The history of congregational closure for Ohio Disciples
Or, ending well is the best way to start again...
In sorting through the financial complications many congregations are dealing with as the post-COVID recovery continues, I’ve had a few people make comments about “unprecedented numbers of church closures.” Any time you say the word “unprecedented” around a historian, there’s a moment of “hmmm” as we think to ourselves “is it, really?” What is our history in Ohio with churches, and their natural lifespan if there is such a thing?
Henry Shaw’s regional history “Buckeye Disciples” of 1952 conveniently includes a pair of appendixes, putting in one place a full roster of Ohio Disciples congregations for the years 1848 & 1950. In comparison in turn to the 2022 list on our regional website, we can draw some constructive comparisons over the last two centuries.
The Mahoning Association, originally a Baptist church body for northeast Ohio, began in 1820, with Alexander Campbell joining in 1823 through the new Wellsburg, (West) Virginia church which was and is sited directly on the Ohio River across from Steubenville, Ohio. Under Campbell’s leadership, this association of churches, most of whom were interested in “the Reformation” led by Campbell through the pages of his “The Christian Baptist” monthly periodical (1823-1830), decided to hire an evangelist in 1827 to begin establishing new “Reformed Baptist” churches. His commission was to begin work as a church planter in the Western Reserve and then preach his way on down the Ohio River to Cincinnati, where in 1832 he established Carthage Christian Church and settled, the Mahoning Association having dissolved in 1830 as the larger Baptist fellowship rejected Campbell’s “Restoration Movement” oriented churches. All of which means the numbers for the Mahoning Association are tricky, because some began as Baptist churches which became Disciples of Christ congregations, and some new foundations by Scott later chose to stay with the Baptists. Between 1829 and 1832 eight different Baptist associations in western Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky pronounced “Anathemas” against the Campbell-allied Reformers, but in the process lost thousands of members and in Kentucky fully half their churches.
By 1848, we made our earliest attempt to document how many Disciples of Christ church fellowships were meeting in Ohio, as well as how many had meetinghouses, aka church buildings. The numbers they reported were 373 local churches, with 195 starred as having a meetinghouse. That’s 52%, which is to say 48% met in borrowed or rented space.
When we come to the threshold of the centennial of the “Ohio Christian Missionary Society” in 1952, the formal body which is now called the “Christian Church in Ohio (Disciples of Christ)”, the general church Yearbook reported in 1950 a total of 512 local churches. It says something worth thinking about that by 1950, the idea of marking which churches had their own buildings was not even considered — of course any church worth the name had a building (the term “meetinghouse” by then also somewhat out of fashion, but still a useful way of not confusing “church” with “church building”).
Between the two dates we have an interesting point of comparison: this is not simply growth from 373 to 512 churches across 102 years. Of that 512, only 130 had been on the 1848 roster. 75% of the Ohio Disciples local churches of that earlier year, 243 of them, some twenty years after the Mahoning Association called Walter Scott, had closed. Only 25% survived to 1950.
Could some of them have “gone independent” in that interim? That will be a factor I’ll discuss in our next phase, from 1950 to 2020, but in fact most of the local churches which were already behaving largely independently (subscribing to the “Christian Standard,” sending kids to Round Lake Christian Assembly and then on to Cincinnati Christian or Kentucky Christian Colleges, attending the then annual North American Christian Conventions and not General Assemblies): those sorts of churches are still rostered in the 1950 Yearbook. For instance, the Rich Street Church of Christ on the west side of Columbus, a long closed church whose attendance board I have hanging in my house, is noted as founded in 1914, with the membership numbers listed and not with the “e.” for estimated membership, either. They were emphatically involved in the independent circle of institutions well before 1950, and would soon formally go independent, but they’re listed all the same.
In a number of cases, where I’m working with a county I know well, I can ground truth the churches listed in 1848 but vanished from 1950, and in fact they did, in all the locations I can check, close in that interval.
Licking County, for instance, lists four churches (all with meetinghouses) in 1848; two communities changed names adding to the challenge. In 1950 the roster is ten congregations, which out of the 1848 list are just two still are open and serving; the other two are gone and I know what happened to their buildings. Knox County, where there’s actually a bit of an overlap with Licking along the northern boundary, shows eleven fellowships in 1848 (five having meetinghouses); there are fifteen listed in 1950, only five of which existed in 1848 (interestingly, it was just two of the five with buildings that endured the coming century).
