At the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Beacon Street in Boston sits an awe-inspiring building. The gray stone front and ornate stained glass are reminiscent of the glory years of a bygone era of the American church. It is the type of church building associated with the rich tradition of a church in New England. The first time I walked up to that corner, I couldn’t help but be intimidated by what must be an impressive history for that church building. But when I turned the corner, I realized that the church building is literally a façade. Two of the outer walls of the church remain, but the actual church building behind the walls has been demolished and a luxury high-rise condo now inhabits the former sanctuary space. There is the external appearance of an historical church, but in reality that church is long since dead.

Throughout many cities in North America, there are numerous church structures that may have an impressive history but now host a very small group of worshipers on a Sunday morning. In Cambridge, there is a massive church building that dominates a central, busy intersection. In recent years, on a typical winter Sunday, that church will meet in a back room rather than in the main sanctuary. The church cannot afford the heat to meet in the thousand-plus person sanctuary. Nor would it be appropriate for a dozen or so elderly white women to meet in a thousand-plus person sanctuary. Within a half-mile radius of that church, there are close to fifty churches (most of them immigrant, ethnic minority or multiethnic churches) that are crammed into much smaller spaces. Right down the street from that large empty sanctuary are over five hundred worshipers from five different congregations meeting in a small, cramped space—the host congregation of about forty worshipers, a multiethnic congregation (with the largest group being Asian American college students), a Haitian congregation, a Cape Verdean congregation and a Friday-night gathering of Chinese international students. The contrast between the large near-empty church building at the busy intersection and the crowded smaller church building down the street illustrates the reality of twenty-first-century American Christianity—the white churches are in decline while the immigrant, ethnic and multiethnic churches are flourishing. As Dave Olson points out in The American Church in Crisis, “The church in America is not booming. It is in crisis. . . . As the American population continues to grow, the church falls further and further behind. . . . Almost all of the data indicates that the church is fated to decline in influence every year in the near future.”¹