracies. They are nonprofits. Tax-exempt nonprofits that sit on a lot of corners of a lot of streets throughout most towns of America. Let’s just start with this with a question. Today, how many churches do you think there are in America?
Case Thorp
My goodness.
Daniel Copeland
Protestant, let’s just go Protestant.
Case Thorp
Oh well, you could throw in the calculus if you want. I know in the EPC we have about 650, 650. I know in the PCA there’s about 1600. So I would venture to say 80 to 100,000.
Daniel Copeland
Actually- if I told you, you were way off, where would you go?
Case Thorp
500,000.
Daniel Copeland
Okay, down, down from there.
Case Thorp
Did I shoot too high? 250.
Daniel Copeland
Okay, so in the last very defendable, most rigorous religious census happens every 10 years by the ARDA, the Association of Religion Data Archives. They did their last census in 2020, mid pandemic, 314,000. 314,000. And that number I checked myself is Protestant and Catholic.
Case Thorp
314,000. Wow.
Daniel Copeland
Yeah, okay. Would you… How many churches would you guess there were 40 years ago? I know now we’re playing with numbers a lot, but 40 years.
Case Thorp
Hmm. Well, I would think based on what we’ve discussed less because there’s been such population growth. So maybe 200,000.
Daniel Copeland
Nope. It’s about 223. So 40 years ago, 223,000 Protestant churches. Today, 314,000 Protestant churches. That’s a lot. Sorry, Protestant and Catholic. That’s a lot of churches. That’s a lot of churches. That is in 40 years, almost 100,000. It’s 91,000 more churches, physical churches, that’s 41% growth of physical churches.
Case Thorp
And are you tapping even those that rent their space or even house churches?
Daniel Copeland
When we think about this, we’re thinking about professionally organized. So organized, if you’re corporate, if you are in a reductive way, a bunch of friends meeting on a Wednesday night and calling yourself a church, you’re probably not being counted here. You’ve got tax filing, you’ve got a website, this is corporate. So in 40 years, 41% more churches. At the same time we just talked about that down to the right percentage of all U.S. adults who identify as Christian. That seems inverse, doesn’t it? That seems a little backwards. There’s Christianity’s a flat line in terms of a population, but we’ve added 41% almost 100,000 more physical locations. That’s kind of something’s going on there. Let me add one more number to this to just definitely confuse the narrative a little bit more, but inviting listeners into the complexity of this. Hey, Case, in 1980, how many denominations do you think the religious census tracked?
Case Thorp
Wow. I bet there’s gonna be more today, because we Protestants love to split. Let’s say 10,000.
Daniel Copeland
Denominations? Wow. Okay, that’s way too many.
Case Thorp
Is that too many? Okay, 2,500.
Daniel Copeland
About a hundred. A hundred. Yeah, just a hundred denominations. And for record keeping, we talk about denominations here. We’re not talking about, if, you know, Bob opens Bob’s church, it doesn’t just suddenly get counted as it’s, you know, an independent entity. It’s not suddenly, it’s not suddenly a denomination until they start having multiple locations. If they start planting. In the year 1980.
Case Thorp
100 denominations. Wow. Got it. Independent churches don’t count.
Daniel Copeland
Today, 319. That is a pace of five to six new denominations every single year.
Case Thorp
Sure. Sure.
Daniel Copeland
Sit with that one. Like that’s incredible change over just 40 years, half a lifetime. You go from 200 something thousand churches, 97 denominations to 314,000 churches and 319 denominations. If I could synthesize that for you in a quick phrase, Christianity, if it is dying, it is dying via division far faster than it is dying via disaffiliation.
Case Thorp
Sure, it’s splintering.