So there’s both attrition and expansion at work here. Licking County closed half of their Disciples churches, then grew times five, from two to ten. Knox County closed over half, then tripled their total number from the enduring fellowships from five to fifteen.
That helps to support the 75% attrition rate for Ohio Disciples churches the lists indicate, between 1848 to 1950, then an increase from that number times four to the new total. New churches are what built that 512 total so well celebrated in Shaw’s “Buckeye Disciples,” not institutional survival.
So what of the next phase we can enumerate, from 1950 to 2022?
As Ryan Burge, the noted church demographer and analyst has noted in his work on church statistics, the Disciples of Christ stand out for the difficulty we present in finding solid, reliable numbers. Or to be even more blunt, we charge for the privilege of knowing our data. That’s not how most of our peer denominational offices work among the Protestant mainline/oldline churches. You had to buy a Yearbook for many years to see our date, and now we have ALEX as an online platform for data collection, a net blessing for our communion, but still an opaque data set for an independent scholar. I’m going to use for our purposes here the Christian Church in Ohio website listing, which is fairly accurate up to 2022. I think it still lists a few churches which have closed, and there are a couple I’m baffled by just because I know they have been assertively anti-Camp Christian and joint youth activities since the 1990s, but if there’s a women’s group that sends money to Week of Compassion, and the congregation hasn’t sent a certified letter asking to be removed, they’re still there. Let’s just say all my 2022 figures are . . . rounded up.
With that, Ohio Disciples claim 147 fellowships — and not all of them have their own building, which is a “back to the future” note, but one I can’t enumerate with confidence. I do know at least half a dozen are renters, even if it’s in a building formerly their own.
Yes, that’s a decrease of 70%, going from 512 to 147. Anyone who knows our history around the period called “Restructure” pivoting on 1968 is aware two things happened in general, and in Ohio in particular: we lost easily half of our congregations to “going independent” with the North American Christian Convention affiliated branch of the Restoration Movement, and our state society (today “regional”) budget actually increased. The churches that left had already been voting with their contributions and activities for years, so their departure didn’t move any needles other than the master list number.
Plus, as you’ll note above: we lost 75% of our fellowships between 1848 and 1950. It’s not exactly unprecedented. A slightly shorter span, some remembered reasons in the more recent history, but still, 70% over 72 years is pretty comparable.
The real issue I want to get at is that from 1950 to 2022, once we get to the 147 churches, it was 109 of them that have a history going back to 1950, so 74% ongoing, with 26% new starts, new at least as in since 1950.
In fact, of our current 147 (optimistically put), there are just 33 that go back to the 1848 list. 22% of our current churches have 175 years or more of history. I’ll list them at the end of this post. They warrant our respect, and perhaps some closer attention to how they’ve managed that, because that’s an achievement in its own right, one worth learning from.
Yet I hope you can see the pattern here. Our history as Ohio Disciples has been to open new churches, and to see them close over time. As in, most of them. Church closure is not, in and of itself, a sign of local or regional un-health. We grew dramatically as a Christian tradition between 1848 and 1950, even as we closed down three out of every four churches; our growth was not the same at all from 1950 down to the present, but the difference was less because of closures than it was a loss of the momentum in launching new fellowships in different locations.
We have, you could argue here, always closed nearly three-fourths of our churches over any given century. The difference is how many new fellowships we launched . . . and doing so knowing that many of those won’t last all that long, but some will.
There’s more detailed analysis to be done, both around locations — rural, county seat, urban, and the new suburban context of population growth — and duration or lifecycles. As to the latter, there are the new starts that go about five years and then fade or merge or close in whatever form, and there are new starts that end up with a building but never really break 100-150 a Sunday over a hundred year history, and there are the ones that boom, but are in that long tail of a small congregation in a big old building. And there are thriving, ongoing congregations with ups and downs but that have some clear running ahead of them. Those four profiles describe most of our local churches today, and how you become one or another is a study worth doing.
Regarding the former, that demographic quartet in large part frames our story: Ohio Disciples began largely in rural settings as an independent congregational polity that could thrive without settled, educated clergy and in a minimal physical plant, grew as the new state grew into county seat towns with bigger church buildings and more well-trained clergy, but we never made a strong push into urban centers around the 1880-1920 boom times for cultural reasons as much as fiscal ones . . . which handicapped us in making the most of developing new starts in the post-WWI suburbs which followed interurban lines, and then streetcars, and finally automotive routes, into the sprawl around cities where non-denominational churches are so aggressively moving today.
