RE: Decline of religion
December 29, 2024 at 12:45 am
(This post was last modified: December 29, 2024 at 12:47 am by Fake Messiah.)
Churches fight to stay open as attendance dwindles
Houses of worship around the country are adopting varying strategies to survive.
On Earth, many parishes are accepting that it's time to sell their properties. As the person leading renewal and development for the Diocese of Buffalo, Father Bryan Zielenieski is one of many religious leaders across America who have closed houses of worship in recent years.
Zielenieski expects he'll need to shut down another 70 churches in what the Diocese is calling its "road to renewal." It's a very biblical name for the challenge facing churches: People just aren't going as much as they used to.
On average, more than half of the diocese's churches today are baptizing fewer than one person a month, and 59% of them are spending more than they take in, Zielenieski noted.
In the late 1940s, nearly 80% of Americans said they belonged to a church, synagogue, mosque or temple, according to Gallup. Today, just 45% say the same, the analytics company noted, and only 32% say that they worship God in a house of prayer once a week.
In 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, America was losing as many as 1,000 churches a year.
Some former churches are being converted for businesses or residential use. One old Methodist church in Atlanta, which was down to about 60 members when it closed, was sold to a luxury real estate developer seven years ago. Now, it's become a series of 3,000-square-foot condos.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/churches-fight...=116905100
Houses of worship around the country are adopting varying strategies to survive.
On Earth, many parishes are accepting that it's time to sell their properties. As the person leading renewal and development for the Diocese of Buffalo, Father Bryan Zielenieski is one of many religious leaders across America who have closed houses of worship in recent years.
Zielenieski expects he'll need to shut down another 70 churches in what the Diocese is calling its "road to renewal." It's a very biblical name for the challenge facing churches: People just aren't going as much as they used to.
On average, more than half of the diocese's churches today are baptizing fewer than one person a month, and 59% of them are spending more than they take in, Zielenieski noted.
In the late 1940s, nearly 80% of Americans said they belonged to a church, synagogue, mosque or temple, according to Gallup. Today, just 45% say the same, the analytics company noted, and only 32% say that they worship God in a house of prayer once a week.
In 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, America was losing as many as 1,000 churches a year.
Some former churches are being converted for businesses or residential use. One old Methodist church in Atlanta, which was down to about 60 members when it closed, was sold to a luxury real estate developer seven years ago. Now, it's become a series of 3,000-square-foot condos.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/churches-fight...=116905100
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