Daniel Copeland
So it’s splintering into all these other pieces and places. That also intuitively means that churches are smaller. I know that mainstream Christianity has been really, really captivated by the megachurch movement, the Christian influencer movement of the last 10 to 20 years, megachurch a little longer than that. But the fact is churches are getting smaller, smaller and smaller and smaller. If every single Christian today went to church, every single church would have about 600 members. And that’s actually pretty flat over time because of change of population and change of things. But what would happen if, say, a hundred years in the future there was one church for every Christian? Would Christianity still be alive? Is that decline? The radically individualized, we could just keep separating, keep splintering. What is it we have to come back to that question what would it mean for christianity to die so if we come back to work for a second and we come back to i’ve got my Christian membership card you’ve got your Christian membership card our membership cards are really different 319 denominations 319 different creeds different liturgies, different histories, different organizing narratives. So Christianity, is it declining or is it dividing? Is it splintering? And is what one Christian is compared to what another Christian is and their Christian-ness is very different today. You could meet, you know, it’s kind of that adage of you could meet every single Christian and have never met the same time sort of thing. You meet eight billion people on this planet and there’s probably eight billion different ways to be a person.
Case Thorp
Well, and now I just take the Presbyterians. there’s so many different kinds. What kind of Presbyterian are you? And that splintering really makes you think about your own identity and your own place. But then the transfer of that information, find folks kind of tune out when I try to explain, why are we evangelical Presbyterians and all the subdivisions.
Daniel Copeland
Take it from a United Methodist over here who went through a very, very public schism over the last few years. And inside the United Methodist Church, it’s been, you know, existential of what we’ve experienced of the splintering, the schism, and yet on the scoreboard of how many denominations, we just added maybe one. Whereas every time new churches get planted and they say we’re our own thing, we add a new denomination to the column, the scoreboard of sorts. And I’m not trying to demonize that. I’m not trying to say that’s necessarily bad. I’m just trying to narrate what’s actually changing. And what I would say is that, it’s that phrase I used a second ago, if Christianity is dying, it’s dying via division far faster than it’s dying via disaffiliation. There’s some current research that’s actually showing that disaffiliation is starting to plateau. The N-O-N-E-S are kind of plateauing over time that they’re ceasing to grow. Maybe that’s good news, maybe that’s, I don’t know, it’s just data. But we’re gonna keep schisming.
Case Thorp
Right. Are we though, or might there be a generational shift that’s tired of it? Or shifts in the direction of let’s find unity? I don’t know.
Daniel Copeland
You know, when I was younger, I, and when I was younger and I was starting to really wrestle with the diversity of what Christian expression could be raised in a mainline liturgical denomination, the UMC, very bureaucratic, high governance. And I got t o college and I started seeing, whoa, not everybody was raised the way I was. Everybody’s Christian card means something a little different. Some of them wear skinny jeans. They don’t dress up to go to church, stuff like that. There was a while where I was really enamored with, wow, I think God is diverse. And so we must need a diversity of church expressions to express the diversity of God. I was really enamored with that idea for a long time and was really attracted to this idea that we probably needed a diversity of churches. I think I’m coming back, this is a little bit more theological than it is social research, but I’m coming to a place where I actually start to look at that and get sad and say, how sad is it that we will disagree about so many things that we cannot worship one God together? That we can’t, one denomination’s gonna question the next. Well, what do you believe? Do you believe in this? Do you believe in that? Do you allow whatever the social or doctrinal issue? It might be that we’re gatekeeping and boundary checking different denominations and expressions of the Christian faith. That really concerns me and suddenly I get really sad, like I said, that we can’t be unified in our worship. I once heard somebody express it this way where they asked the rhetorical question, is there somebody in this world you would not take communion with? And it’s rhetorical. I’m not gonna answer it out loud, I’d have to sit and pray on it. But I think there’s a lot of people in the schisming and splintering of Christianity who look left and right and they say, there’s people I wouldn’t worship alongside.