Gender Road, First Community, Legacy, and Compass Christian mark our only true forays into that terrain, the first three merged fellowships with some traditional and older history behind them but some new DNA and contemporary church influence helping drive them. Arguably, Ohio Disciples should have more of these sorts of congregations, but it’s less that we started and saw the failure of such new plants than that we didn’t start many of them at all.
There is a back-to-the-future model we can consider here, though: those 48% of the 1848 Ohio Disciples congregations which had no building. That first fluorescence of our movement in Ohio didn’t start with “a meetinghouse,” but with fellowship, and sometimes a preacher with some training but often not. 178 of 373 in our original generation of churches didn’t plant with a facility. Did they all survive? Nope! But neither, as I showed above, did all the ones with a meetinghouse make it from 1848 to 1950. Being housed in congregationally controlled structures was no guarantee of institutional survival.
And it’s not about institutional survival, but that’s my point. We have to be willing to do things that don’t necessarily work. To plant the Gospel, to share Good News, and to keep offering up our Disciples of Christ model of an open table to embody the Gospel, we just won’t be able to do that by way of familiar models. In the 1830s the early “launches” met in courthouses and school classrooms and in other tradition’s church buildings; in the 1880s we were building “Akron Plan” buildings to handle a population boom of small children and to deal with a new model for Sunday school; come the 1950s the pent-up building funds from WWII rationing exploded into Education Buildings with individual grade-level classrooms.
What’s the Akron Plan for the 2030s? We haven’t built it yet, obviously. You can argue that the windowless, media-and-screen friendly “God boxes” are the Akron Plan from the 2000s, with the concert model for worship and home based weeknight fellowships the new approach in the growing suburbs and exurbs . . . but also remember the Akron Plan fell out of failure in favor of soundproofed class rooms where filmstrip projectors with record players and later VCR carts with VHS tapes could show “Veggietales,” and the old flannel graph kits went into closets. Are big screen God-boxes the new normal forever and ever? Probably not. What’s next? Beats me.
I’m not here to do prophecy. Just some history to help us discern the prophet’s voice when it comes. In Ohio, we have ALWAYS closed churches, regularly, on roughly a fifty to a hundred year basis. Do some congregations last more than a century? Sure, we have thirty-three of them. Out of 373 in 1848, and from 512 in 1950. About 25% of our current 147 have been launched since 1950, 22.5% have been around for 175 years. That leaves just over 52% of our current churches which may be approaching a crucial pivot point in their own history — to endure, or to close, as is a long-standing reality in our common history. Many will close, and while that’s a reason for a season of grief in each of those places, it’s not a sign of doom more generally.
The real question is how we can get back into a more consistent and sustainable model for adding to that quarter of our churches with a shorter history, fewer “how we’ve always done it” mandates, and a wider range of motion available in the present moment.
New church starts aren’t the only way for a religious tradition to grow and expand, but you won’t endure as a movement without continually doing so. Holding off on closing congregations has never been our strategy, and never will be.
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A note before the list of pre-1848 Ohio Disciples congregations: I have chosen to consider Harmony Springs in Uniontown as the legitimate heir to High Street, Akron (1839). There’s enough institutional continuity for me to see this as proper; I know some newer churches count older congregations as their origin, but this one seemed a single lineage in two locations. Anyhow, not counting them doesn’t change the numbers above all that much.
Ashland, First
Cambridge, First
Canfield Christian
Pilgrim, Chardon (actually, I’m not 100% certain of the lineage here)
Chauncey Christian
Northside, Cincinnati
Carthage (now closed)
Franklin Circle, Cleveland
North Eaton, Grafton
Legacy, Harrison (from First Christian, Harrison)
Hiram Christian
Kent, First
Lisbon, First
Mansfield, First
Mantua Center
Massilon, First
Newton Falls, First
Niles, First
North Canton, Community
North Royalton
Painesville Christian
Perry Christian
Ravenna, First
Shreve Christian
Smithfield, First
Stow, First
Harmony Springs, Uniontown (by way of High St., Akron)
Wadsworth, First
Howland Community
Warren, Lordstown
Warren, Central
Wilmington, First
Wooster, Central
Yep. Closing churches is not how we might die as a viable Christian tradition, not opening new churches is. That's my tl;dr for these 3,000 words!
We need a 10,000 word post on Welshimer