From Believer to Church Alumni: The Real Reason People Leave the Church

A New Kind of Clergy for a New Kind of Christianity, Part 3

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“I see in this moment of Christian history a new vocation for me as a religious leader and a new vocation for the Christian church in all its manifestations. That vocation is to legitimize the questions, the probings, and, in whatever form, the faith of the believer in exile. I believe that a conversation and a dialogue must be opened with those who cannot any longer give their assent to those premodern theological concepts that continue to mark the life of our increasingly irrelevant ecclesiastical institution. I think the time has come for the Church to invite its people into a frightening journey into the mystery of God and to stop proclaiming that somehow the truth of God is still bound by either our literal scriptures or our literal creeds.”
—Johh Shelby Spong, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, p. 21 (1998)

“I don't believe what the church teaches anymore.”

That was the number one reason people left religion behind and became a “done” in 2024.

Now, here’s the question…

Do you really think they woke up one day, suddenly quit believing, and immediately decided to stop attending church?

Of course not. It’s a long process that typically rolls like this:

1. A Christian notices something peculiar for the first time and questions one of the church’s teachings.

2. They then start to ask more questions and scrutinize the teachings in general.

3. They evaluate these teachings according to their lived experience: Do they make sense? If not, they discard those old beliefs.

4. As the list of disbeliefs continues to grow, they end up facing a decision: Having parted ways with their religion intellectually, do they physically stay in the congregation or do they leave?

I suspect most people stick with it for quite some time before they stop coming (assuming they stop at all). Cutting that cord isn't easy. Imagine having family and friends attending the same congregation. This might be the only time in your busy week when you can all get together to have coffee. Do you really want to give that up just because you don't believe what the church teaches anymore?

The main point here is that leaving a church because you stopped believing doesn't normally happen overnight. For every person who has left a congregation because they no longer believe, there are probably two or three others still in the pews who are silently in the same boat. They're just not telling anyone.

(Think about that if you are still in a church. You’re probably surrounded by people who have questions just like you.)

These people who have stopped believing what their church is teaching them, whether they have left or continue to attend, are what John Shelby Spong has called the “church alumni association”.

When he coined that term back in the 1990s, he was primarily referencing those in Mainline denominations, which were in distinct decline (and still are). Now, however, it's the Evangelicals’ turn. Relatively recently, they have started to rapidly fill the ranks of the Church Alumni with their own defectors.

Whether you're looking at the decline of the Mainline or Evangelicalism, I think there's a common thread that helps us understand what's going on.

But, before we get to that, let's first establish some groundwork to understand the situation better.

Introduction to developmental psychology

Developmental psychologists study how human beings develop (yeah, it’s quite uncreatively right in the name). They typically track human development from childhood to adulthood through a series of stages.

When we're talking about stages it's important to note we're not talking about steps where one simply keeps climbing to a higher and higher altitude. Instead, envision stages as concentric circles of complexity. The innermost circle is your starting point. The next circle out is more complex. And the next circle out from that is even more complex. It’s like learning addition and subtraction in one circle, multiplication and division in the next, and algebra in the next.

Moving from one stage to another is a big deal. It's not just about being able to deal with things that are harder. It's about radically changing the framework for operation, and therefore engaging differently.

Think of it this way. It is not like an extension ladder where you go from the first floor, extend it further to reach the second floor, and then extend it even further to reach the third floor. It's more like using a ladder to get up to a certain height, then swapping the ladder out for scaffolding to go higher, then using a suspension cradle to go even higher. With each new developmental stage comes a change of framework that determines how information is processed.

Over the years, developmental psychologists have explored many different areas of life such as psychosocial development, moral development, and personality development.

And this brings us to…

Introduction to the psychology of faith development

For our purposes, here’s where things get interesting. Back in 1981, James Fowler developed a theory of faith development and published it in Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning.

Building on the developmental psychological research of others, he examined how human beings developed their faith. What he came up with radically changed how we understood spiritual growth. For the first time, spiritual growth was tied directly to natural human growth and development, and it had a clear roadmap.

Think about the significance of this for spiritual leaders. Before this, spiritual leaders relied on faith content as a measure of spiritual maturation. So teaching and preaching was all about presenting more and more information for consumption.

Once Fowler's theory hit the scene, we had for the first time a framework to understand spiritual growth that enabled us to identify developmental needs and create engagements that intentionally stimulated spiritual maturation.

Like all theories, Fowler's stages of faith have been open to critique. Carol Gilligan voiced concerns that his model reflected primarily men's development and did not take into account the unique developmental challenges of women. Others have challenged the use of stages themselves as part of the developmental framework. Heinz Streib, for example, offers an alternative that strongly reflects Fowler's work, but makes it nonlinear.

Personally, I believe that Fowler's theory is the strongest on the market. Sure, you need to adapt it here and there. But overall it’s widely accepted because it’s grounded in actual academic research and works wonderfully. So let's take a look at the stages themselves.