Case Thorp
Yeah. Well, and I get all the time from parishioners, I’m a Republican, how can Democrats be Christian? And I’m a Democrat, how can Republicans be Christian? Now, I wanna, okay, so you’re at work and you’ve just kind of blown my mind. I’m thinking, wow, Christianity is not in decline. It’s the environment’s changing, the population’s growing. We’re just getting more diluted. That’s the word I was looking for, diluted. Churches are not actually closing their doors. There’s more churches. So it’s really this splintering that’s occurring. But then you say in myth number seven, the church isn’t relevant enough. So you’re saying the church is relevant. If it’s getting diluted and splintered, how are we staying relevant?
Daniel Copeland
Okay, so you can find this stat in so many of my talks, David Kinnaman, the owner of Barna’s Talks, where we talk about that over time, over generations, younger Christians, even amongst Christians, younger people are more likely to say the Church is irrelevant in the world today. It does not pass the relevancy test. And let’s tease that apart. What’s relevant? What does relevant mean?
Case Thorp
Yeah, what does relevant mean? And I know some folks that go, there’s that word again. I can’t stand the word relevant.
Daniel Copeland
Punchline first, I kind of have that opinion of this word. And I think, you know, Apple is pretty relevant to me, helps me get my job done, keeps me connected to my friends and family. Amazon’s relevant to me. It helps me get the stuff I want on the timeline I need. Two day free shipping has had me sold for 20 years. That’s relevant. Why do we keep using the word relevant to describe what we think the church should be? Relevant to what? Relevant to an individual, relevant to a person’s values. What does that mean? Let me tell you a story. And this is where this idea of the church isn’t relevant enough as a myth came from. One of my favorite studies I’ve ever gotten to be a part of. We did three books called Making Space. Making Space was done with our really great friends and partners over at Aspen Group. Aspen Group is a church architecture and design company and we did a bunch of qualitative research with them where we toured the country and we invited atheists and highly engaged Christians, not at the same time, but independent of each other in focus groups, we invited them to tour churches with us. We’d go tour the buildings, physical buildings, and we’d go to high church. We’d go to very liturgical, stained glass, long pews, huge chancel and pulpit. And then we’d go to non-denominational mega churches and we’d go to the kind of in-betweens. We did this all across the country and we would ask people about the values they felt like this church had just by touring their building, specifically by touring the sanctuary or auditorium, as a lot of non-denominational churches refer to it today, or worship space. And we just asked them simple questions. How do you feel in this room? And we would give them 15, 20 minutes just to go around the space on their own. And I kid you not, I’m gonna summarize all of our groups. We did this a dozen or so times. Christians would tour these spaces like they owned the place. These were not their home churches. These were highly engaged churchgoers who went to a different church in that city or in that neighborhood. And they would come into these sanctuaries and they’d walk around like they owned the place, open doors without asking. They’d go up in the pulpit and be like, look, this is where my pastor’s got one of these. This is where he hides his water bottle or this is where the, these doors, this is where the choir walks in from. I once had somebody in a church comment, a Christian comment about, well, the stained glass at my church is bigger than this church’s and our projector is updated and you’d get into this comparative game with Christians whenever they entered these spaces. When we did the same activity with atheists, they would walk around in this somber reverence for the space. They would look at the chancel, the pulpit area of a cathedral, and they would refuse to go near it. And when asked, they’d say things like, well, I don’t belong up there. That’s a holy space. I don’t even feel like I’m supposed to touch the altar. They would ask permission before opening certain doors. They felt like a guest. And it was in doing that study that I came to, unfortunately and unfairly, juxtapose these two R words of relevance and reverence. And came to believe kind of deeply that the more we pursue relevance for the world we live in, the less reverent we will probably be. And there are so few spaces, I think I even, I hope my pastor doesn’t hear this, but I can’t think of the last reverent space I’ve been in. A physical space where I felt small and I felt like this is a holy and special place. Maybe sometime I was hiking. People get that experience in nature, but very rarely in a church.
Case Thorp
Very rarely in a church, even your regular place of worship.
Daniel Copeland
Yeah, there are times…I had a wonderful Good Friday service this year. Sun was setting, beautiful golden hour. It was different. But in the hustle and bustle of a normal Sunday morning, you just don’t feel that.
