The Three Months Nobody Is Looking For

I want to tell you about a number I can't stop thinking about, and then I'm going to resist the urge to fix it, because I think it deserves to sit there for a minute before anybody reaches for a solution.

Lifeway Research surveyed a thousand Protestant churchgoers who had switched churches as adults. Regular attenders, twice a month or more. Among them, 41% stopped attending church entirely for three months or more between the church they left and the church they found. When Lifeway asked the same question in 2006, it was 28%.

It's getting longer. Not shorter.

Who these people are

These are not the unchurched. They are not the skeptical neighbor or the college kid who drifted. Every person in that survey had a church, was in it regularly, and for a stretch of a season had none. Most of them didn't leave in anger. Sixty percent switched because they moved. Forty percent were unhappy with something at the old church, and 29% say their needs weren't being met. Almost half started looking for a new church only after they'd already left the old one. A fifth don't even remember actively searching. They just ended up somewhere, eventually.

Let me put a face on it, because the number is easy to skim. A woman in her forties. New job, new town, boxes still stacked in the living room. She knows the Lord. She gave at her last church. She had a Sunday rhythm for fifteen years and a small group that texted her when her dad was in the hospital. In the new town she has a list of three churches she found on her phone, and a coworker mentioned a fourth. The first Sunday, there are boxes. The second Sunday, her son has a tournament. The third Sunday she drives past one of the churches and honestly can't tell if it's open. Weeks become months. She is not mad at God. She just hasn't been anywhere.

Here is the part that gets me. She is within ten minutes of probably fifteen churches, and not one of them knows she exists. She is on nobody's list. No one is praying for her by name. She is a believer, she is unattached, she is at least vaguely looking, and she is completely invisible.

How many of her there are

The researchers behind The Great Dechurching estimate that around forty million Americans have left church, and that roughly thirty million of them left casually. They moved, it got inconvenient, other things crowded it out. No crisis, no wound. Of the fifteen million who left evangelical churches specifically, 51% say they're willing to return right now. When asked what would bring them back, the top answers were wanting to make new friends (38%), sensing God telling them to go back (35%), feeling distant from God (32%), and loneliness (22%).

Those aren't the motivations of someone who needs to be argued into church. Those are the motivations of someone waiting for a reason.

The honest limits

I should say what this is not. This is not the same as the unchurched neighbor. Lifeway's work with the unchurched found that about half say a personal invitation from a friend would be effective, but only 35% say they would actually attend a worship service if invited. For the recently dechurched believer I'd guess the yes is higher, but I don't have a number for that and I'm not going to make one up. The whole reason I'm writing this is that I'm tired of made-up numbers.

I also don't have a clean fix, and I promised I wouldn't pretend to. Everything I can think of is partial. Members who actually say the church's name out loud. A website that answers her Tuesday-night questions. A church that looks open from the road. Some kind of presence in the places new families show up. Each of those helps at the edges. None of them is a system for finding a person who hasn't told anyone she's looking.

Why I'm telling you anyway

Because she's there. Four in ten of the people who will eventually sit in your church went through a gap like hers on the way to you, and the gap is getting longer. If you pastor a church under 250, you have a woman like this within a mile of your building this Sunday. Maybe several.

I'm not asking you to launch anything. I'm asking you to hold the number this week while you plan. Forty-one percent. Three months or more. Nobody looking.

Next week I'll write about the part I do know something about: what happens once she finally walks in, and how little time you have. For now, if you want to know whether she could even find you if she tried, that's one of the things the free Church Vitality Check looks at. And if you're wondering why the website isn't the answer to this, I covered that in Nobody Is Finding Your Church on Google.