Last week, Pew Research released its annual Religious Landscape Study, which, for decades, has tracked trends on everything from church attendance to reports of personal spiritual practices across the United States. My guess is that you are familiar with their work, so I don’t need too much preamble to explain why it matters that, in their report last week, they reported that the decline of church attendance and religious belief in the United States, seems to have stopped.¹ 

That’s right, Pew Research reported on February 25th, that, after decades of consistent decline, it seems that the decline in American Christian practice has leveled off. Most anyone who has been engaged in this sort of work was pretty sure this was one of those trend lines that, like how powerful computers are, or the global population, basically only goes in one direction. This small statistical shift (really only a percentage point here and there) made a significant ripple effect across everyone watching the data; personally, I first read about the report in the New York Times.² 

As soon as I read it, I sent it to some of my friends and colleagues at Ministry Incubators, people like Kenda Dean and Mark DeVries and Trey Wince. They all jumped on the thread in to say they were as caught off guard as I was, that they had heard from grant-making partners, that they were all over it. 

The story here is really interesting. The one thing we were all pretty sure about just might change. The trend we are spending the most time looking at, is changing right under our feet and we didn’t even notice. 

The story is really interesting, but so is the story we tell about the story. 

As fascinating as this data is, we don’t really know what it means right now. It might be an anomaly, a bump that will be smoothed into the curve with time. It might be an inflection point. It might be an inevitable course correction, or a miracle, or a result of all our hard work. 

We are meaning-making creatures, it is our natural propensity to craft a narrative around the data we see. But that narrative can reveal us as much about ourselves as it does about the data. So, tell me – what is your reaction? What story does this data tell you?

It is a fluke, an odd off-pattern year? 

Is it a statistical error? 

A result of all of our hard work? 

A miracle? 

A natural change in the tides? 

And what does that story tell you about how you think God works? About what the purpose of our work is? About what the church is for? I don’t know if there’s a right answer right now, or, more accurately, I think even the analysis made today that winds up being predictive will have been a lucky guess. But there’s a lot to be learned even from guesses that wind up being wrong. So check out the data yourself, construct your own theories, and then your own theories about what your theories say about you. Compare notes with a friend, and bask in the sense of wonder this moment has invited – what is our God up to? 

1. Here’s the press release, and Pew has powerful tools for digging deeper into any particular aspect of the dataset if you’re interested. ↩︎
2. Here is the story, which was the lead article of the New York Times Morning Briefing on February 26th, 2025. ↩︎