Case Thorp
Yeah. Well, and I have, especially through the COVID experience and even having worship online, have felt like we in the gathered church on Sunday should double down on the reverent experience, the moments of awe and transcendence, whether it’s in the contemporary style or a more traditional classical style, we do both here, that that is what will get people off the couch and in the room. It is when they know it’s a place of regularly experiencing awe.
Daniel Copeland
It’s such a such a deeply spiritual expression that a school, Starbucks, McDonald’s is never going to offer you. And it’s one of those few places that like I draw a hard line. Like I think only the church can offer reverence. Nature, I think has a really good stick in the fight. And that’s, I think one of the reasons we see people, you know, the national parks movement that we’ve seen in the last 20, 30 years of young people really wanting to experience nature, experience creation, I think is a part of that pursuit of reverence.
Case Thorp
Let me throw in, sadly I hear people talking about going to get high at concerts and these transcendent supposedly experiences but that are totally chemically induced and it makes me sad.
Daniel Copeland
It makes me sad too, but let’s be researchers about it for a second. Let’s dissect that. The pursuit of a reverent experience using what would perhaps be conceived as an illegitimate pathway, a legitimate need. I need to feel transcendent. I need to feel reverent. And they don’t have a path in their life to get to that thing. And so they find an illegitimate path. They find a shortcut.
Case Thorp
Yes, at their longing. Sure.
Daniel Copeland
That is such a reductive way to look at illegal drugs at concerts. Let’s, you know, baby in bath water here, let’s look at what are they pursuing? An escape. And so I love ending talking about these myths with this idea of relevance with basically saying, well, why were we pursuing it in the first place? Maybe our job was not to propose that God is a relevant figure, but one we must be reverent of.
Case Thorp
Sure, sure. So, your myth is the church isn’t relevant enough. The corollary, the truth would be the church is reverent enough, but then you’re critical of that. Explain that to me.
Daniel Copeland
So how I would phrase this is saying if the story we’re telling ourselves is that the church isn’t relevant enough, relevant enough to survive, to live, to attract people. And like I said earlier, I view these myths as organizing narratives, the narratives that we’re trying to organize around. What would be a more helpful narrative because I look at all these and I’d say, I would challenge the church leaders and say, why organize around we’re not relevant enough? Maybe we should organize around, we have a deep reverence for transcendence places. We have a deep reverence for the sacredness that is fellowship. And we’re not trying to attract you or not trying to woo you the way that a Walmart or a Tesla is. We’re trying to create something entirely different for you that you will not get anywhere else.
Case Thorp
You can’t get anywhere else. And that reminds me, these myths don’t necessarily mean they’re false, so I shouldn’t jump to the opposite statement being true.
Daniel Copeland
Yeah. Well, and I think that’s why I like playing with them this way is to say it’s more about how helpful is the narrative. Is it helpful for us?
Case Thorp
Yeah, is it helpful or not? Okay, so I’m just going to tell our listeners and viewers, we’re going to go a little long today because this is so fascinating and good stuff. Let’s look at myth number six. Pastors are burning out at extreme rates. Now that certainly hits on a faith and work issue. I have seen it with my own eyes. I have been moved and concerned with this particular story that a room filled with about 25 pastors who were at larger sized churches. The question was how many of you came close to quitting during COVID and about 70% of the hands went up. And then the question was, okay, we’re through that now. How many of you, if you could find another job that fit your skills, gifts, and pay scale right now would do it? And about 40% raised their hands. So, and I know that a lot of foundations are pouring resources into helping slow down pastor burnout. So explain this one to me.
