Tyler Jones is lead pastor of Vintage21 Church in Raleigh, NC, and Southeast Regional Director for Acts 29. He will be speaking at the upcoming conference Contextualizing the Gospel in the New South on April 26-28. There is a 250 year-old cemetery near my house and often my family and I will meander through it. The range of life recorded in this small plot of land is immense. As you may expect, there are gravestones testifying to lives lived that remind us of the few years we will walk this planet. I often find myself captivated by single graves, wondering exactly who those men were. What made them passionate? What did they yearn for, fight for, and die for? The cemetery also bears witness to eras of history. Entire sections contain the graves of veterans, memorializing many lives lost in a few short years. The events these men died for are markers along the timeline of our country. They shift the politics, well-being and even the mindset of the people. Generations are affected for good and bad; the lives of loved ones are lost, the liberty gained is precious. History scrutinizes each event, large or small, and volumes are written about the heroes and cowards whose actions changed the world.

The Unnoticed War

We are in the midst of a war, and yet there are no records of battles waged in protest, no heroic lives lost. It is not marked by battles or invasions; you won’t hear reports on the news, yet lives are at stake. At this very moment, there is an exodus from the local church and ultimately away from worshiping Jesus—and we are standing by until the graves are marked. In our time and in our place, we—without strategy, without labor, without laying down our lives—are allowing the South to become a boneyard of religious history. This war being waged around us has at its very foundation liberty and eternal life. I am not attacking the church, nor criticizing the many thousands who labor tirelessly to make much of Jesus—I am immensely thankful for these men and women. Actually, this is precisely the opposite of an attack. My desire is to help the church in the South take an honest look at where we are and how we are laboring to accomplish the Great Commission. I realize calling the South a “religious boneyard” is hard for some to digest. There is a church on every street corner and over 80 percent of people in the South believe in God with absolute certainty. It would seem that the church is healthy and doing well.

A Church Building on Every Corner

It is true that there is a church building on every street corner, in every city of the South. For example, I work in downtown Raleigh, many floors up in an office building, and from my window I can count seven churches in plain sight. In fact, this alone is the best evidence that the South is a boneyard of religious history. There are many, many churches in the South—but most are dying, if not dead already. One of the largest denominations in the South reports that when their churches reach 40 years in existence, those churches enter into a steep rate of decline ultimately ending in death. This same denomination reports that 82% of their churches are older than 40 years in existence.

Reviving the Boneyard

This is the reality of the South. There are always multiple church buildings in plain sight, and yet they simply represent an ancient age of church vitality that has passed. Many churches must own the fact that they are in steep decline and radically re-orient their very existence. Some churches are dead already; they should disband and give their resources to church planters so the mission can continue. All churches in the South must get serious about the mission and begin to reproduce by planting and revitalizing churches. The problem the church is facing in the South is much deeper than just older churches that are less effective than they used to be and are dying. There are five or six contributing factors causing the decline of the church. In my next blog post, I will show you how to be Southern is to be religious, and yet Christian faith in the South exists primarily in name alone.