Daniel Copeland
Okay, so a lot of those stats, a lot of those questions, Barna was deep in the weeds of throughout the pandemic. I believe our stat, we were tracking throughout the pandemic, the percentage of all pastors who were considering quitting. And I wanna say it peaked right around like two out of five to almost half of pastors at some point in the pandemic. One of the funniest things about being a social researcher through the pandemic is I said a lot to people this phrase of too soon and too late when it came to how we track things during the pandemic because social research is built on the idea of credible testing, credible questions, credible, we have standards for how we do things. And that pandemic threw us such a curve ball. It was, you know, people are asking me a few weeks in, how do you track, how many people are attending digitally? And I go, I don’t have a verifiable defendable way to track that. So we had to start paying attention to, okay, what stories are we hearing? What do we want to track? Pastoral wellbeing and pastoral burnout became such a hot topic then. Did you also notice that it became a hot topic at the same time, cultural work, burnout in the entire workplace and disengagement with the entire workplace was at its highest too, the great resignation. And so in the same way that we can often idolize pastors as, you know, these great shepherds beacons on a hill, they’re also working a job. And it’s a called job. It’s an important job. It is a set aside job in so many ways. And it’s still a job that is still under the effects, the pressures of contemporary life.
Case Thorp
Okay. Good point, good point.
Daniel Copeland
And so at the same exact time, Gallup, McKinsey, Harvard Business Review are documenting disengagement in the workplace. Generally, at historic rates, Barna, we are doing our due diligence to document that amongst pastors. Here’s how I would synthesize what the research has to say happened during the pandemic. And then we’re going to go a little deeper into all of it. What happened for pastors during the pandemic? You can see this in our tracking data if you want to go find the resource State of Pastors Volume 2, we document a lot of this. What happened during the pandemic is that for about 40 to 50 percent of pastors, they experienced vocational doubt for the first time. The first time they ever questioned their calling. It was like a fire was lit towards – Do I want to keep doing this? When we asked pastors, there’s this great, great data point in that book that showed, I believe it was about 75% of pastors in 2016 said, I’ve never questioned my calling. By the end of the COVID pandemic, it’s less than one out of five who have never questioned their calling. So incredible existential crisis happened and I will be so empathetic to that.
Case Thorp
Well, and I want to illustrate as a pastor who went through that time and I do some consulting with a group that leans in on pastors and leaders in a church. And I want folks to realize, like, everybody’s going nuts and you had so many opinions being thrown at church leaders particularly on do we open for worship, do we not? What did you mean by that phrase in your sermon and are you woke or are you not? Do you like George Floyd or not? Trump and Biden or whoever it was then. I mean there was, it was I guess, there was so much being thrown at pastors and the stress and not having the playbook. How do you lead an institution or an organization through a pandemic? What I hear you saying I don’t know if I love it but it makes so much sense everybody was going through that every business was having to go through that or at least the leaders of those businesses and so I guess you’re saying the pastor burnout and frustration was on par with the rest of society
Daniel Copeland
Yes, and let’s go a little deeper into it. Okay, so we’re tracking, we’re talking about pastoral burnout at the same time people are burning out of the workplace at an incredible rate. So as a researcher, I wanna dig in a little deeper, find out what’s actually going on, what might be more unique to ministry. As anybody who’s followed Barna over the last few years, we’ve been kind of obsessed, like a lot of researchers have been obsessed with this idea of human flourishing. Harvard has set the gold standard of what human flourishing is. You can look up a lot of their work at the Harvard Center for Flourishing. It’s amazing work. We’ve partnered with them to apply that work to the Christian population and to pastors. Would you be surprised at all if what I told you, if I told you, even based on some of the trends at work research that we’ve gotten to collaborate on, that the average pastor is more satisfied in their job than the average US worker? Would that surprise you at all?
Case Thorp
It would because I’m buying the myth of stress down worn out. And yet I don’t know maybe that I see the myth because I’m always like, man, I love my job. I’m doing well, but I also know that I’m in a bubble or not everybody’s experience is the same.
Daniel Copeland
So what we find is that pastors tend to be, I’m not talking by a huge magnitude of difference, but a statistically significant one, tend to like their jobs, feel more satisfied in their jobs than the average US worker. There’s a little bit of unfairness to that, just being the researcher for a second, just because, you know, to compare all US working people to all pastors, apples and oranges, but they are both fruit. It’s not, you know, fruits and vegetables. But you can look at that and go, okay, maybe pastoral ministry is just a little different of a job. If we were to dig under the surface, what actually makes a pastor different than the average US adult in their human flourishing is their relationships. Pastors score nominally lower on relational flourishing than all US adults, concernedly lower. Human flourishing, when we talk about relationships, is studied and measured as the intersection of satisfaction with my relationships and contentment with my relationships. So are my relationships building me up the way I need them to? And do I have a contentment with them? The inverse of that is do I have a longing for them? And what you find in flourishing work and the work that we’ve done around this is that the average US adult, and even somewhat more concernedly, the average engaged Christian scores night and day better than the average pastor when it comes to relationships.
Case Thorp
And you don’t mean relationships with colleagues. You mean deep friendships. Okay.
Daniel Copeland
Exactly. I’m not talking about your friends as coworkers, what do you call, your passer-by relationships, your colleagues. I’m talking about life-giving relationships.
Case Thorp
or even with the breadth of a congregation, even though I’m relationship to a bunch of folks, you’re talking about that core group of people you lean on.
Daniel Copeland
That’s exactly right. Talking about like true belonging in relationship. So what we find is that actually if you were to dig into the story that’s been told about pastors for the last few years, us being part of that has been that they’re burning out, they’re unwell. Well, if we were to nuance that, what we’d actually say is that pastors don’t have the relationships necessary to thrive. It’s not their job, it’s their support system that is…
Case Thorp
And that specificity helps get to, okay, what can we do about it?
Daniel Copeland
Because what if we went and put millions of dollars into helping pastors stop their burnout? Let’s get every pastor an executive assistant. Let’s get them AI solutions. Let’s get them a gym membership or let’s go get them a subscription to have all their sermons written for them for the rest of the year. You wouldn’t hit the center of the bullseye. They need relationships. They need friends, kindness, interpersonal-ness. And then suddenly you can feel it kind of in your body when you hear it. You go, wow, wait, that hits something deeply about what I know the experience of pastors to be.
Case Thorp
Well, my seminary taught me explicitly. You are not to be friends in your congregation. You find that elsewhere. You are a professional. You have an understood professional distance. And so I started at First Presbyterian church of Baton Rouge as a young associate pastor. And about six weeks in, I was absolutely miserable. I was not yet married and I was just fed up and I’m like, well, that is not me. That’s not the kind of relationship I want to have in my congregation. So forget what the seminary told me. I’m going to go find a buddy. So I was a young adult pastor and education and Christian ed. So I looked through the young adult list and I thought, you know what, who would I want to be friends with? Bobby Strupak. And I called Bobby and I said, Bobby, let’s do something. He was like, come on. And he had a farm north of town and he was like, come on up. We’ll just hang out for the day. And that just turned the tide. And I realized I was told a myth or a lie. A lie.
Daniel Copeland
Yeah. Well, and thank God for Bobby. And I can tell you similar stories being in the United Methodist world, in the itinerancy world, where we know that our pastors are going to leave every five to seven years. A lot of pastors in that system feel like they can’t get attached, that it would be a risk to get attached. Now, let’s go up a level to the workplace. Just back to workplace for a second. Where do the majority of US adults get their meaningful relationships in life? It’s in the workplace, for better or for worse. Well, there’s so many strings attached to this. Case has heard me say this a few times before, but for the sake of listeners, in sociology, we talk about there being five socializing institutions. It’s the institutions that teach us who we are and give us the things we need to succeed in life. The five are government, education, religion, family, and work. They teach us who we are. They give us the things we need to survive. Each of those in contemporary life are our trust in them are eroding. People go to church less, people disassociate from their family, people don’t trust the government, we don’t trust the credentialism of education, we see the workplace as oppressive. But historically, these are the things that really form us and teach us how society works and keep society working at a pace. It’s a way to think about things, it’s not universal. The workplace…if you look, if you study the 19th century, I think it was like, somebody’s gonna correct me on this stat, but I believe it’s about one out of four people met their spouse in the workplace. That number is actually in decline, but let’s just look at that number and think, wow, that’s a lot of really meaningful relationships happening at work.
Case Thorp
How do you account that for the fact there were fewer women in the workplace?
Daniel Copeland
Sure, great question. Maybe they’re fewer women in the workplace because they get married then they drop out of the workplace. It’s almost like the MRS degree. And lot of that, some of the researchers in that field pointed to the digital workplace to show that because we’re not making as strong of relationships in the workplace as we used to.
Case Thorp
But you say it’s on the decline. Could it be sexual harassment and HR rules and people are little more scared off?
Daniel Copeland
Well, and when you look at the, of the socializing institutions, government, education, and the workplace are the ones who a lot of our trust in them is in decline because we’re seeing the negative side of bureaucracy, of the overly controlled government, the overly controlled workplace and education system where we have all these rules of success and how we can interact with each other. I’m not trying to make a claim on are those things good, bad, or indifferent, but one of the reasons that those institutions are really suffering at the moment is because they’ve gotten the ceiling of bureaucracy has gotten so short that people are cramped. And we are at a moment where bureaucracy really needs to turn into a floor that everyone gets to stand on, a foundation. But people are really cramped in those spaces. They don’t build the relationships they need, but, the workplace has served as a really important place to build meaningful relationships and back to pastors for a second. I wish I knew this stat. This would be a great stat for Daniel to know on hand. But I’m gonna guess the average church staff in America is no more than three people. I think that’s probably right. Probably a senior pastor, some sort of ministry associate or youth pastor, something like that. And then an admin or facilities person. We’re not talking about the huge churches that have hundred person staffs, the average church like mine. And so they don’t have those workplace relationships to fall onto. They’re literally educated pastors to not be friends with their congregation. What other social circles are they gonna find themselves in? Maybe they have kids, and they can make friends through their kids’ friends or their parents, that’s pretty normal. But then wouldn’t you want those people to come to your church? And wouldn’t all those people know that you’re a pastor? So this whole myth is about honing in the precision of where our pastor’s actually suffering. If we were to really make a diagnosis, we wouldn’t say vocation, we’d say relationships, we’d say loneliness.
Case Thorp
Yeah, yeah. Well, so I was a single young pastor and because of bureaucracy and because of distrust in the church, one wing of the denomination passed a rule that pastors couldn’t date church members. And it was this attempt to control the few instances in that situation of pastor sexual harassment in the midst of counseling situations. And those are real and it happened, but this response was a bit extreme and very controversial. So when I arrived, the elders asked me, would you like us to go challenge this rule? Because where are you going to meet somebody? You’re to go out bar hopping in Baton Rouge and the LSU college scene.
Daniel Copeland
Wearing your church’s t-shirt, I’m sure.
Case Thorp
And exactly. I’m cool. I’m a pastor. Want to drink? So I said, no, no, no, no, do not. The Lord will bring me whomever he would desire. Well, He brought her on the third row of the contemporary service in our church. And so I wanted to go out and I asked my senior pastor and he said, you know what? Coffee is not a date. Y’all go have as much coffee as you want. Meanwhile, let’s go get the rule changed. So we got the rule changed and here we are. But I resonate with what you’re saying about those environments for pastors to be able to build rich relationships. For my closest guy friends, I have found I can open up and develop a beautiful relationship when they don’t see me as a pastor. They allow me to be Case and to be not perfect and to lean on them. And I find, I mean, they have to be usually very spiritually mature so that they don’t think that I’m some guy that walks on water. And sometimes I’ll meet new people and after a while realize they just aren’t there or can’t do that and that’s fine. But I’m very grateful for the friends in my life. Daniel, this has just been incredible. I really appreciate your time and your research. These myths are certainly out there and it’s so helpful to not just let social media or the mainstream media tell us what to think, but to really dig into the data. And I see it making a difference for how we can live our life in the world. I’ll close with this question. What advice would you give to someone that now through your research has these new insights and how they bear witness to the gospel?
Daniel Copeland
So first and foremost, the thing that I would say is that information on its own, which research is information, rarely changes behaviors. It might at its best inspire us to see things differently, but we need an experience. We need a conversation. We need a friend to see it the same way as us to lead to a behavior change. Very, very few people in this world can read a great stat and go change their life. Probably as many people as can read the gospels and say, need to change everything. No, you need a medium. You need a church environment. You need a spiritual guide. You need something else to come alongside you. So first to a listener, if something in here just really hit you, go talk to somebody about it. Go talk to your pastor about it. Allow information to be a connection point through which you can say, wow, this data nerd from Barna group told me that Christianity might not be dying. How have you seen this to be true? How has that impacted your ministry? How has that impacted the way that you show up at work? Have a conversation about it. Second, I’ve repeated this phrase a few times around these myths, which is organizing narratives. The workplace, education, our families, our churches are organized by stories, far more than they are organized by, well, I think this is being complicated in the 21st century, but, stories are stronger than bureaucracy. We tell a story about how things are, who this congregation is, who my friends are. It’s more powerful than the truth, so often than not. you tell yourself certain things about yourself, whether it’s poor self-confidence or loneliness, that story will be more powerful than the truth. And so I’m actually less interested in everybody in the world being just research nerds and data nerds and knowing all the hard stats. I want critical thinkers. So I would love to inspire people to look at the narratives around you, your workplace, your family, your church. Listen to those and say, if that was true, how would I know it? What would I see naturally? One question we always ask in research was, well, if that’s what’s happening, what’s the natural outcome? If Christianity is in decline, how would I see that happen naturally in the world?
Case Thorp
Because I thought earlier, when you made this point about the fear of churches closing during COVID, I don’t see a lot of buildings that have been boarded up.
Daniel Copeland
I haven’t seen, I can name one in East Atlanta that I saw closed. And then I learned a while later that they just moved. But you know, my radar system went off and said, closed church. But think critically about those stories that you’ve chosen to organize around. I’ll give a quick example. I sit on the board of my church. It’s been a great honor to sit on the board of my church for the last year or two. And my church has told the story forever that we’re a transient church. We’re located right down the street from a few major universities. For long time, we got a lot of college kids. And the story of the church was that we were transient. That I remember the pastor back then even saying, yeah, we’ll have a one over three person turnover every year. That’s huge. I started keeping the numbers.
Case Thorp
I was about to say, you went, where’s the data?
Daniel Copeland
And I found that’s not entirely true in that we were programming our church for transients where the data really didn’t back that up. The data really didn’t back up that we were that transient of a church. It wasn’t zero turnover in a year, but it wasn’t one out of three either. And so look at the principles that whether it’s your workplace or your family or your church and say, what are those organizing stories? And do I have data to back that story up? Can I look at this story and say, that’s actually what’s happening because we’re making decisions based on those stories like my church did about being transient. And then ask, well, we’ve got all these programs to attract newcomers, to try to convert a visitor into a member. What would I do differently if I knew that that story wasn’t exactly true?
Case Thorp
Well, I’m going to do a lot differently and I really thank you for your time. Friends, if you want to learn more, go to barna.com. Barna.com, you can learn more about Barna events, even book Daniel or others as speakers. We’ll also throw in our links, the State of Pastors Volume 2 and the link to the Harvard Center for Flourishing. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Remember, like and share, leave a review where you can. It helps us to get the word out. You can visit WecoLabor.com for all sorts of content. Drop us an email and we will send you a 31-day Faith and Work prompt journal. You can also find us across the social media platforms. Don’t forget our Formed for Faithfulness podcast, a weekly 10-minute devotional for the working Christian that follows the liturgical calendar. I want to thank our sponsor for today, the V3 Family Foundation. I’m Case Thorp, and God’s blessings on you.
